The Summer 2007 issue of Endicott Studio’s Journal of Mythic Arts is up, and this one is geared for the YA crowd; there are poems from “Stardust” author Neil Gaiman and fiction from my Bookslut reading partner, Catherynne M. Valente, and two good essays, one on the “Orphaned Hero” in Harry Potter etc and the other on Why Disney’s The Little Mermaid May Not Be As Feminist as You Think – I mean, if you thought it was, which I never really did, but I did like the singing lobster. And there may be two poems from Becoming the Villainess
in there as well…
All right, I have a question for you to perk up our summer writing doldrums:
Which ten books are the books that have inspired the most writing from you? The books you read that you couldn’t wait to put down so you could write afterwards? These aren’t neccessarily your “favorite” books, but the books that have helped you generate the most new work. If you are a poet, they do not have to all be poetry, they can be fiction, non-fiction, etc.
Here are my top ten “inspiration-generating” books so far:
-Louise Gluck’s Meadowlands
-Hayao Kawai’s The Japanese Psyche: Major Motifs in the Fairy Tales of Japan
-Kelly Link’s Stranger Things Happen
-The Armless Maiden: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors, Edited by Terri Windling
-Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Women Who Run with the Wolves
–Humphries’ translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
–Margaret Atwood’s Selected Poems II
–Marina Warner’s From the Beast to the Blonde
-I’m going to cheat and allow film in this list: Hayao Miyazaki’s entire oevre
-HD’s Collected Poems
-My mother’s copy of XJ Kennedy’s Introduction to Poetry, circa1969, including all her notes
I’d love to see your lists!
It is Monday, though I feel quite cheerful because I have a new computer that works (thank goodness, finally) and I wrote a letter to the editor at the Atlantic and I’ve never written a letter to the editor before but I thought it was for a good cause (to cheer Kelli and Pacific U) and this afternoon I am going to a very smart rheumatologist who may at last tell me why I’ve had a fever for two months and have albumin-anemia and high C-Reactive Protein. This I believe has been the cause of my fatigue and “down” moods lately – I was telling a friend that I feel my “down”-ness is in my body, not my head, that’s exactly it. I actually feel okay with my life, especially now that: a. I am wondering where to rent next (always an adventure when you’re picking a new town, even a new town in driving distance) and b. where/if/how I should work (teaching? publishing? more freelancing?) and c: I feel happy about the third manuscript I’m working on, and how I’m writing a lot of poems about sleeping women. It’s just that I have so little energy – like having lead weights on all the time. I always feel weird talking about my physical stuff here but it’s hard to explain my life without also explaining that stuff, if you know what I mean. So, it’s part of my life – like writing, like my husband and cat, like where I live – it’s part of the life environment – when you are sick, it affects everything else.
But enough about me! Here’s a neat link to an interview with one of my favoritest faculty at Pacific, Dorianne Laux, at the Smoking Poet!
And, apparently, a party run by the Poetry Foundation was shut down by police in Chicago this weekend. Look, poets are already paranoid enough that “the man” is out to get them – you don’t need to encourage that kind of thinking, fellas! Wish I could have been there to see it.
Aha! Solved the mystery of my grumpy computer…the hard drive died today and the computer would no longer boot up. I freaked out because I thought the whole of My Documents was lost- along with the 40 page third manuscript I’ve been working on but had no hard copies of – until I remembered I’d backed up two weeks ago. Then I stopped hyperventilating. I took it to a computer repair wizard (or as I call it, the PC Whisperer) and he said, yes, the hard drive is dying, lifted it to his ear and shook it, and got it to boot up one last time so I could copy the files over to a new laptop (goodbye, majority of grant money!) On the plus side, the new laptop is pink and superspeedy. If anyone wants a nice, three-year-old laptop with a dead hard drive, give me a whistle! Selling for cheap….
PS The PC Whisperer says the most common thing for 2-3 year old laptops to go is the hard drive. So remember your backups, all ye who bought laptops in 2004!
On the plus side, my father and brother made it through their respective eye surgeries swimmingly. Hoorah!
And, may tomorrow may be a less stressful day. Health and happiness to all!
PS May go see Hairspray tonight. Need an escape from reality for a bit…
- At July 19, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
2
Had the chance to see Peter Pereira and Nancy Pagh (author of “No Sweeter Fat” from Autumn House) read tonight in Redmond, and both did a terrific job. Peter read my favorite poem from his new book (Twenty Years After His Passing, My Father Appears to Us in Chicago, at Bobby Chinn’s Crab & Oyster House, in the Guise of Our Waiter, Ramon) Also had a fun poet-friend dinner beforehand, which was nice. I’m really lucky to know such supportive, wonderful writers.
I’ve been a bit grumpy lately, but hope it is just a funky-funk I will snap out of. I apologize to all who interact with me and who read this blog. I’m sure cheerleader levels of pep will return soon.
On the plus side, Heroes and Masi Oka nominated for Emmys!
Update: I know one of the contributing factors to the grumpiness is my three-year-old laptop computer, which has started giving me memory error and registry corruption problems, and now runs so slow I can barely open e-mail, much less a Word file, in 20 minutes. Help me, Obi Wan Kenobi – (I mean, shiny new Sony laptop on sale now) you’re my only hope!
To borrow from Ms. Loudon, My Glamorous Life as a Poet:
Well, after being 24 hours without power, we had to throw out the entire contents of fridge and freezer (except for what we saved via ice-chest and cooler.) That was expensive. Then go shopping to replenish: cheese, milk, frozen pizza/veggies and yogurt, salad dressings and sorbet (essential in heat) and other underpinnings of meals. Then, loads of undone laundrey. Then, host of unreturned phone messages and e-mails. Two members of my family, my dad and my older brother, are getting eye surgeries this week because of rare odd problems, so waiting for news of both. Managed to finally get two submissions out yesterday night (both online) and write and revise one poem. Got back to someone who was waiting on feedback for their poems. And had to attend to lawyer from x company that wants me to sign an affadavit that I am not the inventor of Y techology that I wrote about lo many years ago when I was a tech geek. Fun!
In between these little life crises, I managed to read the new book Japanamerica by one of the editors of A Public Space, a lit mag I love, which was a fairly shallow evaluation of popular culture in Japan and its relevance in America. Not bad, just not as in-depth as I would have liked, especially as it mentioned certain artists (Murakami the “Superflat” pop artist, and Murakami the novelist, and anime auteur Hayao Miyazaki) but didn’t really shed new insight into them for me. Maybe because I’ve already read a lot of books and magazine articles on these subjects.
Still contemplating move to an (Even smaller and further out than Bothell) small town at the end of my lease. Seems like the only way to live on my freelancer budget (even with husband G’s income) is to get the heck out of the Seattle area, where rents and property values just keep climbing. Poetry just isn’t that lucrative, and if I want to stay a poet, and not, say, a writer of vampire chick lit or corporate handbooks, it seems important to figure out a way to live on less.
Verse Daily, Three Cheers for Kelli, Power Outages and the top five low-res MFA programs
Okay, Verse Daily has my poem “The Husband Tries to Write to the Disappearing Wife” up today! (And by today, I mean Friday…please ignore the blogger timestamp.)
It’s from Redactions. Thanks guys! I’m honored. This is one of the few persona poems where I tried to write in a male voice, so it was a little risky for me. I hope you like it!
Immediately pick up the Summer Fiction issue of The Atlantic, which has a terrific poem by Kelli that won their student poetry contest! Hooray!
In this same issue, the Atlantic has an article that rates various graduate writing programs. I’d like to say my recent Alma Mater, Pacific University, made it onto the Top 5 Low-Res MFA Programs. Pretty good for a West-Coast newcomer to the scene, right?
It seems my power only goes out when the temps are below 30 or above 90. In that tradition, I’ve been hiding in an air-conditioned hotel room. Has this been a crazy week or what?
The Villainess Goes to…ComicCon?
Imagine my surprise when someone pointed this out to me in the ComicCon 2007 schedule:
Saturday 1:00-2:30 Comics Arts Conference Session #11: High Art and Low—Richard Becker (CSU Northridge) discusses the nature of the narrator and authorial self-insertions in comics, like those of Lee and Kirby, Gerber, and Morrison, and the schism between schools of storytelling in which the writer is very visible and another in which the writer seeks to be completely invisible. John A. Walsh (Indiana University) examines Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol stories and their punctuation by appearances of and allusions to similarly fracture, damaged, and outcast artists and works and asks whether the members of the Doom Patrol are artists or heroes and if there’s a difference. Jason Mott (UNC-Wilmington) uncovers the history of comic book superheroes and traces their evolution from serving purely as devices of metaphor for poets to becoming the subject of extended development and progression by award-winning poets such as Brian Dietrich in Krypton Nights and Jeannine Hall in Becoming the Villainess. Room 30AB
Very close to this listing: the Q&A with the Heroes cast and crew. Hee! Yes, I’m missing a last name, but it makes me more mysterious…
Wish I was going to be in San Diego in two weeks!
PS It’s 100 degrees today. So I’m going to see Harry Potter!
Verse Daily, Pubs, Bill Gates Sightings…
I just found out one of my poems will be up on Verse Daily this upcoming week, I think on Thursday. (No, I have been corrected – it will be up Friday – also my husband G’s birthday!) Check it out! Yay!
Received the beautiful little pocket of Foursquare on Saturday, with my poem “Anime Girls Consider the Resurrected.” I loved the other poems in it, which means poet-editor Jessica Smith and I must have similarly excellent taste. The only question is – how do I find out which poet wrote which poem? I really liked the prose-poem piece. And what other poetry journal comes in its own convenient and attractive fabric carrying pouch? If only it came with an origami swan…(See last post for joke reference.)
My interview with prolific interviewer-extrordinaire Kate Greenstreet is up at Eclectica Magazine. Also has poems by Michaela (not my illustrater, the poet/blogger Michaela) and other interesting stuff.
Raven Chronicles final print issue, titled “Whimsies” (containing, appropriately enough, one of Jeffery Bahr’s poems) is out at bookstores now – the last, and if I may be bold, best-poetry-edited issue Raven Chronicles ever! (Full disclosure: I was the guest poetry editor of this issue – although most of the editing was done three years ago. A lot of lag time in the publication. ) Seriously, this comedy-filled issue is a lot of fun. It contains poems by Kelli Agodon, Peter Pereira, my fellow Crab Creek editor Natasha Moni, and many other superduperpoets.
Friday I was chilling out in husband-G’s office lobby at Microsoft, had my feet up on the table, playing a little cell-phone video game, when Bill Gates walked within two feet of me. (PS He is very tall. And still very, very geeky.) No security or nothin’. I should totally have hit him up for poetry funds. Five minutes later, as the husband and I strolled across the parking lot, a supervillainy helicopter shoots up over our heads, with aforementioned-almost-richest-man-in-the-world aboard. Geesh, will this billionaire just leave me alone? Quit stalking me already! I get it!
PS This is indeed the best time to visit the Northwest. Today was sunny, seventies, the streams’s water lilies hid baby ducks and the grass baby rabbits, the wind over the water, the youth spoke politely to me in my inquiry after the rabbits, “Yes ma’am, lots of baby rabbits this time of year,” roses and honeysuckle were blooming, and all was well in the world. Yup, nothing wrong with Seattle in the rain, but Seattle in the sun is nearly unbearably beautiful. I spent four hours outside and hated to go in.
PSS The husband and I celebrate our thirteenth wedding anniversary tomorrow on the 9th. Wish us luck on the next 13!
While passing time at the gigantic Bellevue library this afternoon, I ran across the best (and most amusing) thing I’ve read in Poetry (this was the July/August issue) in some time:
http://www.poetrymagazine.org/magazine/0707/comment_179843.html
This essay ostensibly and comically describes the difference between fiction writers and poets from the perspective of a somewhat flibberty-gibbetish fiction writer in love with a poet; fiction writers are “too busy writing to read” while poets are “always reading,” the fiction writer writes 13 pages while the poet leans her head against the window waiting for the poem to hit, etc.
My favorite part was the tongue in cheek part about payment, near the ending:
“But it’s been a good week for us. I sold my new novel, after a bidding war, for $11 million, and my Poet had a poem taken by a well-known literary journal, which gave payment in the form of an origami swan made out of her recycled submission. “
And the part where the poet throws books by beautiful-young-prizewinning-theorist-poets she’s reviewing across the room. Not that I would know anything about that. No sirree.
I also checked C. Dale Young’s second book out of the library, along with Natasha Tretheway’s Belloq’s Ophelia, which I had skimmed but hadn’t really read – it’s a series of poems about a prostitute in New Orleans who was photographed early last century; they’re mostly persona poems, truly well done. It’s an easy book to read in one sitting, moving and graceful.
I also sent a query in to Poets & Writers Magazine with an article idea. I figure, maybe I should try to write for magazines which have something to do with what I do all day. You know, crazy ideas like that. And an MS into BOA. Wish me luck…
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.
