Little Kindnesses in the Poetry World, Holidays, Fa la la
Besides that, I was thinking about a kind remark on a rejection – this time, from a poetry book contest. I think it is so wonderful when an editor takes the time to make a specific comment – to say, look, your work is valuable, even if we don’t take it, it’s good, don’t give up. It makes the whole poetry submission process seem less like a dog-and-pony show and more like a civilized correspondence between literary acquaintances, if you know what I mean. It’s the same with reviews. I won’t write a mean review, although I strive to write a fair and truthful one every time. The reviews are so meaningful and valuable to the writer – and such unrewarding work for most reviewers – and something about the reviewing process reaffirms that there are readers out there that care about what writers produce.
I have also recently had poets out of the blue send me encouraging remarks, give me advice, offer help. I am thankful. The holidays this year are keeping me full of cheer, though we’re low on cash due to the move (isn’t that the story of my life!) and I’m far from my family back in Cincinnati. I haven’t been writing or submitting like I should be, but I remember that I have friends who need encouragement, students that need close readings and guidance. A little kindness means so much. I should remember, kindness, kindness, make it mantra.
Poem up at Rattle’s blog and we’re washing away…
My poem, “I Forgot to Tell You the Most Important Part…” is up today at Rattle’s blog. Please go check it out and comment on it or otherwise make a fuss.
In other news, there has been so much rain here I think we seriously need to sharpen our ark-making skills. Last night, the rain on the roads was making our little car sedan squeal and complain. Belts got wet and tires spun. The rain pelted our windows so enthusiastically it woke me up at four in the morning. The train from here to Portland was closed for mudslides.
I am done with my Christmas shopping, we have seen the Christmas boats, and I only have a few cards left to send out. Now, if I could only get a similar jumpstart on my writing and writing-related tasks…
Thundering Seattle and more…
Yesterday there was a lightning strike so close to our apartment building that I almost thought it hit us. It might have hit us. The phone went dead and the cable went out, but eventually the internet blinked back on. Lightning is very uncommon in Seattle, though where I grew up in Knoxville, we watched the storms come through every afternoon, we opened the door and watched the wind shaking our trees and smelled the clean electric smell of storms, and in Cincinnati, every thunderstorm meant the possibility of tornadoes (one struck while I was babysitting two young kids when I was about 13. Another tore up one of my high schools and gym – luckily, no one was in either when it hit. ) I have been listening to hard rain against windows.
AWP is going to be Seattle in 2014! I think this is a good sign that AWP is following me around. I think AWP should stop being in places like Chicago (so many times!) and the coooold East Coast in winter – let’s face it, no one wants to make that plane trip in Jan or Feb – and start having itself in warm, tropical venues – or at least San Francisco or San Diego. I think by 2014 I should have a permanent house, a permanent job, and another book. You know, if 2012 doesn’t get all apocalypse-y. Maybe that’s too optimistic, but I hope not. Then I can host AWP sleepovers!
In other news of good people getting good things, Ilya Kaminsky was named director of the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet Monroe Institute. I remember meeting him in Seattle when Dancing in Odessa had just come out. I loved the book and when I met him, I thought, what a charming and intelligent young man (well, he’s a little younger than my younger brother, so I can’t help thinking of him as really young.) I thought, I bet he’s going places.
(In a late addition: Remember Aimee’s book I mentioned in my last post, Lucky Fish? Well now it’s been chosen by The Rumpus Poetry Book Club. So Yay for her too!)
I’m spending too much time grading and not enough time writing poetry. Too much time worrying about Christmas “business-busyness” – cards, present buying, corporate party-going – and not enough on Christmas fun. (Although last weekend I did get to visit with artist Michaela Eaves and a pair of tiger cubs at the same time as we toured Port Defiance Zoo. Which was pretty great all the way around – holiday lights, good friends, meerkats and reindeer and Sumatran tiger babies…who could ask for anything more?) Maybe next week will be a bit more peaceful…
The Holidays…and the new book becoming a reality
The holidays are upon us. I keep being reminded of this by the cold cold weather and by the fact that we live down the street from a Christmas tree farm. We are going to go get our tree today, and do some festive light-seeing afterwards. I love driving around town looking at lights, because of my inner twelve-year-old-girl.
I have news about my new book, She Returns to the Floating World, that suddenly makes it all very real: I have a street date from my wonderful publisher Kitsune Books! July 1, 2011! And they’re going to send review copies out before that even! If you’re a reviewer who loves
a. my work, and wants to review my next book whatever it is about
b. books about Japanese anime characters/Japanese folk tales/the love of Japanese culture by American teens/all of the above
c. books with haibun and haiku
b. books about love, disappearing women, animated heroines, apocalypses, fairy tales in which women transform into animals or trees, Tennessee childhoods, foxes, or litte brothers…
Please send me an e-mail at jeannine.gailey@live.com with your mailing address and I’ll be sure to put you on my list!
It’s the holidays, and our minds turn to buying presents for our loved ones. May I recommend a book of poetry? Small presses are always struggling, and poets are part of the economy! Here are a few:
—Becoming the Villainess. Yes, that’s my own book. It’s perfect for lovers of Buffy, Wonder Woman, bad girls, fairy tales, and etc.
–Looking for a slightly more adult version of a fairy tale? Check out Lana Ayers’ A New Red.
—Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room by Kelli Russell Agodon makes a great gift for writers, or anyone who wants to think about life’s mysteries, from the star tabloids to the stars of cosmos.
–For those who love travel and recipes, The Alchemist’s Kitchen by Susan Rich.
—A Working Writer’s Daily Planner, for the writers in your lives.
—Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Now, this one doesn’t technically come out til January, but you can pre-order it, and who can resist that cover?
These are but a few wonderful options. It’s time to browse some poetry, either in the local independent bookstore, if you’re lucky enough to have one, or online.
Happy Thanksgiving and to MFA or NYC: flaws in the logic
Happy post-Thanksgiving everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend. I had to start a class (on the 22nd – I know! Crazy timing for a new quarter!) but other than that Glenn and I managed to have a pretty fun time despite being far from our families this year and getting snowed into our little neighborhood – we had four or five straight days of snow and ice here in the wooded outskirts of Seattle, which definitely put us in the Christmas spirit. We drank hot chocolate and watched holiday movies (Brigit Jones, the Holiday, About a Boy, When Harry Met Sally – total chick flick fest.) We got to go out and see the Christmas lights at Bellevue Botanical Gardens and are planning an outing to go out to the Tacoma zoo for some more holiday lights plus tiger cubs! (One of the tiger cubs has been struggling for her life but she’s on the mend – how do I know this? I keep track of all baby tigers in the news.)
What does all this have to do with poetry? Nothing! So let’s talk about writing. I went to see a poet friend yesterday and spent a couple of hours talking about his book manuscript, about publishing, about poetry in general. It was so much fun! I hope some publisher snatches up his book soon. We talked about going to the publishers with open submissions and query systems rather than waiting around and going the contest route, which can feel very much like a beauty pageant circuit, one we have no control over and is often fixed anyway. (See this post for more on that…)
There was a crazy article in Slate about being a writer, something about the “MFA versus NYC.” I can guarantee you neither of these things guarantees that you will become a writer. If you both get an MFA and move to NYC, you could still totally not be a writer. You could also never get an MFA and never move to NYC or even visit and still be a great writer. There are lots of examples. This is something my engineer father would call “a false dichotomy.” Anyway, Kelli (here) and Charles (here) have already made some very good comments about the article. I was even moved to comment on the article myself at Slate, to say that hey, maybe the Internets have changed some things about publishing and networking and maybe that fact should have been included in the article. But what do I know?
Also it reminded me that writers sure like writing about themselves and their problems, don’t they?
So besides the “not mentioning the internet revolution and its impact on publishing,” which I’d say is a pretty large omission, this article fails to state what I have observed at both the program I attended and the program I currently teach in. Which is, many of the students who go to MFA programs are not going to become “professional writers” as a career. Many of my MFA students are already high school teachers, or they teach at the community college level, and they get their MFA to both learn more about poetry or fiction or whatever but also because it benefits them in the form of raises and promotions to get that MFA. Many of them aren’t that interested in even publishing a book themselves. They just want the education (and the raises.) Others go just to learn. My decision to get the MFA wasn’t motivated by the thought of getting a job as much as the desire to start taking myself seriously as a writer. All an MFA really does is buy you time and space (and a motivating mentor/teacher/advisor or two) to write. It does not guarantee anything, it does not make you a literary star and it certainly doesn’t provide an automatic entry to tenure-track teaching. I think most MFA students know that.
As someone who, like most Americans, doesn’t live in NYC and doesn’t go to publishing parties on a regular basis, I know they are important but I question if they’re as important as this article might indicate. I hope not, because that would not be healthy for American literature. Or maybe that’s why there are so many boring books about NYC! Geez, people, there are like a million other interesting cities out there – and I’ve lived in a lot of them – LA, Seattle, San Francisco, New Haven, Knoxville, Richmond, Napa – go out and live in one!
Strange Horizons and Snow in Seattle
I just saw that my poem, “Jin-Roh: Wolves in Human Armor,” was up at the highly respected journal of sci-fi/fantasy/speculative writing, Strange Horizons:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20101122/gailey-p.shtml
You can even comment in the forums on each poem, a kind of feedback loop we don’t usually see in literary magazines. Maybe it would be too scary! We poets can be a frightening group! The poem was inspired by a beautiful anime movie called Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade that is about a terrorism group and a frightening shadow police group, a re-telling of Perrault’s Red Riding Hood, and doomed love against a post-apocalyptic Japanese backdrop. See it if you get a chance.
I woke up early this morning to a snowstorm outside in the treetops outside of my window, and the snow kept coming down and kept coming down…and it’s still snowing! Seattle does not usually get a lot of snow, and certainly not this early in the season, but it is lovely in post-card kind of way. As long as I don’t have to drive in it. (Northwesterners don’t have experience driving on snow or ice, so there are always a ton of accidents…) A surreal aspect of this is that Glenn and I haven’t worn even as much as a coat in the two years we lived in California. Maybe Seattle wanted us to get in the Christmas spirit! We did turn on some Ella Fitzgerald Christmas carols and made a gluten-free dutch apple pancake (which was an okay experience, although Glenn said the recipe needed more eggs.)
Found out I’ll be writing an article for next year’s Poet’s Market on “How to Know When to Target a Smaller Press” on micro/small publishers of poetry. I’m excited! And my first day of classes for the winter quarter was today. An odd timing since this is a holiday week, but oh well! So, off to work I go!
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,
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.
