Copper Canyon Parties, Dean Young’s Robots, and New Anthologies

I missed some of my favorite holiday parties this year, but did manage to arrive (if slightly sleep-deprived and bedraggled due to heavy rain) at the year-end Copper Canyon party, where I got to see one of my poetry heroes, Dean Young, read, as well as Deborah Landau, and say hi to some of the people that make Copper Canyon Press and Hugo House what it is. Dean Young read at least two poems mentioning robots, and drew a robot in the book he signed for me, thereby procuring my admiration for all time. Seriously, his reading flew by, leaving all of us wanting more. I remember reading his poems years ago and thinking, what a weird (and wonderful) brain! I feel very lucky to have such vital organizations in my town (plus I got to hear the inside scoop from one of the interns on Dana Levin’s new apocalypse themed book coming out in 2016!)  Here’s a pic of Glenn and I on our way out the door and me with fellow East-side poet Sarah Jones!

Two anthologies recently came out – so recently I don’t even have the contributor copies in my hands yet – that I thought you might like to know about for the holidays. One is an anthology of poems related to television, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems
which includes a poem of mine about engineers and Wile E. Coyote as well as work by Dorianne Laux and Billy Collins, and the other is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry from Mythic Delirium, Mythic Delirium: Volume Two: an international anthology of prose and verse, recently reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly, and containing a poem from me but also work from spec stars like Jane Yolen. Anyway, both would make great gifts!

I finally slept all the way through the night last night – and by that I mean, from 1:30 AM to 7 AM – for the first time in over two weeks. I was telling a friend that this virus has been like having a really evil, uncute baby that wakes you up every forty-five minutes. So I’m hoping that by the time actual Christmas rolls around I’ll be all recovered and hearty! I’ve got tickets to see the new Star Wars right before the new year (don’t buy your movie tickets late in a geek-driven town like mine, or you’ll wait a week to see the movie!) and got all the Christmas presents for faraway family out the door yesterday, so I think I’m ready for the holidays! 2015 has been a tough year for a lot of us, so I’m wishing us all a happier 2016!

 

This Post is Redacted: Authenticity, the Holidays, and the Problems of Shiny Instagram Life

Sometimes I struggle with what to put in this blog post. How honest should I be? What should I include? What should I censor? Everyone knows that any writer’s life is more than happy pictures and thoughtful meditations.

I want to avoid giving anyone more bad news, even if it’s just about me. You know if you read my blog regularly I have some health issues, including an immune deficiency that makes me particularly vulnerable to pneumonias and other upper respiratory infections. A day or so ago I was in the hospital struggling to breathe, with a high fever and an upper respiratory infection that activated my asthma, a migraine that almost made me pass out, a cough so violent I actually vomited a few times, unable to get a breath, and hurt some ribs. A couple of days ago I couldn’t talk, or walk across a room, without collapsing into a coughing fit. Scary stuff, and yet, part of me did not want to write about it – don’t want to put my vulnerabilities out there, or give anyone bad news during a time that has enough bad news. Plus, we all have fair-weather-only friends – and even family – people who only want to be on your side when you’re winning, who only want to hear your good news – and there’s a fear that admitting our weaknesses makes us look weak, makes our problems more real.

Besides the illness, I’ve been feeling discouraged, isolated, unmotivated. Like all writers, sometimes I lose hope and momentum. I can’t get out as much when I’m sick, and the lack of social interaction can make me feel worse, as I’m sort of a social girl. And no doubt the weather (windstorms, mudslides, downed trees, massive amounts of rain) isn’t cheering anyone here in the Seattle area up.

In my Newsfeed, I’ve been trying to avoid reading any news about another shooting, terrorism, details of another good guy gone bad. Instead I read about a white Bengal tiger cub frozen to death in Crimea, the rising levels of Cesium-137 off the shores of Oregon and California, the news the seagulls are smarter than we think. It’s the holidays. I look for any shred of news that’s even slightly cheerful: astronaut cats, for instance, or robot arms to support you while you read. Margaret Atwood’s writing a comic book about a cat-bird-man. (http://electricliterature.com/margaret-atwood-is-writing-a-superhero-comic-book/)

What do we redact from our lives in our Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, Instagrammed moments of perfect cupcakes and outfits? Does that hurt our world, drain our authenticity? Does blocking bad news from your feed prevent it from happening? If I don’t tell you I’ve been sick and discouraged, does it make it disappear?

As the daughter of a scientist who did government consulting on Superfund sites, I am used to being around “Redacted” documents. When I was doing research for what became The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, I found a lot of the environmental reports for the Oak Ridge area were heavily Redacted. This didn’t mean there wasn’t radioactive contamination – it just meant no one wanted to talk about it. Or know about it. Or think about it.

There’s a danger to keeping secrets, to pretending to be invulnerable. No one can – or should – be “rah-rah” all the time. And I think it’s okay to admit that. During the holidays there is even more pressure than usual for us to present a cheerful picture, even if we’re not actually cheerful (which I believe is one of the lessons of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, that most spiritual of holiday shows.) But here, let me say that it’s okay not to be perfect, and not to pretend everything is okay when it isn’t. Struggling is part of the normal human condition. There’s a pressure for people with chronic illness, especially, to reassure others and present a “happy face” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1209-baer-sickness-upbeat-notes-20151209-story.html) and that’s not necessarily true, or healthy. Admitting our problems, our vulnerabilities, our pain, our struggles – that’s part of being fully human. And sharing those things lets in a crack of light, perhaps – opens a conversation, reassures someone else they’re not alone. The friends and family who love and support you, in the cliché terms, – in sickness and in health, in good times and bad – the ones you are able to be most authentic with – are the ones you should keep close.

Our job as writers – despite the pressures of increasingly shallow and shiny social media – is not to present a perfect façade, but to crack ourselves open a bit – to let both the light and the dark co-exist together. That seems to ring especially true near the coldest and darkest day of the year, also one of the world’s most celebrated holidays. Festivals of light, renewals of hope, narratives of rebirth and redemption – these are all the more necessary because we live in an imperfect and broken world, in mortal bodies.

Science Poetry Gift Books! And writing for ghosts

Thanks to the folks at the Lofty Ambitions blog for including my book on the five science poetry books to buy as gifts for the holidays! I’m honored to be in wonderful company with poets like Tracy K. Smith and Sandra Alcosser – go check out the list!

I’m a little late on writing about this (lots of doctor and dentist appointments in the last week…) but I wanted to make a little comment on the essay On Pandering that was published up at Tin House.

It made me think about the audiences we write for, acknowledged and unacknowledged. Are we writing for ghosts? Claire Vaye Watkins writes that she has written consciously for an audience of white males, who still sort of rule the literary world, a world where sentimentality is the ultimate sin and everyone wants to be Franzen or Hemingway, to be included in the “literary canon.”

It made me think about who I write for. When I got my Master’s Degree, I literally had no creative writing teachers who were women or people of color – they were all white males with a somewhat formal bent. Did that influence my poetry or who I tried to become as a writer? I think what had more influence on me was working with younger kids in volunteer work, because I remember trying to write a kind of poetry that might be interesting to younger people who mostly didn’t read poetry, who played video games and read comic books – and the result was Becoming the Villainess.

Since then, I got an MFA where I had women mentors as well as male ones. I’ve even taught at an MFA program myself, where I (hope) I encouraged wide and diverse reading.  I’ve been published by mostly smaller publishers, and I’ve never been reviewed in the New York Times – I think in a way I’ve been okay with writing somewhat out of the mainstream, being feminist, or speculative, or super-science-y, or whatever would take me out of the running to be acceptable to the white male invisible ghosts out there who decide what is or isn’t acceptable or literary or whatever. Has it hurt not to win the big book prizes, or get reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly? Of course! But I don’t think I would change what I write to gain approval of an invisible set of judges. I’m not really haunted by ghosts. My literary heroes (and heroines) – Margaret Atwood, Dana Levin, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux – all sort of stand out and have their own styles and quirks and that’s the reason I think I was drawn to them. They’re not afraid to be angry or emotional or funny or try something different, and they’ve all found audiences and even acclaim eventually.

Anyway, it’s an interesting essay that makes us think about who we are really writing for, and why, and is that authentic? Is that truly us? Does our writing really represent us or what people expect us to be?

Black Friday Weekend Poetry Special!

Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We had a peaceful Thanksgiving with roasted duck and chicken (duck was much more popular!), gluten-free cornbread stuffing with duck and fennel, maple-roasted root veggies, cheesy mashed potatoes with a hidden moat of green peas, veggies with honey-mustard dip, sugared cranberries, and for dessert, delicata squash cheesecakes and cranberry meringue pies, celebrated with Glenn, my little brother, and his wife. It was nice to have family to celebrate with – and given how sick we’ve been recently, that both Glenn and I actually felt pretty healthy on the big day! We watched a little MST3K Turkey Day marathon and a little football while we decorated the tree.

It’s Black Friday! Have you considered poetry gift shopping? Just for Black Friday weekend, get your poetry fix!

[POOF!]

Also, consider supporting and checking out your local small presses for more literary gifts! I recommend Two Sylvias Press, Mayapple Press, Steel Toe Books, and New Binary Press, as well as Moon City Press!

 

Giving Thanks in the Middle of the Storm

Thanksgiving is coming with accompanying storms—we’ve been cold here in Seattle, and it’s getting colder, and bringing some wind, rain, and even snow. We’ve had bad news from family and friends, and missed meetups for readings, parties, editing, and workshopping. We haven’t really been able to celebrate my good news with friends and family, or even just quietly at home—we’ve been surviving, getting by. It seems I almost always get good poetry news when I’m totally unable to really appreciate it—I remember getting the good news about the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize right after getting out of the hospital from a lung infection, after our propane tank had been repossessed (due to our landlord’s sloppiness with his records) so we had no heat despite being super sick, and I think that was also around Thanksgiving.

Still, we’ve started decorating, we’re bringing in cheese and cranberries and flowers, prepping for the holidays, despite.

The last week (or two) I’ve been nearly paralyzed with worry about my husband, sicker than I’d ever seen him from life-threatening complications from a colonoscopy but who is slowly recovering, then I was whacked with a really nasty flu—all the things, 102 fever, aches, stomach and upper respiratory stuff, the whole shebang—then the terrorism news pounding a dreary beat on every news station. Yeah, that’s been the kind of fun we’ve been having.

Today I wasn’t totally recovered, but I decided to try to go for a walk in the bright sun (despite the chilly – 45 degree, which for Seattle, is pretty cold) and spotted towhees flittering around and even a baby rabbit eating grass beneath leaves. I finally motivated myself to send out some poems from the upcoming book, Field Guide to the End of the World, out to magazines. I watched on Twitter had a miraculous upset when the #BrusselsLockdown hashtag became a place where Brussels citizens posted picture after picture of triumphant kittens—in Darth Vader costumes, flying with fairy wings through rainbows, even some bouncing penguins – virtually overcoming the nastiness, paranoia, and political rants that usually punctuate Twitter. It was quite silly and inspiring.

It’s a sign that we do not have to be defeated by bad news, by fears, by anxiety. Even if I’m having anxiety dreams every night these days, wishing for health, peace, comfort, and love, all those holiday promises. This is a picture of me and Glenn goofing around at local garden superstore Molbak’s with a Christmas display of big top stuffed animals for some reason, because sometimes we have to give thanks and face darkness with a little bit of silliness. Hey, there aren’t flying kittens, but there are stuffed penguins and a fake stuffed animal circus!

Moon City Press Book Award Winner – Field Guide to the End of the World

Good news after a month full of pretty bad news – I just found out I won the Moon City Press Book Award with my fifth book, Field Guide to the End of the World.
My next book! Moon City Press! I’m very excited. (Plus, this is the first book of mine that’s won a book contest! And had no footnotes! Coincidence?)
This book is a light-hearted look at the end of the world. It will be out in November 2016.

Here’s a poem from the book to give you an idea, and is also maybe appropriate for the news going on around us right now, originally published in Redactions:

Epilogue: A Story for After

I want to tell you a story about how we survived the end of the world. Crouched around a dying fire, I illustrate with shadow puppets the old, beat-up van, the velocity of water and sky, the unnamable odds against us. What really sells it? The way the ending goes on forever, moon ebbing closer to the mysterious dark, its craggy face calling out, the skies scattered with falling stars. The way objects are nearer than they appear. You next to me, and I remind you – here is where we used to be, here is where we are. I draw a line in the dirt with a fork and draw a picture – a house made of a square and a triangle, a single daisy in the yard, and two smiling stick figures. This is what we dreamed of, the day we awaited has arrived. There are no more shotguns or dusty trails lined with diseased corpses. A ship arrives on top of a mountain, heralded by doves; an airplane lands on another planet, seatmates dazed by the lack of gravity. We might teach the dragons to dance, learn the alchemy of soil again, rebuild libraries with tales of fantastic voyage. All I need right now is you, the simple weight of your hand, the warmth of your breath, and this last cup of coffee to tell me – we are miraculous.

Poems from the book are upcoming in issues of Mythic Delirium and Front Porch, too!

Thanks again to Moon City Press and its editors – I’m delighted.

Looking for Light, Thinking of Paris

This week has been dark, I’m not going to lie. Here in Seattle we’ve been in the midst of a huge five-day storm, complete with thunder, wind, streams flooding, and an immense amount of cold rain. My husband’s been in the hospital and I was worried about whether or not he would recover without dangerous surgery.

And then, the Paris attacks. So many of the victims were young; the venues chosen for attack were places where many young people hung out. I was only 15 when I went over to Paris as an exchange student, and fell in love, returning ten years later with my husband. My infatuation was with the art, the parks, the way of life, and the people (yes, the French can be as gracious and welcoming as can be) But the thing that Paris has always been known for is its light. I included the Arc de Triomphe instead of the Eiffel Tower because I wanted to remember that Paris has been through a lot of wars – founded, the story goes, by Jeanne D’Arc during a seemingly unwinnable war with England, slated for destruction by Hitler – and yet, Paris still stands.

parislights

I’ve been reading the Twilight Zone stories by Rod Serling along with Ray Bradbury – for research, on a project I’m working on, but it seemed strangely appropriate for this time when people are scared of the end of the world, where distrust turns people against each other (just read “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street.) The end of the world was always in the mind of these two writers, whether from nuclear war or “Midnight Sun” or alien invasion. The method didn’t matter – the thing at the heart of these stories is our human reactions to the end, to desperate times. Do we turn violent, paranoid? Do we try to comfort one another with art?

One day amid the storms I took a ten minute walk alone in a brief minute of sunlight and managed to snap a hummingbird feeding at a stand of red flowers, still amazingly in bloom here in Mid-November. Does this fix sorrow and anger? No. But I hope it gives some hope that beauty abides, that light will return.

 

Eventful Week and Trying Times, Goodreads Semifinals, and Flipping Roles

It’s been an eventful week since I last posted – my husband went through emergency dental surgery, then we found a great house in Issaquah then bid on and lost it, then my husband’s supposed-to-be-uneventful first colonoscopy turned into a nightmare overnight – he developed a perforation or abscess just from taking the prep mixture, and had to be hospitalized. In fact, I’m still watching him to make sure he doesn’t need emergency surgery.

Luckily my little brother and his wife came to visit in the hospital, and helped replenish our clear fluid supply from the grocery store and pick up his array of meds from the pharmacy. You don’t realize how much you need help until these things happen. Just in the last two days I’ve thrown out my back, messed up one of my ankles, and my upper respiratory illness that I’d finally fought off came rushing back. Flipping the roles on caretaker and patient reminds you that caretaking is hard! I think there should be a charity that helps people with cooking and cleaning, especially, while a family member needs full-time care, short-term or long-term. Wouldn’t that be nice? Anyway, playing nurse has put a bit of a cramp in my reading and writing, but there was lots of nice news this week, including…

My mother made me aware this morning that The Robot Scientist’s Daughter made the Goodreads Best Book of the Year semifinals! You can do me a favor and vote for it (and your other fave small press books) here at this link:

https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-poetry-books-2015

I also may have gotten some other good news I can reveal soon! Mysterious…

 

November – Goodreads, Acceptances, and NaNoWriMo for poets?

Hope you all had a happy Halloween! I’ve been sick (cough, sneeze, cough) and the time change – yes, now it gets dark at about 4:20 – always throws me off a few days.

But the good news is, after a whole month of many rejections, I had two acceptances of a total of five poems right at the beginning of November, which cheered me up and also encouraged me to try my own poet version of NaNoWriMo – where I write something for twenty minutes every day of November. So far I’ve got a couple of poems out of it and some various essaylike stuff.

It has been mostly cold and dark, but I’ve been looking for signs of beauty even in our dark November days – here’s a rainbow from a rainy Sunday and some Anna’s hummingbirds, who have been haunting our feeders with some fervor!

I rented some movies from Redbox to watch tonight and hope to get some poetic inspiration from – Pixar’s Inside Out and the David Foster Wallace movie The End of the Tour. A nice night – the high today was in the forties, the sunset was at around 4 PM, so we’ve got to start planning cheerful activities to the nights don’t seem soooo long. But having a little bit more nighttime does seem to lend itself to more reading and writing – I’ve been reading Laura Hall’s Speak (linked short stories about AI, among other things) and Dani Shapiro’s Still Writing for inspiration. All this will take our minds off the somewhat depressing househunting, as well.

And I hate to ask, but if you guys are on Goodreads and you could go here (https://www.goodreads.com/choiceawards/best-poetry-books-2015) and type in The Robot Scientist’s Daughter at the bottom of the page as a write-in vote, I would really appreciate it!

Anyway, happy November! And let me know your own anti-gloom writing and reading tricks and tips!

Halloween Poems – Intro to Teen Witchcraft and Intro to Teen Girl Vampires! Plus Moon City Press and Other Fall Poetry News

Happy almost Halloween! This year I’m giving you two poems about pop culture depictions of young women – witches and vampires! (And thanks to Atticus Review and Hobble Creek Review, who first published these two poems…)

Introduction to Witchcraft

Always these young women in search of power,
their eyes rolled back in their heads, midriffs exposed.
Always some girl with a candle in a dark room –
and poof, her face brightens as she achieves
some moment of bliss. The raindrops around her freeze

in midair, the wolves stop baring their fangs, and for a moment
the young girl marvels at her own invincibility.
But then it’s fire, fire, always someone with a stake or a knife
ready to do her in. She is a spark about to go out.

Introduction to Teen Girl Vampires

turn feral while defending their human boyfriends,
harmless and blond in Varsity jackets and crewcuts.
These girls just want to be loved, and fed,

in that order, and can we blame them? A nurse
here or there won’t be missed, or the guy playing
“second policeman.” Bram Stoker equated blood and sex,

Mina chaste and clever while hunting her Dracula down,
his bite awaking impulses that ignited and were ignored.
These days, teen vampire girls enjoy sex

with abandon, tossing lovers around like tree limbs.
These days, the girl doesn’t succumb to the monster,
she is the monster, teeth gleaming in the moonlight,

coquettish limbs and curls masking superpowers.
Oh, she still wants to be the prettiest girl at the prom,
and perhaps she mourns some future idea

of motherhood. But men line up for the promise
of her bite, her blood. And she has nothing to fear;
she cannot be broken, tarnished by age, her heart

impenetrable to anything except for that wooden stake.

How have you been? For me, it’s been a remarkable month for rejections, except for the good news from Moon City Press that my apocalypse manuscript is one of eleven finalists there. I also got the AWP schedule for my “Women in Speculative Lit” panel, which is scheduled for Friday afternoon (which is good news because I am useless before noon!) In the next few days, I’m visiting with a poet friend and her daughter, going to a fancy party for a mentor’s 80th birthday party, and of course, celebrating Halloween! So it’s going to be a social next few days! I’ve also been trying out some art supplies – oil pastels, alcohol ink artist’s markers, and watercolor pencils – I have very limited art skills, but it’s very relaxing and it kind of gives you good creative brain waves. The house hunt has been taking its toll, and it looks like we’re going into the holiday season as renters, with no new home on the horizon. At least I have a stack of pumpkins to celebrate with (from our many trips to the local pumpkin patches – that’s one nice part of living close to a few ruralish areas!)

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall GaileyJeannine 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.

Connect with Me

Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Tumblr Pinterest Amazon Wikipedia Email
Copyright © Dandelion by Pexeto