First, sunshine! Yay! Finally!
In the media and sort of related:
I made the local paper, but they misspelled my name. Despite that, a good article – sign your high-school writer up today! Fresh air, sunshine, the ocean, and comic book/mythology creative writing exercises…
http://www.ptleader.com/main.asp?SectionID=101&SubSectionID=329&ArticleID=21140&TM=56653.35
This warms my heart. The rise of girl geeks AND the article name-checks Buffy:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/140457?GT1=43002
(Update: Also in the media, poet Aimee Nez has a post up at the Book Critics Circle blog you should check out:
http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/06/small-press-spotlight-aimee.html)
And congrats to my Mom, who just graduated with her Phd!
There have been some interesting discussions going on about book and manuscript organization – see here for Kelli’s and here for Anne’s, where she discusses the impact of Bruce Springsteen on her MS. So I thought I’d put in 2 cents of my own…
For me, organization isn’t a set thing – it’s organic and keeps happening. I’m always shuffling around the order of poems, especially the first ten and last ten, and adding and subtracting poems as I make up my mind about them.
With Becoming the Villainess, the decision to turn it into five sections that mirrored the anatomy of a comic book was made right around the time I sent it to Steel Toe Books, and a major rearrangement (making the narrative arc a little darker, rather than ending on a lighter note) happened around the same time. A re-titling happened at the same time as well. This was about a year after I started sending it out, and things just seemed to come together in a new way. Getting other people to read and respond to the MS was really key too – not because I neccessarily took their advice, but the advice got my brain to work in new ways, and the bouncing around of ideas was important to me.
The arrangement and organization of my two current manuscripts are both still in flux – I arrange poems chronologically, by theme, and then try a different tack. I start writing a new set of poems, and decide to include them, then lose an old poem that feels now like “filler.” I’m trying to keep the manuscripts as close to fifty pages as possible (one’s sixty, one’s fifty-three) because I don’t want readers (who may have to read 1000 manuscripts) to be overwhelmed. I do all the usual stuff – I read the TOC to see how the titles flow and if I’ve got too many of the same kind of poem next to each other, I put the pages all over the floor and furniture (difficult to manage with two curious cats, but…) to see if they want to group together, I think about theme and how I want the reader to feel starting and finishing the book. I play different music and see if that jolts things together. Also, when I re-read the MS, I often find little tweaks I want to make from poem to poem – wow, when those poems are next to each other, I want to drop this couplet, I want to eliminate the repetition of this adjective, etc, etc.
So what about you, dear blog reader? What are your magic organization tips and tricks?
Have to cancel my Seattle reading tomorrow…still down with stomach flu…
and in other news, Seattle colder than Siberia (and my little town is a little colder than Seattle…)
From The Seattle Times this morning:
“It doesn’t seem fair, but it’s the cold, hard truth — accent on cold: While Seattle hasn’t seen a 70-degree day in more than two weeks, Fairbanks, Alaska, has had six of them in the past 10 days.
Just about everyone, it seems, is toastier than we are. You’ve heard of International Falls, Minn., the self-proclaimed “Icebox of the Nation”? It’s had four days this month in the 70s, topped off with a pleasant 75 on Sunday. Across the Atlantic, the northern destination of Oslo, Norway, has been passing the 70-degree mark nearly every day recently, while even the Siberian city of Tomsk, Russia, hit the 70s last weekend.”
I had a wonderful weekend, I mean, way more wonderful than usual, which was promptly followed by a 24-hour bout with the stomach flu/food poisoning. Since vomiting is on my list of least-favorite things to do, I thought I’d ponder some of my favorite things which kept me sufficiently distracted during my down time:
–Steven Colbert. Scary smart, off-beat cute, and impossible to pin down. He’s my media crush.
–Aimee Mann. Her new album arrived just in time. Go here and listen to a song from the album:
http://www.aimeemann.com/
–Haruki Murakami. I grabbed the new fiction issue of The New Yorker and enjoyed it immensely. One of the highlights was Murakami’s essay on how, at thirty, he started distance running and also trying to write full-length novels. His breezy tone, which comes through unmistakably even when translated from the Japanese, is a wonder. I love his short stories. An aside: while reading The New Yorker, I realized just how much American women’s magazines talk down to their reader. British women’s magazines suffer from this a little less, but it’s really very insulting. Also, there was an in-depth discussion of the problems of God, faith, and suffering, which I always enjoy, but I was surprised to see for some reason.
–My husband and my cat, Shakespeare. Because when I was miserably curled on the floor at 2:30 in the morning, they came and joined me.
Poets on the Town
I had dinner last night with the delightful Kelli Agodon and her husband last night. It’s always nice to catch up with poet friends in my little town, which is at least an hour’s from other small towns.
Also, if you are a high school person or you have any high school kids with nothing to do in the Washington/Oregon area who would be interested in studying theater, arts, or writing for a week, the Centrum High School Intensives weeklong program still has scholarships available! For more information or to register, go here:
http://www.centrum.org/youth/yap-hs-summer.html
I’m pretty excited about this. I think I’ve already got ten students signed up for my class! It involves discussing how mythology and comics/graphic novels are related, and having students write their own myths and comic book superhero characters. Should be fun.
- At June 04, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Open Reading, Steel Toe Books
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Public Service Announcement:
Do you have a poetry book you want to be published?
Did you know Steel Toe Books’ Open Reading time is the month of June? See this page for details. The cost is only the cost of one book ($12) from Steel Toe Books catalog – you could get my book, or Mary Biddinger’s or John Guzlowski’s or Martha Silano’s – really, nothing but good choices 🙂
Good luck!
- At June 02, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In CD Wright, convergences, Poetry
- 0
Odd Convergences in a Small Town…
Sometimes things just come together. Today I got two contributor copy magazine issues (of Mythic Delirium – a paying market, by the way, of science-fic poetry, and Poetry International, where I share pages with the likes of Li-Young Lee, Nin Andrews, Lynell Edwards, and more…) and two acceptances in e-mail, one from the very last issue of the Journal of Mythic Arts, a terrific resource that I’m so so sad is at an end.
Then, I got an acceptance of a query for a poetry journalism piece, then an e-mail inviting me to a small reading and Q&A session with CD Wright (!!) this very afternoon! She’s going to read in a few days in Seattle, but she happened to be in my small-town neck of the woods for a local class, so it was basically the ten students, ten folks from Copper Canyon, and me! Fun times. She read some from her newest book, which I liked as it was all post-apocalyptic. I definitely benefited from hearing her read her work – I had thought of her as a difficult poet, but when you hear how she reads it, it no longer seems difficult, if that makes sense. She was very charming and down to earth, too, answering questions. She talked a little bit about collaboration with artists (which I loved hearing about) and about hybrid forms (same.) I asked about her use of the line, which always seemed to me to be very progressive. She responded that “I was never very good at the line, but I was good with sentences, and dialogue, and so I wrote around my weaknesses.” Ha! Like I said, very charming.
It was also my first day of this current residency, which goes through June. If only the cabins had internet – or I had one of those roaming internet devices. It seems like all my work these days – submitting, researching, interviewing, etc – requires an internet connection. And don’t forget I’m researching new cities to live in, as well – the move is just around the corner now, and we still haven’t made a solid decision…
Sorry to neglect the blog! Husband G got a cold, then I got it, and in my downtime, I got to revamp my two manuscripts and write some new poems. I’m writing more about my childhood in Knoxville, and about the whole “nuclear” thing in Oak Ridge, which is on my mind more and more these days. My father worked as a consultant on the Oak Ridge site, checking in and out with his radioactive-monitoring badge, showing me how to work a Geiger counter at an early age, and owned a black safe in which “secret government documents” were kept. Dad worked on the cleanup end, trying to figure out how to make the place safer, not on the whole “making bombs or reactors” side.
I’m also planning a big web site revamp, moving from the techie main site with poetry subsite to a main site focused on poetry. The site will have fewer subpages, the navigation will be cleaner, and the style will be a little softer, a little more “creative type” and a little less “Matrix.”
After all, when I started webbish6.com lo these many years ago, I was mostly a freelancing technical journalist, who was just starting to get going on the poetry stuff – whereas now, I’m mostly a poet – at least I think so. Plus, the code is old and doesn’t run well on Firefox, which is what about a third of visitors are using, according to my web stats. My little brother, who is a graphics wizard, is helping me build the layout, and we got permission to use some art from one of my current favorite artists. I hope you’ll like it!
I know exactly what you want to do with your beautiful Memorial Day weekend – get a peek at my thesis essay on persona poetry! You know you want to.
If you’ve been following this blog, you know I’ve been interested in persona poetry pretty much since I started writing. Poemeleon, that paragon of online poetry magazines, just published its theme issue on persona poetry, which contains poems by me (from the Japanese MS,) Mary Agner, Dorianne Laux, Bob Hicok, Lana Ayers (her Red Riding Hood is a hoot,) and a bunch of other cool poets.
Plus, a shorter-and-sweeter version of my MFA thesis critical essay on the persona poetry of Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck, and Margaret Atwood called “Why We Wear Masks.” Also, why isn’t there a good anthology of persona poetry already out there? Paging publishers and anthologists!
Some more on Poets Earning a Living, a continuation of my current fascination with the subject:
http://pshares.blogspot.com/2008/05/bah.html
Ploughshares blog discusses this article:
http://www.nplusonemag.com/?q=money
The N+1 article reminds me I am spending too much on rent.
Second Book Blues
So, working on the re-organization of my two manuscripts for the next set of deadlines. For all the “first book” contests, there really aren’t that many places interested in reading second books. It feels harder this time than last, and that could be simple math – there’s just not as many places I can send. Fewer places are accepting open submissions; Copper Canyon’s contest for first or second books is on indefinite hiatus, Wave Books isn’t accepting subs til next year, Ausable decided not to read open subs this year, etc. Sign of the times?
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.
