Almost Summer – Memorial Day Weekend, Supermoons, and Dreaming Some Poetry Dreams

Pink Peony – Signs of Summer

Signs of Summer – Memorial Day Weekend

Happy Sunday, readers. Are you seeing signs of summer yet? Here, after a fairly rainy and cold May, we are finally seeing and feeling a little summertime vibe. Like the blooming – peonies, roses, and lavender – all definitely summertime flowers here – and the baby birds of all sorts. It was a lovely 72 degree sunny day yesterday, one of those impossibly blue-sky, happy almost-summer days we get here, and I took a walk on the Sammamish trail, observed tons of baby things, listened to the wind in the trees, and the air smelled sweet – not yet full of wildfire smoke (hopefully we’ll have less this year) and there’s a sense of happiness and buoyancy all around.

The end of the pandemic is not here yet, but it feels close. I can tell you I feel more optimistic this May than I did last May – with more knowledge, vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and hopefully some good antiviral meds on the way. Now they’re saying immunity after being ill with covid-19 lasts at least a year.  Anyway, we have a reason to be optimistic again. Not that I’m off to ride a crowded subway or sit in a movie theater yet, but a trip to the bookstore again (even a poetry reading?) seems within the realm of the possible.

Flower Supermoons, Eclipses, and Feeling Restless

This week we also had a lunar eclipse of the Flower Supermoon. I also get weird around Supermoons – I sleep poorly, I’m moody and restless. Am I the only one this happens to? It’s also this time of year – the changing weather (fifty and rain one day, eighty and sunny the next) that throws me off.

Flower Supermoon, pre-eclipse

Supermoons also make me think about the future, for some reason. I always have weird vivid dreams – this week, among others, I had a poetry dream where a person was helping me sort one of my poetry manuscripts with blue drawers along a wall, and another where a man told me “No one wants to hear from a woman over 35.” (I mean, that seems like it is true in the poetry world, sometimes, doesn’t it? Or in the whole world? Women in my age group (late forties) seem to be mostly ignored, when we are in major energy mode in terms of knowing who we are, what we want, when we are gaining in inner powers.) Anyway, I have been feeling like I’ve been hearing an awful lot of “no” from the literary world and started thinking about what I might be able to do about that. I know I can’t just “will” good things to happen, but sometimes it seems like forward motion comes from a kind of crisis.

Which leads me to…

Towhee with pink flower

Poetry Dreaming

So, last week I talked about discouragement from the whole rejection-cycle of being a poet. This week I’m going to talk about poetry dreams. The sort you’ve thought about for a while and think – now may be the time to take steps towards making them a reality. You know, I’ve been sending out resumes for jobs in the literary world (this is a big secret) but it got me thinking about what kind of work I could start on my own. I’ve thought a long time about opening up my own press, and lately I’ve gotten to start thinking about Virginia Woolf – the way she cultivated her own circle of talented artists, writers, and critics, and invited them to her home because her health didn’t do well when she was away. I thought about maybe investing in a little writer’s retreat cabin in a resort area that I could use, but could also rent out to friends (writers and artists), and maybe even running a little writer’s retreat of my own. I think that would be within the range of things I could do without endangering my health, especially if I had an accessible place to host from. What do you guys think?

The main thing keeping me from starting a press in the knowledge that while I have some gifts that are good for running a press – enthusiasm for getting underrepresented voices out into the world, a great reader (and pretty good editor, if I do say so myself), PR and marketing know-how, a pretty good idea of how to run a business – my worry is that I recognize I don’t really have a great mind for detail (even worse since the MS). I wonder if I could get a partner in the press who was great at detail-work. I know that the caveat of a one-or-two person press is that if, for instance, one person’s health fails (which has happened at two of my own publishers) then the press is gone. Thus my hesitance to “go for it.” (Well, that and paperwork – one of my least favorite things in life.)

Goldfinch with rose bush

So the kinds of jobs I’ve been applying for would be doing marketing and PR for presses – or even acquisition editor, a job I’ve had before in my previous life at Microsoft. While it would be fun to be part of a team in that case, would it be more fun if I had more ownership?

So, even if I don’t have the money, partners, or plans completely available right now, there’s no harm in putting these things out into the universe, is there? Please chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts, encouragements, or ideas about what I’ve posted here….