Goodbye to the old, Hello 2012!
2011 has been an interesting year to look back on. I’ve enjoyed being back in Seattle, where I have been happy to reconnect with my friends (and bookstores.) Having my second book of poetry come out with Kitsune Books was pretty wonderful even though I couldn’t travel much to promote it because of health stuff. Let me just say that technologies like Twitter and Facebook and the internet and e-books make a book launch a very different animal today than it was in 2006, the last time I did it.
And speaking of the e-book revolution – I have to say again how delighted I am to read poetry on my little e-reader while I got my hair done yesterday, how beautiful a job Kitsune Books did with She Returns to the Floating World
and how it looks (and the new anthology, Fire On Her Tongue: an eBook Anthology of Contemporary Women’s Poetry
, too!) I think I spent an hour yesterday downloading Jane Austen, Andrew Lang’s fairy books, Osamu Dazai, The Art of War…
2012 looks to be a year for moving on to new stages – perhaps a third book in the works, writing in new genres, maybe buying a house – all things that ground me, that put my ever-wanderlusty-roots into the chilly muddy ground of Seattle. (Hmmm, metaphorically speaking, my other big Christmas present besides the e-reader was a nice solid pair of flat black leather motorcycle boots. Very Seattle footwear. Does this mean something symbolically?) Would it be nice to stay in one place for a while? I have never really longed for that before, but I’m starting to say yes, that is it, a home, a regular place to stand and sit and dream and write from.
These are not resolutions, not goals, more like: projections, dreams, posted onto the blank screen of 2012, its ominous tones notwithstanding. (My local bookshop employee checked us out by saying “And enjoy the time left until the apocalypse!” I replied, “phhh, we have til December…”) Health, happiness, friends, a place to call home and a bit of writing luck.
Good luck and good health and happiness to all of you in 2012!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
