Books Reviews, 5 AM, Twitter, Summertime
I have a new book review up at The Rumpus, where I compare Karyna McGlynn’s I Have to Go Back to 1994 And Kill a Girl to Twin Peaks, Momento, and Sixth Sense. It’s one of my favorite books of 2010 so far!
It is finally feeling like summer here. Wednesday we drove an hour and a half to walk on the beach and the wind was so hard and cold it blew sand into my teeth and hair but the water was so blue, the sky was cloudless. We lost twenty degrees driving out to San Francisco, what seemed like dramatically too-warm clothing at home felt too skimpy near the water. We went to the San Francisco Zoo at the Golden Gate park, the zoo is shabby and not updated except for the fantastic meerkat-and-prairie-dog exhibit which is open to the sky and has wonderful heated rocks all around. Still, though it was a sad zoo, otters showed off every time I walk by, as river otters do. The most beautiful otters. I still miss being able to go out and see otters every day on the dock at my Port Townsend beach.
For a long time I resisted twitter. Now I have an account and you can follow me there if you look me up under “Jeannine Hall Gailey” or find me @webbish6. Later I will tell the story of how twitter helped me find and fall in love with my new publisher. I actually signed up to “follow” a bunch of my favorite poetry book publishers!
My heart still hasn’t slowed down from the time I got the news about my book. I don’t think it will settle down until the book is in my hands, until then, I’ll just be a skitter mass of nerves. All things to get in order: blurbs, cover art, maybe a new author photo. I have to proofread, proofread, proofread. I’m changing order, adding new poems, deleting lines from old poems, reshaping the MS. You think it’s finished, then you realize you weren’t.
A shout out to the lit mag 5 AM as I am always pleased with the reading experience whenever I am lucky enough to get a contributor copy – the magazine falls towards the quirky and funny, along with the occasionally heartbreaking, so I guess maybe my poem “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter [circuits]” fits in alongside the “quirky” in Issue 31 with other poets such as Marge Piercy, Michael S. Harper, Charles Harper Webb, and Denise Duhamel. Buy it! Read it!
Kitsune Books – She Returns to the Floating World
So, since my new publisher just tweeted about it, I guess I can make the news official:
Kitsune Books, a wonderful publisher down in Florida of all kinds of speculative lit, has decided to accept my Japanese-folk-tale-and-anime-themed manuscript, She Returns to the Floating World, for publication (tentative publication date – late 2011!)
I am so excited to be working with them and to have a new book on the horizon! Second book second book second book!!! Thanks to everyone who has read it for me and kept encouraging me along the last few years.
Also, thanks for Valerie Loveland for her kind review of my first book, Becoming the Villainess, here.
secrets!
- At June 25, 2010
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In mysterious good news, secrets
3
I got some good news this morning, which I can’t tell you anything about until it’s official. Huge tease, I know, sorry. Yay for waking up to good things in the e-mail box…
Summer Manuscript Class – Sign Up Now!
Are you trying to put together a first collection of poems, or is your book manuscript languishing in a drawer? Do you need some feedback? Are you ready to spend some time and energy getting it into shape for the fall submission deadlines?
Then sign up for my poetry manuscript summer class, eight weeks for $250, where I’ll give you my feedback on your poetry book manuscript, plus you’ll get feedback from your classmates (and I have some great poets signed up already.) We’ll have weekly sessions with discussions and exercises on subjects like organization, theme, tone, and, of course, we’ll talk about publishing. We’ll even have visiting guests to provide advice and encouragement. Send me an e-mail at Jeannine.gailey@live.com. I’m looking to start the class July 1, and I only have space for one or two more poets!
Splinter Generation and Becoming the Villainess
Jessie Carty writes about needing a hero on Splinter Generation, and says nice things about Becoming the Villainess there. Thanks Jessie Carty! And Splinter Generation!
Seattle and Portland: Poetry Wonderlands
Getting ready to make the 12+ hour drive home to Northern California, I’m lugging way more books. There are new chapbooks by Dorianne Laux, “Dark Charms,” and Joe Millar, “Bestiary,” from the Pacific University MFA reunion last night, where I got to see Kwame Dawes, Jack Driscoll, and Pam Houston read. Yes, Kwame Dawes is as good a reader as you might think. It was wonderful to see all my former advisors – the whole faculty there are still as warm and sweet as ever – and the shiny faces of all the new students. It’s been a few years now since I graduated, so there weren’t any of my old classmates there, but I still feel a sense of pride and happiness whenever I visit. I got to hang out with my sci-fi-writing friend Felicity for a few hours beforehand too, which gave us a chance to discuss genre and the blurring of lines between literary and “other,” Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, Junot Diaz, etc.
Of course, due to a visit in Seattle at Open Books, I ended up with way more books than I even have time to read – the Gurlesque anthology, Canadian poet Susan Holbrook’s “Joy is So Exhausting,” an anthology of interviews called “Poetry in Person,” Allen Braden’s first book from U of Georgia Press, “A Wreath of Down and Drops of Blood” – which was even better since I ran into Allen at the bookstore and had him sign it – poetry books by Stephen Burt the critic and Lisa Russ Spahr, and, my friend K. Lorraine Graham would be proud, a book of experimental feminist poetics called “Feminaissance” that has a pretty rockin’ cover as well. So I’ll have to write my next two reviews and get to reading this summer!
It was chilly and rainy almost the whole week I was visiting the Northwest, even a little chilly and rainy for Northwesterners, which is saying something. It reminded me why I owned so many sweaters and wore so few sandals when I lived up here. The other thing I was reminded of is why a community of writers counts for so much in a person’s life. I felt renewed and energized to go back home and pay attention to my writing, to revision and submitting and all the things that can sometimes feel like chores.
Notes from the Northwest
Two spots still available for my manuscript summer camp session, so if you’re interested in getting some feedback on your manuscript this summer before you send out to the contests this fall, or are just putting it together for the first time and need some guidance, this is a great opportunity to let me know! I’ll be doing full manuscript critiques, and the other members of the class will be sharing their own work and their feedback as well. I’m hoping to have a place where we can talk about organization, structure, individual poems, publication opportunties, the whole nine yards. (Something that doesn’t happen often enough for poets, I think.) Starting July 1!
My first road trip up from wine country in California to coffee country in the Northwest, a great drive. Got to see Lake Shasta, the beautiful whitewater rivers winding through evergreen forests, astounding Mt. Shasta, a hugely tall volcano, completely snow covered, that the road passes closely around, and stopped the night in Ashland, Oregon, home to a big Shakespeare festival (and many little motels.) Yesterday we got to spend a sunny summer-feeling day in Seattle, having brunch with good friends (and Crab Creek editors) Kelli R. Agodon and Annette Spaudling-Convy, going to Woodland Park Zoo to see the new meerkat exhibit (more enclosed than San Diego Zoo’s, for the obvious rainy-and-cold climate reasons) and just generally enjoying the downtown area. Being back is wonderful, though we are supposed to have some rain coming up this week. Well, almost everything (zoo excluded) you probably want to do in Seattle is indoors anyway. Husband G will be at the office all day all week and I’ll be stuck in an East-side hotel room without a car, so I’m going to try to get some reviewing and other (paying) work done as well as some poetry revisions. Looking forward to seeing my MFA buddies at the reunion on Friday in Forest Grove, Oregon – and hanging around Portland for a day at the end of the week. I punctuate my visits to cities by bookstore – Open Books on Wednesday, Powell’s on Friday.
A week of blue herons instead of egrets, water and mountains instead of vines and rolling hills.
Who’s Your City: Deciding Where to Live – Poet’s Edition
I’ve been reading this interesting book called Who’s Your City, by the guy who wrote that “Rise of the Creative Class” book back in the nineties. Who’s Your City has a kind of anti-“the world is flat” thesis. It makes the argument that where you live is one of the most important decisions you can make, that it affects your life in myriad ways, and that most people don’t give where they live enough thought. It offers some ideas and information like: B types like small towns, A types like big cities. Agreeable and conscientious folks live in the Midwest and Southeast. Creative clusters bloom under the right conditions: good weather, good schools, a high number of motivated and ambitious people (who are neither agreeable nor conscientious, by the way. Apparently successful people are open to new experiences, but big jerks. I’ve never thought of agreeable-ness and conscientiousness as being liabilties, but this book makes that argument via graph.) Being close to friends and family can be worth over six figures to people. I’m the kind of person who does a lot of research before I move somewhere: air quality? crime rates? average rent? wait times at the local ER? But stats can only tell you so much of the story.
Once again we are considering a move at the end of our current lease. California is beautiful but very expensive, and Napa is far enough from San Fran to keep us from going there as often as I’d like. The Northwest’s constant rain raises some health challenges for me with allergies and asthma, but that’s where my friends live, and the poetry community there – and I’m talking about Seattle and Portland both – is warm and convivial. Husband G’s job is still in Seattle, which makes the West Coast preferable. The book makes the point that if you want to be the best in your field, you move to where the best in your field live. For instance, if you’re a musician, you move from a small town to Austin to Nashville. If you’re a poet…well, I’m not sure -would New York City/Boston be the equivalent kind of city? I love the energy of NYC and Boston, but they’re super expensive, out of our price range for sure, as is living any closer to San Fran proper than we already do. I’m not sure that kind of thinking even applies to writers anyway…
There are costs to moving as often as we have – economic and emotional stress for sure. But I am happy I’ve gotten to explore some of these wonderful places, and as a writer, it’s been fascinating to see the different writing communities, the bookstores (though Napa Valley’s independent bookstores have mostly closed, and San Diego was no great shakes for bookstores either,) the landscapes and cultures and people. Some places are going to have better job opportunties, better vistas, better education opportunities, or better weather; cheaper costs of living, better access to friends and family. How does where you live impact how we write? There are writers that I can’t imagine living outside the Northeast (like Louise Gluck) – or think about how Margaret Atwood’s threatening Canadian wildernesses feature in so many of her stories. I’ve been writing a series of poems about growing up in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Where my neighbors were a combination of poor Appalachians and nuclear physics experts, the liquor store got held up by the teenagers who lived down the street, where we grew the most wonderful strawberries in soil that was laced with contaminated heavy metals and radioactive waste.
I don’t know if I agree with Who’s Your City’s author, Richard Florida, that where we live is the most important decision in our lives. But I think where we live does seep into our selves – into our writing, the way we walk and dress, who we marry and befriend, how we think and carry ourselves. As a bit of a rambler, who was moved four times before she turned ten, and continues in that tradition as an adult, maybe what I’m looking for is just a place that feels like home, that doesn’t bankrupt me to rent there, that has good doctors and good libraries, that provides a bit of the balance between cultural benefits and natural beauty. Maybe I’ll just keep wandering. Maybe I’ll take a vote.
What is the Role of Intelligence in Poetry?
A few days ago, I got a letter from a publisher, a publisher I respect and like, one of those contest letters about all the manuscripts they received this year, what they thought of them, yadda yadda.
I had a hard time getting past a line or two in the middle of the two page letter about intelligence in poetry. “As for intelligence-of course we assume that a poet is intelligent. And she should be. If not, no hope for anything beyong intelligence. But the person we really want to be intelligent is our doctor. More and more we’d rather our poetry impress us with an eye and heart that sees recognizable human beings, and gives them to us…”
I sat back baffled. I thought, “The person we really want to be intelligent is our doctor?” Well, no doubt. But isn’t the reason, I mean, one of the very main reasons, we read literature is to be intellectually stimulated? Is it all about feelings and mushy stuff in poetry? In fact, I was just reading one of this particular publisher’s book, a difficult book with a shattered narrative and many embedded clues to different pop culture references. It was not an easy, emotional, accessible book, and one of the reasons I liked it is because it challenged my mind. I guess I might be a “head” poet rather than a “heart” poet. I like putting science and mythology in poems, and I like reading poems about things I don’t already know. I don’t play Sudoku, instead, I like to read poems that don’t necessarily make themselves clear to me the first time around. It made me think about publishing, about poetry, about priorities. What are your poetry priorities? Do you demand that your poets be at least as intelligent as your doctor? Because I think that would be ideal.
I never think about things like references to science or folk tales being offputting to people. But I guess I should. I like poets who aren’t afraid to talk about difficult subject matter in difficult ways; this isn’t about avant–garde or quietism or whatever, it’s about demanding something from the reader, and providing something for the reader they didn’t have before. It’s about not talking down to an audience. It’s about expecting a poet to know things about the world, beyond just poetry, beyond just themselves and their feelings.
What do you think? What should the role of intelligence be in poetry?
Summer Online Manuscript Workshop Special
Hey guys! I’ve been doing online one-on-one poetry consulting (along with my National MFA program teaching) for some years now, but I want to try something new this summer, more fun, more interactive. Kind of like summer camp for your languishing poetry book manuscript!
This is something I’ve been wanting to try out for some time. I’d like to set up an online poetry manuscript workshop, using e-mail and a private blog, for about five poets. I’d do my usual manuscript consulting, exercises, and critiques, with discussions of publishing, organization, theme, tropes, and individual poems, but we’d also have discussions and participants could comment on each other’s work as we go along. I’d also have participants read and review a book of contemporary poetry, besides working with your own and your fellow participants’ manuscripts. I might also have a guest mentor come in and “talk” – well, virtually – to the participants as well. All in all, it’ll be a good time!
If you’d be interested in something like this, I’m charging $250 for two months with once-a-week check-ins and assignments. Applicants for the workshop – and I’m only going to take five students, so apply early – should e-mail me a brief writing-oriented bio and a few poems if they’re interested to jeannine dot gailey @ live dot com. Deadline for applications is June 25, as I’d like to get started by July 1.
And here are some qualifications in case you’re curious, in the form of a bio:
Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess, published by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book were featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and two were included in 2007’s The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She has written articles and interviews for The Poet’s Market, Poets & Writers online and The Poetry Foundation Web site., as well as book reviews for The American Book Review, The Cincinnati Review, and many others. Her poems have been published in journals such as The Iowa Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal, and Ninth Letter, and she has won grants from Washington State’s Artist Trust as well as the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg contest’s top prize. She has been teaching at National University’s MFA program for a few years, as well as doing poetry consulting independently. She has a BS in Biology and an MA in English from The University of Cincinnati, and an MFA from Pacific University. Besides teaching part-time, she also works as a journalist and volunteers as a consulting editor for Crab Creek Review.
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.
