Sorry I haven’t been blogging – it was a crazy week, grandmothers on both sides in the hospital, a couple of UW dr. appts, lots of poetry events, and lots of paperwork and assignments to get done. (21 page essay for MFA program, I’m looking at you.) I barely had time to breathe, and then, on top of that, the husband whisked me away for a too-short romantic getaway – which was very restorative. I didn’t blog, I didn’t read, I just relaxed and hung out with the husband. The sunny weather was very cooperative for long walks by the water and general canoodling. When I got back, wham, e-mails, phone calls, regular mail, tax documents, work, work work…When I first quit my full-time job to do freelance work, poetry, and school, I thought wow – how lazy I’m being, compared to my previous life. Now I feel that I am just as busy, maybe busier, than before – but the pay and the type of work are different.
I’ve been writing and writing feverishly lately, new poems, all based on Japanese fairy tales and animé. (New poems based on fairy tales called “The Crane Wife” and “White Bird Sister” – if you know where to find good English translations of these stories please let me know!) I can’t get the energy up to send stuff out, but I’m writing like a fiend. I think because Becoming the Villainess is coming out so soon – sooner than we thought, maybe in March in time for AWP – having the book coming up makes me wary, and I want to make sure I’m still writing, not just focused on putting together a mailing list and readings and the sort of “commercial” work you have to do for a poetry book with a small press (most of which I really haven’t done yet.) I mean, all the time it takes to pick out poems, pick out an appropriate journal that’s actually open to new work at this exact time of year, get the stamps (out of stamps) and the envelopes and the address labels. God bless the lit mags with e-mail submissions, I’d be lost without them.
Speaking of e-mail submissions: On top of everything else, I’ve got the poems coming into Silk Road to contend with. Some, a minority, are terrible, those are easy to make decisions about, but a lot are well-crafted but don’t really grab me– those are tough – and then a lot more take some thinking and decision-making. I have noticed the general trend is that I’m getting lots more poems from women. So come on guys, what’s up, send me some poems! Remember hospital rooms and video game landscapes count as poems of “place.” If you send, remember to cc me and don’t put your poems in an attachment, include them in the body of the e-mail. I’m trying to get the submissions guidelines updated, but that always takes forever when the web site’s in the hands of some university volunteer.
This upcoming weekend, starting on Friday, I’m going to be a guest of a Sci-Fi Convention called RadCon in Pasco, Washington. I have a reading at 8 PM on Saturday the 18th, in case you’re in the area. Mostly I’m curious to see the sci-fi crowd’s reaction to poetry – will they love it, hate it? We make assumptions that non-poets don’t like poetry. But I don’t know that it’s true. Mostly I’m reading stuff concerning the female comic book superhero and my new animé poems. Anyway, put on that superhero costume and show up – we’ll have fun!