Overscheduled but Happy on a Rainy Weekend
This morning I woke up early (at the crack of a very grey dawn) to Skype-meet with a class of students in New York state (hi Dustin’s class!) and frighten them with stories of learning to shoot a gun in Tennessee when I was seven and the sexual connotations of the joystick. When will I learn to be more appropriate? Then I sped down to physical therapy (where my PT person recommends socializing less to relax my jaw and help it heal – whoops!) and then raced home to change and meet my friend, rising star Sci-fi/Fantasy writer Felicity Shoulders, for coffee in downtown Seattle. I just got home from a rainy, traffic-y drive after stopping off at our poetry bookstore, Open Books, for a copy of “Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets,” which looks fantastic.
Then I got the welcome news that Redactions had nominated my poem, “She Justifies Running Away, from the newest issue 13, for a Pushcart Prize. You can read all of this year’s nominees from Redactions here: http://redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp
Now I think I will have a hot bath and some cider while simultaneously catching up on some bad tv and reading magazines. Tomorrow I go into downtown again for the 3 PM Crab Creek reading at Elliot Bay Bookstore with contributors Erin Malone, Kevin Miller, Peter Pereira, Michael Schmeltzer, and Martha Silano. A lovely group, I think you’ll agree!
Beyond Ekphrastic: When Poets and Artists Collaborate
You know, we artistic types like to talk about supporting each other – musicians, visual artists, writers, theater folks – but often we get so embedded in our own little worlds that there’s very little true interaction. A lot of poets aren’t well-versed in contemporary art, and there are few artists who’ve read a lot of contemporary poetry, even though the artistic movements in both art and literature run vaguely parallel.
So I’ve considered myself lucky to get to know several local artists, including Amy Johnson, who does beautiful installation art (check out especially the images of thorns, black and resin-colored rose sculptures, etc.) They help educate me about interesting galleries and exhibits, the different medias and methods they use.
Amy and I sat down tonight and talked about truly collaborating on her next project, an installation inspired partially by Hans Christian Andersen tale The Snow Queen (about which I’ve already written a couple of poems.) We both were really excited by the possibilities of the story, the duality of the powerful villainess and one of the only “hero’s journey” tales in fairy-tale-dom where the female hero rescues her boyfriend-in-distress, the beautiful images of snow like bees, snow that takes on the shape of birds, and the dangers and beauties of accessories (the robber queen’s daughter’s knife, Gerda’s multiple fur muffs and magic boots.) So I’m writing a few poems that could be read out loud during the installation, perhaps mixed with a track of humming bee hives, for her project. I’m really excited to be trying something like this. And the best part? You’ll be able to go see the work in action in January in downtown Seattle. I’ll keep you posted!
Ink-Stained Amazons and Gluten-Free Souffles
It’s a wonderful thing to wake up on a cold, rainy, grey Seattle November day is a great guy bringing you delicious homeade goat-cheese and apple souffles. (Gluten-free, of course – e-mail me if you want the recipe.) Delicious and so autumnal. And the first attempt at souffle making!
And today I got to see a friend – Jennifer K. Stuller – read and talk on her book, The Ink-Stained Amazon. She’s a pop-culture feminist historian – kind of a non-fiction version of what I do with poetry – whom I got to know online and then got to meet at Wondercon this year in San Francisco. Particularly memorable was an awesome video on female heroes in pop culture over the last thirty years.
A fun thing about this reading was its location, a secret Seattle Geek hangout called The Wayward Coffeehouse in Greenwood owned and operated by the terrific Bronwen with decor that I would call “Whedon-chic” and a tall stack of sci-fi books on the shelves. Now I want to do a reading there! (Plus they had gluten-free cookies.) See? I had lived in Seattle ten years but never been to this awesome little coffee house (did I mention they screen movies – currently “Joe Versus the Volcano,” one of my all-time favorite movies – there too?) Seattle is a town full of neighborhood surprises that you might never find unless someone you know happens to tell you about them.
Right now I am warming up in front of a fire, I have my new Buffy comic, a couple of books of poetry, and I am feeling terrifically geeky in a town friendly to geeks.
Social Whirl in Seattle
- At November 08, 2010
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Here’s a pic with Oliver de la Paz,
Charms of the Country and Kelli’s readings
Yesterday, after a day of bracing storm and swirl, we had a day of brilliantly watery sunshine and the temp pushed up to 64 with a clear cold wind, which still feels like 50. We did all the things that we moved to our neighborhood to do: we drove past a Christmas tree farm and a farm with Shetland ponies, then hiked a river trail up to another horse farm, then visited truffle-sniffing potbellied pigs at this place. (It’s where I tell everyone to stay if they visit us. I want to move in there myself if I ever make Hemingway money. ) The trees showed their brilliant colors and I wore a scarf for the first time in over two years. We came home and cooked apples with caramel sauce and had baked potatoes. It was a perfect fall day.
And today promises to be another gorgeous day, only this time Kelli is visiting to take me to her Grange Cafe reading, and we’ll eat creme brulee and drink coffee. It will all be very poet-y. By the way, you should check out Martha Silano’s interview with Kellli here. And I hope to see you all at the Frye Museum on Sunday at 2 PM, where local poets Kelli, Allen Braden, Oliver de la Paz and Susan Rich will be reading at the museum. I love poetry readings at art museums and hopefully catch up with my friends! Plus I get to wear black again. I didn’t wear black much in California either.
I was actually excited watching the news yesterday. I must be getting old, because I get more excited about politics than I used to. I’m still cynical, but it’s kind of a wonderful process, this getting to participate in one’s government, even if sometimes if feels like our votes barely get heard among the throng. It’s kind of like poetry: you send out your messages into the universe, having faith that somehow they will make a difference.
Spooooky Zombie Halloween Poem
They Are Not Regenerating
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
We are not zombies, thrown into a pool
of dubious origin and coming back beautiful
but decaying
unsure of how to live – pretending to swim,
eat yogurt like regular girls.
We are not clones, despite being drawn to specifications
(36-26-36) and bearing bouffants and bikinis
we might hack each other to pieces
but we are not confused about our identities
(living or not living) we continue
in this shape we were given
our cells cannot regenerate and the scientist
names us “Dead”
we are not regenerating we cannot reproduce ourselves we cannot be anything
but the fulfillment of your fantasy, flesh-eating or not.
Happy Halloween, and poets on fear
Happy Halloween! A bit early. I already have candy by the door, which is a bit optimistic since I live in a condo-y-apartment-y building which probably won’t have trick or treaters.
I am the kind of person who sprains her own jaw during her move, from stress. I had ulcers when I was a pre-teen. If I was a horse, you might call me “High spirited,” but as a human, I think I might be termed “high strung.” I will be nervous and out-of-sorts til I can find my books, my clothes, the everydaythings that are still hiding in boxes, I’m afraid.
I thought I would talk a little bit about fear, since it’s almost Halloween, what fear means for writers. Fear of failure, fear of rejection, fear of writer’s block. What are your worst writerly fears? I think I fear failure the most, and that turns out to be a very motivating fear – you don’t want to fail for lack of trying, I suppose? I’d rather fail while trying hard than fail while trying not-at-all. So out go the little stacks of poems, the manuscripts, the job applications, the e-mails asking for readings. I admit that when I read the back of Poets & Writers, and see all the people who have won things (mostly not me, sadly, or my friends) it sometimes makes me feel discouraged. I get that grumpy “poetry-is-an-insider’s-business” feeling. I admit that when I get a bunch of rejections, I feel sometimes that I’ve chosen a stupid path. When I was working as a technical writer, way back when, I decided to try to “be a writer” – aka, go to graduate school, really spend time writing, reading, and submitting, write and try to publish a poetry book, for the first time in my life. That was a scary moment, but it would have been scarier to say – well, my mother, grand-mother, and great-grandmother (and great-great grandmother, as a matter of fact, who was the postmistress of her town because she was the only one who could read) all wanted to be writers, and didn’t do it, and I’m going to be just like them. I wanted to fulfill a dream that I feel like has been in my family unfulfilled for generations. Hrmph. Not sure if I’m living the dream, yet, but at least I will be able to say that I gave it my best shot, that I didn’t let fear (of failure, of debt, of poverty, of rejection) get the best of me. What’s that expression? Fail more, fail better?
Back Home and Gearing Up for Fall
Back in the Northwest, safely tucked away in an apartment with a view of treetops from every room in the middle of Washington wine country, which has grown from just a couple of wineries to about twenty tasting rooms crowding each other (but, unfortunately, still no grocery stores in a twenty-minute radius! What’s that about?) Our apartment office advertises things like “Goat gouda making class” and “Wine and cheese pairings” so it seems very fancy, like a little urban condo building in the middle of all these farms with shetland ponies and designer lettuce. The suburbs of Seattle are so weird. That’s what I like about them.
Yesterday, instead of spending all day unpacking like we should have, we took advantage of the slightly warmer temps (61 degrees!) and watery, cloud-ridden sunlight to go out and enjoy some of the surroundings – going to the bookstore, looking at boots (boots are the best thing about fall, along with caramel apples, although I’m not sure I should be buying more boots) and wandering around the local corn maze/pumpkin patch, where we picked out a giant pumpkin for our balcony, a tiny pumpkin and gourd for our mantle, and a 600-pound glass jar of local blackberry honey. (The Northwest still has blackberries on the vine, and some of the pumpkins were still an unripe stripey green, even this late in October.)
So, to get back to writing…I’ve had several e-mail rejections (sigh) and one acceptance – and the acceptance was for my first piece of creative non-fiction, a kind of short-story/lyric essay, so I’m excited about that. I mean, I’ve done journalism before, but this is definitely a different kind of monster, so I was nervous about sending it out.
I’ve been catching up on sleep – eighteen hours of driving with very little sleep in between, and including a trip that involved a large white cow on a five-lane highway that Glenn almost hit with the moving truck and then us getting seperated in the Oregon mountains and then me getting lost from a malfunctioning GPS in what I’d term the “Killbilly” area of Oregon, where there were only vacant motel parking lots and crack houses for miles around – meant that I need some extra rest. Kelli’s recent blog post is right – everyone is a nicer person when they have more than four hours of sleep. I’ll experiment and tell you, but I’m betting I’ll be more cogent and kind with a decent night’s rest.
There are so many poetry to-dos on the horizon, I feel like I’m going into social activity planning overdrive after being somewhat isolated out in Napa for a year. I even feel like maybe throwing a party! I haven’t made it into Open Books yet, but that is definitely on the agenda soon. Now, back to trying to find…everything that’s been stuffed into the bottom of a box somewhere…and some appropriate clothing. Somehow, when it’s fifty and raining, you can’t wear your little slip dress/strappy sandal combos anymore…it’s unearthing boots and sweaters that haven’t seen the light of day for over two years!
Goodbye California! So long scarecrow!
More San Fran, Moving, Pics, Video to Come
I thought you might want some visuals from our San Francisco weekend at LitCrawl. Here’s me in front of my hotel window right before the reading – you can see the Bay Bridge in the background! That’s what I look like with glasses on, by the way – and I have to wear glasses or I can’t see my poems! And then a cell phone pic of the Japanese Gardens at Golden Gate Park with the sunshine in the background – a heavenly place indeed! (Though it took us two hours to get out of the park and to the Golden Gate Bridge – apparently San Fran didn’t want to let us go!)
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There is a rumour that a very nice gentleman from Fourteen Hills may have taped my reading and may be sending me a link to it, so I’ll post it when I get it! Isn’t it nice when things like that work out?
I’m in a frenzy of moving preparations, taking down pictures, stuffing clothes and books into boxes, donating food to food banks. We’re having a bizarre heat wave, in the nineties all week, so we’ll be moving from a place where the roses are still blooming, butterflies are still fluttering, it-s-still-too-hot-to-go-to-the-park-til-after-6, where the vineyards are just barely turning colors, to the rain-soaked, fifties-to-sixties Northwest wintertime in just a week. It’s like moving seasons instead of just locations.
On an unrelated note, I think I’m going to write a little essay about women writers and ambition. Maybe I’ll wait til after all the boxes are gone to think about that, though. Back to stuffing boxes!
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.
