Best Horror of the Year, Mid-American Review, and Cheer up, it could be worse, the joke

First, some good news. In the last two days I’ve received two lovely contributor copies, one of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthology, in which I have a poem, “Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales.” This is a great, eclectic collection of speculative writing, even if you’re not the typical horror fan.

The other is the spring 2014 issue of Mid-American Review, in which my poem, “Every Human is a Black Box,” appears. This is especially exciting for me because I sent there for years, getting nice encouraging rejections, and it was one of the first literary magazines I read and sent to (one of the only ones available in Cincinnati bookstores back in the 90s.) Loved reading through the rest of the issue – Mid-American Review is consistently great.

You know how I was talking in my last post about family and anxiety? You know that old joke? “Someone told me, “Cheer up, it could be worse!” So I cheered up, and sure enough, it got worse!” Well, after all the worrying about my little brother in Thailand, the Santa Barbara shootings, etc,  my very health-conscious mother-in-law went into sudden kidney failure a few days ago. We can’t figure out a cause except for a recent course of Celebrex and years of NSAID use, which, FYI for your older parents with arthritis, can sometimes cause kidney failure, especially in older folks whose kidneys don’t handle toxins quite as well as they do when you’re young. And kidneys aren’t the kind of organ that’s easily fixed. Asking continued prayers and good thoughts for Sally, a very sweet sort of mother-in-law, who is going in for more tests in a few days. She was in the hospital, now she’s out with apparently better blood work, but we are still worried. It’s especially hard on Glenn to be so far away from his mom (his brother is in Cincinnati, so that at least is comforting) right now, and we’re trying to help her understand the doctors and the lab work as much as we can over the phone.

I’ve also been laid up with a sprained ankle and mystery virus, which have caused me to read a lot but not feel very productive. I’m hoping to bounce back soon, otherwise I’m going to go crazy – we’ve had all this nice weather, all this stress, it all just begs for long walks and writing! Neither of which I’ve been able to do.

Stay tuned for links to a new poem in Anti-, as well as my first somewhat snark-ish review in The Rumpus. I feel very ambivalent about writing anything negative about another poet’s book, especially a female poet whose other books I really liked, but…well, you’ll see when the link to the new review goes up. (Added: the link to the review.)

Thailand, Author’s Notes, and Query Letters

I spent most of this last Memorial Day weekend, frankly, trying not to think about bad news. My little brother is in Bangkok while they declared Martial Law, promptly had a military coup, and now have suspended the constitution. The misogynist shooting in Santa Barbara prompted strong responses from me, but I tried not to engage with trolls on Facebook and Twitter about it, mostly (though a truly horrifying number of men think its totally appropriate to kill women for not giving them sex on demand – just see the #yesallwomen tag..) Plus I managed to sprain an ankle and run 101 fever for five days last week. So I was a little slowed down (possibly from the Skagit conference? I’ve got to watch overdoing…)

And then I spent hours researching my own past as well as all of nuclear history to write this author’s note for my next book, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” I interviewed my Dad on stories I remembered from my childhood about his work and read papers and sections of books like Atomic Accidents and watched documentaries. Not much fun to watch what happens to butterflies who eat houseplants from Fukushima, for example, or ponder exactly which of your medical problems might spring from radioactive exposure in your youth – but both things seem important to the book. (Flannery O’Conner railed against the difficulty of writing an author’s note for Wise Blood and now I see why! They are very difficult! You want to include enough of a clue about your own reasons for writing the book, enough of the history and science of the subject matter to make it understandable, but you don’t want to talk down to the audience…it’s a tightrope walk!)

Anyway, after several nights of bad sleep, anxiety dreams about death and not much peace or productivity, I decided to try the “taking my mind off it” strategy of seeing a movie – in my case, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” which was fairly enjoyable except for the total lack of attention paid to the state of robotics in 1973, which I happen to know something about (see previous paragraph) plus I noticed entire sections ripped off of other movies/shows (particularly a sequence exactly like a similar sequence in The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s The Wish, and time-travel stuff that reminded me strongly of Charles Wallace in Swiftly Tilting Planet and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight series.) Oh well. Besides my small disturbances, the movie was great fun and even had some hope/emotional resonance, I thought, which is pretty good for a comic book movie. (Also, I watched five trailers for comic book movies to come..not one of them featuring a female comic book superhero. Come on, Wonder Woman movie! Or Scarlet Witch! Or Black Widow? You dudes in Hollywood know Hunger Games wasn’t a one-time aberration in movies, right? That we actually want to see strong female leads in action movies? Oh well…)

To combat my non-productivity, I did manage to write two pages of the author’s note (which will need to be edited down later,) a few pages on my “medical memoir” project and…even more bravely…re-wrote a query which I may or may not send out to agents about the book. Any agents out there reading my blog really excited about a medical memoir project? 🙂 Get in touch!

Anyway, I hope your week was filled with peace, health productivity, and much less anxiety than I had this week. May your loved ones be safe, may you stay healthy, may your writing flourish! That’s my Memorial Weekend wish!

 

Skagit River Poetry Festival Report, Mark Doty on Routines

sunsetatskagit2014This year’s festival got off to an interesting start when the fundraising dinner they held on Thursday night began with me sitting next to Robert Hass, his poem and my poem from the anthology next to each other on beautiful broadsides at each place setting. Let me tell you, there’s no way to make you feel humble like sitting next to a former US Poet Laureate. But the good news is we had plenty to talk about, including Japanese translations, our favorite Japanese current literature (I was able to tell him about Monkey Business, the contemporary Japanese journal Roland Kelts works on, which he was really excited about and had never heard of) and one of my former UC professors that Robert told me he really admires. On the other side of me sat visual artist Fritha Strand, who live painted during the evening readings, quite a cool spectacle, and of course I love artists, so that was great too. (Kelli snapped this pic so you could see how happy I was to get my book signed by Robert Hass – literally I looked up for a second and flash!) j9hass2014

I loved meeting Blas Falconer, who was so accomplished and had a great warm, intuitive personality, and seeing Kwame Dawes and Mark Doty read again, talking religion and language with Emily Warn, and discussing women and monsters with lovely Canadian poet (who also happens to look like a Disney princess, but cooler) Rachel Rose.
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The panels and readings went as well as they could (I think!) and I was surrounded by old friends at the festival too. (Pictured: Kelly Davio, Rachel Rose, Lana Ayers, Kelli Agodon, Susan Rich, Oliver de la Paz, the top of Robert Hass’ head,  and sunset view from our B&B.)
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Some of the highlights of the weekend for me included wildlife sightings: seeing three otters flipping around logs in the river, getting startled by a series of herons who look and sound like ghosts at night flying right up to us and landing as we walked along the river at night, lots of close-ups of white-headed sea eagles, deer and quail crossing the street. La Conner was just beautiful, showing off with sunny weather and iris fields and startling sunsets and mild evenings of river time.

Last night at the final reading of the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Mark Doty started a poem by talking about how “wildly creative people need their routines – where they get their morning coffee, where they get their haircut, where they take their daily walk – to produce creative work.” And as I’m settle back into my house and my routines, I realize how true that is, how no matter how much fun I have being extroverted and running from panel to reading to dinner while I’m at an event like this, it is always nice to come home to my little townhouse, my own little bed, my cats, the hours of alone time.

Skagit River Poetry Festival – Where I’ll Be

Off to the Skagit River Poetry Festival in La Conner, WA, on a beautiful sunny afternoon in the Pacific Northwest.

If you want to see me there, you can catch me at:
–Saturday – 1:30-3:00 Festival of Poets reading
–Saturday 3:30- 4:45 Phyllis L. Ennes Poets reading
and I’ll be otherwise hanging around causing mischief! (Doing a high school student panel on grief and healing Friday morning  that I hope will be helpful too, so wish me luck on that! And staying healthy for three whole days!)

The tulips won’t be up anymore, but we might get a peek at some iris fields…Hope to see some of you there!

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Wisteria, New Genres, Skagit Poetry Festival, Mulling Medical Results

wisteria2014  Starting out a post with a picture of blooming wisteria from Seattle’s Japanese garden. It’s been a thoughtful couple of days as I’ve processed the MRI results (the good news – it doesn’t look like MS, and the lesions haven’t spread. The bad news – it looks like an autoimmune disease is attacking my white matter. Which means back to more autoimmune tests…) I’m thinking about just taking a break from tests for a while. You can only take so much testing at a time. (On the plus side, I have a surprisingly healthy spine for a forty-one year old!) The other thing I know for a fact from my twenty years of experience with autoimmune problems: autoimmune problems are made worse by stress, and taking it easy on myself – resting, spending time in nature, eating right, being happy – sometimes causes intractable symptoms to ease up. Hence, the trip to the gardens.

It also made me think about writing some creative non-fiction about all the medical experiences I’ve had, kind of giving them a narrative and an order and a way of weaving them together with my life story to make a memoir-y sort of thing. I’ve read a bunch of medical memoirs (including, most recently, Siri Hustvedt’s The Shaking Woman, which was curiously unsatisfying, as she spends most of the book (spoiler alert!) convinced her seizures are due to, of all things, a kind of hysteria, and it takes until the last chapter for her to go to the neurologist and get her MRI, which reveals nothing.) It’s challenging to tackle a new genre, but you don’t find out what you can do until you try to do it, right? I’ve written a few short stories, so creative non-fiction short pieces can’t be too far behind…

I’m also gearing up for the Skagit River Poetry Festival, starting this Thursday evening and going through Sunday, where I’ll be talking on two panels. It’s a very laid-back poetry event, generally, in the charming small town of LaConner, WA, with lots of nice poet types. I have my handouts ready and books packed up. I’m looking at some bright sides: I’m not in a wheelchair, or even walking with a cane, right now, so the festival should be a little easier for me physically than this type of thing has been in the previous five years. And any three days dedicated to poetry and poets has got to be fun, right?

Leaving you with this peaceful image, another from the Japanese garden:japanesemay2014

A New Review of Unexplained Fevers, MRIs, and a new favorite author – Siri Hustvedt

Thanks to Julie Brooks Barbour and Barn Owl Review for this excellent new review of Unexplained Fevers: http://www.barnowlreview.com/reviews/gaileyfevers.html.

I have to say, I am grateful for each and every review, because as a reviewer, I know how much time and energy goes into each one. And I’m grateful to journals that still publish reviews!

Had my two-hour brain and spine MRI on Saturday; the tube shook during parts of it, and then the floor of the tube heated up. I asked the tech about it, and she said “Sometimes the coils overheat when we do the whole spine.” Aha! Good to know. Well, that didn’t make my fear of MRIs any better. But now it is done, at least hopefully, for a whole year. I find out my results on Thursday, (more neural lesions or spine lesions would be bad news, anything else is basically good news) but I’ve already been able to look at my MRI on my computer, you can see the outlines of veins and muscles and bones. It’s quite fascinating.

I’ve been reading a book, The Blazing World: A Novel, that has quite taken my breath away, in the manner of a classic A.S. Byatt or Margaret Atwood, all about feminism, female artists in the art world, art world biases towards the young and male, art world hoaxes, phonies, and masks – a faux anthology with different POVs – an academic art critic, the artist’s children and boyfriends, a professor of aesthetics, and the artist’s own hyperbolic (?) journals – and it manages to do everything with a subtle undertone of irony, making direct observations that ring so true to me as a middle-aged female writer but refusing to take away any of the layers around sexism and agism – did the main character, an artist who finds fame after her death, merely take herself out of the game too soon in her mid-fifties, before resorting to her male masks? Did she refuse to step into the limelight because of her father, husband, children? Is she, in fact, the hysterical monster that so many art critics assumed her to be? It’s been a long time since I’ve encountered as complex, unlikable, and intelligent a female character as Harriet Burden in any book at all, but I especially love that the character is so closely aligned the prototype of just my kind of female writer  – ambitious, misunderstood, prone to sympathizing with Frankenstein. I fell in love even more with the author when I picked up her memoir, The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, about the author’s sudden and disturbing onset of neurological symptoms in middle age. Yes, I would like to have tea with Siri Hustvedt very much. Except her name makes my dyslexia nervous.

After visiting with my oldest brother last week, I was thinking about the things we think make us unique, the things that color our vision. My brother and I are both dyslexic and partially color-blind, for instance, and I wonder about what sorts of colors we’re not seeing. (He jokes that he’s “gray/gray” color blind, a great joke!) For years I wore blue and purple together, thinking they matched, and I’ve never been able to write down a phone number correctly, or a credit card number. My bones and joints are hyperflexible, my collarbone popping in and out of joint at the slightest provocation these days. How, now, with my knowledge about my newly dysfunctional brain – a motor skill dropped here, maybe the ability to read music there – do I proceed? Will I remain myself if I lose my memories, my abilities? This should, after all, be inspiring me to write more – but instead, I remain quiet, waiting, listening. Perhaps I am shoring things up, keeping them to myself, watching them to see if they are changing.

Waterfalls, Recovering from Family Visits, Hot Weather, and Rejection Manifestos

Well, that’s it – I’m another year older, my oldest brother and sister-in-law are back home in Tennessee, and we are recovering from the visit – you know, laundry, grocery shopping, sleep – and reveling in the unexpectedly warm weather. Yesterday it was 80; today it was 88. It’s a great time to visit a waterfall – that’s what we did for my birthday, visit Snoqualmie Falls and Ollalie State Park, home to a smaller but still forested and beautiful waterfall. The drive up always makes me feel at home – driving into the snow-covered faces of mountains dotted with pine trees, the roar of the water, the blooming azaleas, rhododendrons and dogwood along the side of the road. (My brother still lives in Tennessee, where I grew up – and he said this waterfall visit was his favorite thing he did the whole eight days he was here. It made him feel at home!) There are the falls, and Salish Lodge in the background (you may recognize it from the credits of Twin Peaks!)

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Poetry month is over, my birthday is over, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and relax, at least until the Skagit Valley Poetry Festival in a couple of weeks! So what to do with this nice bit of downtime? Michael Schmeltzer, friend and editor of River & Sound Review, has a rejection manifesto here. Since rejection is a big part of being a writer (at least, being a published writer) I think it’s worth talking about. Especially when you first start out, it can be really discouraging when you get, say, seventeen rejections for every one acceptance. But the truth is, it happens to everyone. And remember: encouraging rejections, with comments or asking you to send again, mean you should actually send again. (Something I didn’t do when I was starting out.) You can read more of my thoughts on rejection here.

On my birthday, I got a couple of phone calls from friends and family, my brother took us out to a cool Puerto Rican restaurant/dive bar (or the closest thing to a cool dive bar in Redmond) called La Isla, and I sold one book and got invited to be on an AWP panel. All in all, not a bad way to turn a year older! Birthdays! They always make me wonder about what I’m doing, where I’m going, all that existential crap. I don’t have it all figured out yet, which can be frustrating. But maybe I’m on a good path. I hope so.

Writer’s Digest Poem-a-Day Challenge Judge Today – and Playing Tourist at Pike Place Market

Today is April 27, which is the day you can go post a poem at the Poetic Asides blog for their PAD challenge and I get to read the poems as the day’s judge! I’m very excited about the project. Check it out here! They have a poetry prompt for the day as well, in case you need it, and it’s very appropriate…Write a monster poem! Dragons, zombies, vampires…my kind of poetry! Here’s my own “Zombie Stripper Clones”-inspired poem, “They Are Not Regenerating:”

They Are Not Regenerating

We are not zombies, thrown into a pool
of dubious origin and coming back beautiful
but decaying
unsure of how to live – pretending to swim,
eat yogurt like regular girls.

We are not clones, despite being drawn to specifications
(36-26-36) and bearing bouffants and bikinis
we might hack each other to pieces
but we are not confused about our identities

(living or not living) we continue
in this shape we were given
our cells cannot regenerate and the scientist
names us “Dead.”
We are not regenerating we cannot reproduce ourselves we cannot be anything
but the fulfillment of your fantasy, flesh-eating or not.

It’s two days from my birthday as well (a birthday this year I’m not anxious to celebrate for some reason.) I’ve had continuous hosting problems eating up all my spare time, which is a drag; on the non-drag side, I’ve had my brother and his wife visiting. Yesterday was a sunny 55-degree spring day and we went around Pike Place market, which I guess I hadn’t visited in a while, because I didn’t remember there being a giant Ferris wheel there…when did they put that up? And I swear there were new vendors, although all my old reliable favorites – the sweet white-haired beekeeping honey lady, the Hmong grandmothers with their spectacular bouquets, the delicious hazelnuts, fruit stand vendors  enthusiastically gathering up sweet snap peas and giant Washington apples – were there too. Anyway, having family visit always makes you re-examine your home with new eyes. Yes, I guess it is beautiful here. It’s good to remember. (Below: at Pike Place market with my brother, sister-in-law, some flowers, and a statue of a pig for some reason…)

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Happy Poem-a-Day-ing!

It’s National Poetry Month – Do You Know Where Your Poems Are?

I admit I’m doing a bit of catching up – my host was down for a few days due to server issues, so I’ve been setting up a new hosting system, I lost a couple of days to just resting after the tulip adventure (detailed in the last post) and I’m also getting ready to host family, so I’ve been cleaning and setting up. And where is the poetry in all of that? Good question! I’ve written a few poems, but nowhere near a poem a day. How about you?

Speaking of poems a day, I’m going to be a guest judge for the April 27 Poem a Day Poetry Challenge via Writer’s Digest. Have you heard of it? If you are picked, you get to be in a real anthology and everything. It’s all very exciting. They have a different judge every day, so if you haven’t entered yet, you should!

I’d also like to give a quick shout out to Serena of Savvy Verse and Wit for mentioning me in her “Poetry Has a Genre For You” post on Book Bloggers International. Poetry really does have something for everyone, she’s right – romance, mystery, science fiction.

And also, thanks to C.A. LaRue for nominating this blog for the Beautiful Blogger awards. beautiful_blogger_awardI like all her nominations, so I would add the following:

—Kelly Davio, for her insider information (as the former editor of the LA Review) and her discussions of books and book tours.

—Kelli Russell Agodon, for her cheerful and useful meditations on the writing life

—Rachel Dacus, whose observations on nature and writing have always been inspiring.

—Rebecca Loudon, whose blog posts have inspired more than one poem.

—Kristen Berkey-Abbott, who discusses Christianity, working in an admin role in a university, and poetry in a unique (and frequently updated) blog.

—Karen Weyant, whose own poetry is fantastic and who discusses working-class and Appalachian poetry books.

–OK, it is hard to pick just seven – how about a tie for seventh: Sandra Beasley, who discusses her poetry career in graceful ways, and Sara Tracey, who has been discussing leaving academia after getting her Phd.

Note to Nominees:
If you chose to accept the award, please do the following:
1.  Add the Beautiful Blogger Award logo (found above) to your sidebar.
2.  Thank the person who nominated you and create a link back to his/her site.
3.  Nominate 7 (yes only seven) other bloggers and say a little something about why they inspire you.

Not Tethered to Darkness – How to Survive Hard Times Part II – Tulips, Sunshine, Swan

swansbakertulips20142

Last year I wrote a little bit about how to survive hard times:

https://webbish6.com/you-are-not-tethered-to-darkness-and-other-advice-on-how-to-survive-hard-times/

2014 has been a tough year for me physically, mentally, emotionally. I’ve been feeling short-tempered, limited and frustrated with my limitations, like my physicality is interfering with my goals (which it does.) This year alone I’ve had pneumonia, a super-long virus that’s spurred more autoimmune neurological problems, two types of stomach flu, broken my arm, and sprained a couple of joints.

Yesterday I was up in La Conner, Washington, for the Tulip Festival, and happened to see something I have never seen before – a huge mass of trumpeter swans in flight. It was noisy, astonishing. The trip hadn’t started out in an auspicious manner – I had fallen on my right wrist and sprained it. I felt prickly and tired. But the persistent sunshine (unusual for this time of year in the Northwest,) the shining faces of many kinds of tulips and apple blossoms and daffodils, and then the unexpected spectacle of the swans made me remember why we should make an effort to embrace the things we love, to let the light in, to refuse to sit around huddled in fear. When we make a conscious effort to find things to be grateful for.

Palm Sunday was this weekend, Passover began, there was a blood red lunar eclipse. I’m no spiritual expert, but it seems like a spirit-moving sort of time. I was sitting in church (for the first time in a while) and thinking of all the good things that have happened to me – the things I might not have been able to focus on because of the looming fears, physical troubles, or other types of darkness. This Thursday I’m having another MRI to check for things – scary neurological things, I’ll admit – and that induces a kind of anxiety that is hard to forget about, even in the midst of flowers and white-winged birds.

I’m turning another year older this month, and it’s National Poetry month (both of which I’ll admit have been pushed into the corners of my mind.) Being a writer is a funny thing – so many ups and downs – mostly downs – and uncertainty is part of the job. Being human makes us vulnerable to fear, depression, anxiety, genetic mutations, rare autoimmune problems that attack our systems. I mean, we are really pretty delicate little creatures, we don’t have infinite time, and we have to learn to operate within the spheres we are given. The swans reminded me again that we are not tethered to the ground – at any time we can rise up, unexpectedly shining, and create something memorable, unanticipated, miraculous.

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.

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