Post Holiday Plans
Hope you all had a wonderful holiday, that Santa brought you everything you wanted, and that you all ready to ring in 2012, which I am thinking of, surprisingly, not as an apocalyptic year, but a year of positive changes. I hope. You know, less asteroids, more realizing our potential and stuff.
We still haven’t taken down our Christmas decorations. We’re actually trying to extend Christmas this year, making a long holiday out of it – yesterday I went to a coffee shop downtown (the oldest one in Seattle – Cafe Allegro, which is a super cute find near the U of Washington, in case you’re looking for a good coffee shop in the area) to meet two out-of-town friends for back-to-back post-Christmas coffee dates. The barista asked me if it was my birthday, because he said people kept coming in with presents for me! Ha! Anyway, I had a wonderful time catching up with these friends, and reminding me again how important it is to spend time with the people you care about – it’s tremendously encouraging!
And as far as poetry news: If you’re at all interested in the Japanese form of haibun, go check out Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s excellent article on Poets.org:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22712
and here’s the whole haibun from me that she refers to in the article: http://haibuntoday.blogspot.com/2008/04/jeannine-hall-gailey-rescuing-seiryu.html
So what are your plans for 2012? Explosions and Atwood-style dystopia? Or a future so bright…?
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.
