Verse Wrights features “The Conversation” and Teen Poetry Workshop Tomorrow
- At July 23, 2013
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Many thanks to Verse Wrights for featuring my poem, “The Conversation,” on their web site today.
My tenure as Poet Laureate of Redmond is coming to an end soon, but I couldn’t be more excited about my last sponsored “geeks for poetry” workshop for teens tomorrow evening at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, which will be run by YA author and poet Karen Finneyfrock. Read more about it here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4568648-free-teen-poetry-workshop-in-redmond or here.
This July has been oppressively hot and surprisingly muggy for the Seattle area. I miss our old-fashioned summers of 70-degree-low-humidity weather. Not that many places in the northwest, by the way, have air conditioning – including a lot of restaurants and my favorite garden store which was 110 degrees yesterday, yikes for its employees! Yesterday as we were driving over the Sammamish river we had a huge bald eagle swoop towards us, right over the car. My mother says the eagle is one of our totem animals, that it is a sign we are on the right path, that we must have courage or that spiritual help for difficult times is coming. Of course, I told her it is a sign we live in the Northwest – there are a lot of eagles out here. It was a nice thought nonetheless. We walked by a winery’s lake covered with yellow water lilies and populated with sleepy ducks. I have a hard time eating, writing, or thinking when it gets this hot and can’t wait for fall to come. This summer has been oppressive in other ways too, with worry, with sadness, with the whole “what does the next part of my life look like.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the path ahead. I guess that’s when we need our eagle totems!
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.
