Anticipation, New Mexico Poems, E-publishing, and a Tuesday Announcement!

I’ve been busy with things that involve anticipation.

I’ll have an announcement about my third book on Tuesday!

Helping my mom prepare for a big job interview (Good luck Mom!) and signing contracts (!) and thinking about planning events for Redmond all the way through next spring. And November and December are so busy! Also we’re trying to squeeze in all our doctor and dentist appointments before December 31 as our company health care plan is getting much more expensive and paperwork-heavy next year (I hate to say it, but mainly due to the government’s new health care changes. They hurt me more than they help me, but I know I’m probably in the minority that way.) Still, these things require planning. And I’m already worried about next year’s taxes! This is going to be our most complicated tax year ever, I think. So, onward…

I’d like to direct your attention to the innovative project “200 Poems for New Mexico” – and one of the poems is one of mine, “America Dreams of Roswell.”

And Rachel Dacus has an interested post about the lack of e-book publishing  here. I would like here to make a pitch for those local to Seattle to come out and hear my friends Annette Spaulding-Convy and Kelli Russell Agodon talk about this very topic, e-book publishing for poets at the Redmond Library at 7 PM on December 6th, as part of the “Geeks for Poetry” initiative that I started as Redmond’s Poet Laureate. We’ll talk all about e-books, twitter, social media in general. It’ll be grand times! These guys know what they’re talking about, as they have already produced a fantastic e-book of women’s poetry called Fire on Her Tongue. You know, my new publisher is also interested in doing e-books! I think we poets need to embrace new ways to read poetry and get it out to as big an audience as possible.

I’m off to Annette’s reading for her first book, In Broken Latin at Open Books at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s a wonderful book. Check out this blurb. I wrote it, so you know I believe it!

“Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin is a collection that leads us with intelligence, wit, and compassion through a woman’s life in a nunnery and her slow disenchantment with the church. There’s a spark of hidden sensuality and humor hidden beneath the habit, as displayed in one of my favorite poems of the collection, ‘There Were No Rules about Underwear,’ where a fireman breaks into a nun’s room as she sleeps nude, saying he ‘needs to feel your walls to see if they’re hot.’ The poems here contemplate the gruesome origins of desserts created for saints, the daily rituals of women in the convent, performing a fascinating balancing act of playful irreverence and deep thoughtfulness about spiritual exploration.”