A Poem “Divination” in the new issue of Shenandoah, Birds, Heat Waves and the Fourth, Good News and Gardening

Bald Eagle

Poem in the New Issue of Shenandoah

Happy to announce that I have a poem in the new Spring 2021 issue of Shenandoah, which also has work by friends and amazing writers like Lesley Wheeler, Ann Fisher-Worth, Erika Meitner, Anna Marie Hong and Lisa Russ Spahr. Here’s a link to the poem but read the whole issue, it’s great. I’m very thankful to be in such a dream magazine with so many great writers.

Here’s a sneak peek at my poem in the issue here:

from Shenandoah Spring 2021 issue

Birds and Heat Waves

It was a brutal week here last week, getting up to 110 degrees in our backyard, almost everyone, including birds and flowers, miserable. I tried to keep the bird watered and the garden watered and called and checked on friends without air conditioning, but it was stressful. The heat makes my MS worse, and I almost fell a couple of times out of nowhere, so that was scary. I have to remember to rest on hot days.

We’ve also got wildfires now in BC, Canada, and the smoke is lingering in the sky high overhead. Many places here cancelled their fireworks shows due to the dry and the heat, but some idiots will insist of lighting off their own fireworks and possibly starting fires. Fourth of July has never been my favorite holiday (smoke! loud noises! asthma attacks from the terrible air quality!) and now with the threat of fires, even less so. Oh well. We’ll hope for the best.

And in the meantime, some pictures of birds (and a Townsend chipmunk) that visited us this week, to cheer us all up. And I’ll post a picture of Glenn and I on the 4th with blue and red hair!

Glenn with blue hair, me with red, Happy 4th with roses and Lake Washington!

Happy 4th and A Bit of Good News

I was thinking about the way we think about good news, and the way we poets are always waiting for good news, and get a lot of rejections, and steel ourselves against disappointment, sometimes so much so that when we actually get this long-awaited good news, we underplay it, to keep ourselves from further disappointment. Isn’t it hard to celebrate? So much easier to expect the worse than to even dare to think about expecting the best possible thing? Is this a writer thing?

And here are some flowers from my garden, a little bit of Seattle in July. In the garden, I expect the deer to come and eat some flowers, and for unexpected plant illnesses to kill some of my favorite plants sometime. I just shrug and go ahead planting different plants and hoping for the best. Gardening is so optimistic – you plant some seeds, and you hope some of the seedlings survive and flower. I planted a bunch of poppy and sunflower seeds last year, and although the didn’t all come up, a lot of them survived and gave me flowers I didn’t have before. If you plant a tree in the wrong place, or with the wrong conditions, sometimes it dies. But if you fertilize, and water, and protect it from predators large and small, eventually, you will probably have a full-grown awe-inspiring tree. Trees make me happy. Flowers do too. Maybe the attitude I have towards gardening should also be the attitude I have towards my writing life.