Adventures at the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Harvest Fairs, the Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, Harvest Moons and Looking Forward

Glenn and I with pumpkins

Adventures: the Ballet and Some Over the Top Pumpkin Fairs

This week brought some adventures with it. We were given tickets to the opening night of the Pacific Northwest Ballet, three short ballets separated by long intermissions. The first was Serenade, a kind of monotonal, plotless group dance with blue costumes and blue background, with music by Tchaikovsky (Serenade for Strings in C Major, Op. 48). The second was a premiere of a pretty grating piece called Pages, with atonal repetition of terrible performance poetry, followed by equally grating sound (non-music), and the poor dancers having to wander around stage with a chair suspended over them. I started to wonder if I actually hated ballet! Then the third piece was charming: Pictures at an Exhibition was based on the original piano-solo concerto by Mussorgsky, with the dancers dressed in color block, which I believe was supposed to represent the joy of painting?

Me at Swan’s Pumpkin Farm

Then Saturday we decided to try a new pumpkin farm. We drove way out along the Snohomish River, along the beautiful Cascade mountains, past three gigantic fairs with slides and carnival tents, horse farms, and we even saw skydivers! Then, finally, Swan’s Trail [Pumpkin] Farms, which was enormous and swamped with people—and this is still October. There was an animal barn area, which didn’t seem to be well-supervised, a gigantic trampoline area, a bubble area, huge lines for cider doughnuts—and U-pick apples and corn which required a tractor ride to get to. So, we quickly decided this was definitely a place for kids, not kidless adults, went swiftly into the Country Store and bought a candle, missed the last bit of corn, got run into by a very rude but sizeable young boy. We sped the twenty-minutes back to the much-more our speed Bob’s Corn and Pumpkin Farm, where the employees are all friendly, the children adorable and angelic, plenty of Pazazz apples and new sweet corn, and we bought another pumpkin.

Pumpkins at Bob’s

Harvest Moon and Looking Forward

We wanted to explore further on Sunday but one of the pumpkin farms isn’t open ’til October 3rd and the other closed early on Sunday, so we just toured our local farms again (JB Family Growers and McMurtrey Farm), bought some kettle corn and a gourd or two and went home and made roast chicken with autumn vegetables and apples.

The Harvest Season naturally makes us think about the changing of time and seasons, what we want to learn, what we want to leave behind, what we want more of in our life.

This season I am looking forward to working more (and hopefully making a little more money to cover my expensive hobbies, like poetry and having MS,) to making more friends, to being a little more adventurous—although with the time change, we often start spending more time indoors and less time meandering around outside. Here’s to a fun and productive fall/winter season, with more reading, writing, and more time with friends around coffee and cake. (And yes, I still can’t share my good news with you yet, soon though!)

Literary Kitten Charlotte with The Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay

Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay

Very happy to say I am honored to have an essay in Field Guide to Writing the Lyric Essay, with some powerhouses, like Diane Seuss, Brian Turner, Kimiko Hahn, and also some friends (who are also powerhouses), like Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Oliver de la Paz, and Julie Marie Wade. I am looking forward to reading all the essays because the form is very interesting to me, and I like the idea that writing essays can follow the body or breath as form, that it can be experimental or traditional, that it does some things that poetry cannot do. My essay is called “When Poetry Gets Mutated: Writing Lyric Essays, Haibun, and Other Hybrids.” (Gotta represent the mutants!) Each essay also has a prompt, so it lends itself to teaching as well as just personal education. Check it out from Rose Metal Press! Also shout-out to the editors, Lee Horikashi Roripaugh and Heidi Czerwiec.

Wishing you all a good Harvest Moon Week!