In Which it Doesn’t Quite Feel like Summer Yet…

While the rest of the country has been in the throes of a heat wave, we here in the Seattle area have been shivering into our wool coats and fuzzy boots with day after day of cold drizzle. Yesterday evening around 7 PM the sun broke out and it reached almost 70 degrees for the first time in ages. Summer? It barely feels like spring has arrived yet…

I confess I haven’t been spending enough time writing, but lots of time on administrative work for jobs and such. I turned in the grades for my National class; last weekend we had friends over to celebrate the new house, which was really fun (most popular foods: blanched asparagus with white bean hummus and chips with grilled watermelon salsa – the health conscious poets! and most popular drink, pomegranate champagne cocktail;) yesterday I attended my first ever city council meeting, and tonight I’ll go to my first HOA meeting. All over the place, appointments that I’ve put off for yearly doctor and dentist things. I feel too busy to read, even sit still for long, and when I do either something needs to be written up (still in the middle of finishing a book review and my class notes for the Port Townsend Writers Conference) or I need to respond to e-mails or…well, you know the feeling.

I am looking forward to a little more down time, a little more of a creative spark, a little time to wonder and ponder and pay attention to the insistent bird calls, the way the roses have snuck up on us with their blooms.

In Which a Writer Pieces Together Her Life

I realize from talking lately to friends that so many of us, as writers, live fragmented lives…we have writing lives, and work lives, and family lives, and maybe a couple of other lives as well. It’s really hard to keep giving to each different life, keeping them all going. It might well lead to fragmented selves. I’ve been at the task of piecing together a work life and a writing life that leads to some kind of reasonable balance, trying to get organized and focus on my long-term goals. While taking stock of the years from age 19-current, you know that the single stable factor was across all the years, more than the type of job, longer than my marriage has lasted, besides poetry? Volunteering. Mostly with teens and children, at schools, churches, children’s hospitals, writing workshops. I realized that this probably means that what I want to do is have a positive impact on the world, more than making money, more than any specific career goal. It’s something I hadn’t realized about myself. I mean, I need to pay off those student loans eventually, right?

I went through my giant three boxes of literary magazines and realized that some writers I thought I was just now discovering: Karyna McGlynn, for instance, whose book “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl” I reviewed for The Rumpus and loved, or Karen Carissimo, the wonderful perfumer, whose poetry I have literally had in my possession for over ten years in different literary magazines…these writers aren’t new discoveries, I’ve been reading them for years! I thought about how long it takes writers to make an impact. I was thinking I’m going to be on my third book next year and how it still feels like a struggle to even make a little bit of noise in the howling hollow of the poetry book world. The other thing these boxes made me realized is how many of these magazines had a sentimental value: my friend Natasha Moni’s first issue of Crab Creek Review as editor; an issue of a defunct magazine a bunch of my Seattle and blog friends are in; my fellow Pacific U alum friend Felicity Shoulders’ first story in Asimov’s. The first issue of A Public Space, which included a ton of contemporary Japanese lit stuff that helped me research my second book. A six-year-old issue of Paris Review that has an amazing AS Byatt story about contemporary mermaids. Heck, I still have my seventh-grade poetry textbook, with my loopy cursive handwriting notes on the poems.

So it would seem that though I think of myself as a poet who is pretty hard-headed, practical, business-y, (at least for a poet) I’m actually full of sentiment and care-taking impulses. Sometimes our physical possessions indicate something about our real selves, and unpacking forces us to realize this.

The Girl and the Fox, the MFA and tea parties, chronic illness and academia, and other assorted bits

As some of you might now, I have a thing for the connections between women and foxes, and they show up frequently in my poems. But even if you haven’t written a whole bunch of poems about fox-girls, you should drop everything and immediately watch this gorgeous short film with no dialogue called “The Girl and the Fox.” It also reminded me of the new novel, The Snow Child, about a feral girl in Alaska whose only companion is her fox. I love all alternative re-tellings of fairy tales, and I liked the way this one combined the gritty realities of homesteading in Alaska in the twenties with the Russian fairy tale, “The Snow Child,” which I’ve always loved. Thought a little slow at times, I really enjoyed this for the most part, and her delicate balance between aforementioned realistic grittiness and magical realism was pretty interesting!

Two articles were really interesting to me recently. One was from The Millions, called “From Teaching to Tea Parties,” discussed the difficulty of making a living as a writer and teacher with an MFA. The expectations of many of my students at National is that they will get their MFA and automatically get a teaching job that will support them. But the reality is much different. I often hesitate to tell my students how hard the path is for most writers, even writers with books and teaching experience who really hustle. Most of us are cobbling together a living from multiple jobs, most, sadly, less glamorous than high tea and vintage fashion.

The other article tackles the difficult problem of having chronic illness in academia, how it might interfere with the job path and create awkward situations with work. Of course, that would be true in any work or social situation, but I thought it was interesting to examine it through the lens of teaching:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2012/MJ/Feat/good.htm

Sorry to hear about Ray Bradbury’s passing, who was one of my favorite childhood writers; his Illustrated Man still influences the way I think about tone in successful short narratives, and I admit to some compulsive memorization of literature due in part to reading Fahrenheit 425 at an impressionable age. But celebrating new Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, who, yes, already won the Pulitzer, you know, no big deal, and what is she, 45? It’s a lot to live up to! Her book that really won my affection was Belloq’s Ophelia, which contains some really beautiful persona poetry and interesting character/historical storytelling work. Now I will have to check out her new book as well.

I’ve turned in my final grades and am finally able to turn my attention back to my own reading, writing, and submitting, which unfortunately, between the class and the move and other distractions, had gone by the wayside for a while. I wrote a new poem, sent out some work, and am finally turning my attention to the new townhouse’s smaller pleasures: planting in the tiny little outside back plot, putting miniature roses in the window box. Still dealing with the grand space issue in townhouses (where in the heck do you store things? Where can we put towels? Why does the bathroom have no place to put anything? Thank goodness for the handy husband who keeps installing shelving in every possible space…) but all the downstairs bookshelves (all five of them) are now filled – filled! – with books. That’s just the necessary, needed-to-get-to-them-right-away books. The rest of the books are still hiding away. And I think we’ve got all the cardboard boxes out of the downstairs living area, if not from the upstairs OR the garage yet. Thought it’s June and I see blah-blah news about hottest spring on record, we have had nothing but chilly rain here in the Northwest for as long as I can remember. I think we’re going to get some sunshine soon…send some of that warm sunshine our way, rest of country! I didn’t move back to Seattle to get depressed by record rain and cold!

Atticus Review Feature, and I’ve Been Tumblr’d!

Thanks to the Atticus Review, who today is featuring an interview with me and several fresh brand new poems! (Including one inspired by Secret Circle, and another inspired by Algebra!) Check it out!

Tumblr! What is it? I’m still not quite sure. However, I know that right now, poems from my first book have been Tumblr-ing around the internet, and I wasn’t sure if this was important or alarming or what til my friend Ivy Alvarez, dynamite, plugged-in poet that she is, twittered me this morning with this message: “Wow, your poem was blogged on Hello, Tailor! Gurl, that’s major! 🙂 http://hellotailor.tumblr.com/post/24411614478/vega-ofthe-lyre-the-villainess-by-jeannine-hall”
Thanks to Ivy for alerting me to this, and for telling me some more about tumblr. Are you guys using this tool? Has it been good for poetry? Please comment and tell me your thoughts!
I will say this? Since my Tumblr flurry (poems up include, from the first book, “Femme Fatale,” “The Villainess,” “Becoming the Villainess,” and a couple of others…) my Amazon ranks for both books have gone inexplicably under 100K. Which is always good!

My second (and upcoming third) book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is having Open Submissions right now. You should check them out and think about sending your manuscript. But remember, they like longer poetry books!

Unexpected Collaborations…Perfume, Songs, Jewelry, and Jobs

So, I found out I still can’t make my announcement yet. Beginning of next month. Sigh. But I can tell you I really enjoyed meeting with our mayor! He had even read some of my poetry. How cool is that? It makes me feel more civic-minded, that’s for sure…

I was thinking about the unexpected collaborations that sometimes we wonder into, like my work with painter Deborah Scott on my upcoming book, Unexplained Fevers. I didn’t plan for that collaboration to happen; she just happened to ask to meet for coffee one day last year, and we got to talking and here our plan is now, actually happening! Poets and artists, working together.

So when I was up at the Skagit Valley Poetry Festival, I ran into someone working at one of the cute retail shops there that I had chatted with a few times before – she has an advanced degree in Medieval Literature, so we have a lot in common – and she told me about some jewelry she was designing that was sold in the local museum gift shop. She showed me some of her designs, and, as she and I had talked before and she knew a little bit about my writing, offered to do a custom “book pendant” – a tiny book, with usable paper pages, with layers of stamped-and-etched metal as the “binding.” Here’s one of her designs for my “She Returns to the Floating World” book, named after one of my poems:

Isn’t that amazing? Her name is Melinda Erickson, and her work can be found in galleries and gift shops, including the La Connor’s Museum of Northwest Art. And here’s a link to her blog.

Another happy accident has been working with poet and perfumer Karen Carissimo, who contacted me because of a mutual poet friend down in San Francisco. I have a bit of a passion for perfume, as those of you who’ve been following my ramblings for some time might know; my first job out of school with my pre-med degree was managing a small perfumerie in Cincinnati that specialized in hard-to-find European perfumes, so now I have a terrible addiction to difficult-to-find perfumes like Cartier’s Panthere or Caron’s Blond Tabac. Besides being a wonderful writer herself, she’s talented at creating custom perfumes, and through correspondence she’s working on a perfume for me, with notes that belong to my second book – the bright top note of cherry blossom, the coolness of bamboo and peony. Really an amazing honor! 

And of course the experience, which also happened recently in some kind of lucky coincidence, of working with Seattle musician Joy Mills, who created a song out of my poem “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle.” I just loved it. You can see/hear our collaboration here on YouTube: 
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5-Zw9yJ3WY&feature=relmfu

So I was thinking about the opportunities the universe might provide us with, things we might not even think to ask about but that we’ve always wanted…my upcoming announcement has to do with this too, something I hadn’t thought to ask the universe for but something I’ve wanted since I moved to the Northwest thirteen years ago.

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  Melinda Erickson

  melinda.erickson@hotmail.com

Sudden Flurry of New Reviews and a Meeting with the Mayor…

Sometimes, a book can be out for a while, and it can be kind of quiet; then, for no reason, a sudden flurry of book reviews come out! Such is the case for She Returns to the Floating World. Yesterday I received a copy of the new issue of one of my favorite lit mags, The Mid-American Review, to find a wonderful review in the back of the issue.
Then, Galatea Resurrects issue 18 came out, with not just a fab review by Kathleen Kirk but a close reading of one of the poems from the book by John Bloomberg-Rissman.
A banner day!

Though we are still in the middle of cleaning the old apartment and trying to unpack the new townhouse full of boxes at the same time, life continues to spin around – yesterday there was a horrible group of killings in Seattle near the University of Washington, and crime has just generally been up downtown over the past few weeks. It’s so chilling in such a beautiful, laid-back city to have people suddenly murdered in a drive-by or random shooting.

In other more cheerful news, tomorrow, for some mysterious reason, I am going to be meeting with the Mayor of Redmond. I hope I am able to find both a blowdryer and an appropriate suit from the cardboard boxes…And why, you ask? Well, I can announce that…tomorrow!

I Review Plume, Saying Goodbye to C. Dale’s blog, In Between Boxes

Well, we survived our holiday-weekend-move with very few major injuries, so I consider it a success! Never mind I can’t find anything and that our house is a labyrinth of boxes…

My new review of Washington State Poet Laureate’s second book, Plume, is up at The Rumpus:
http://therumpus.net/2012/05/lie-down-patriot-dont-ask/

Super Secret announcement coming soon!

Got my first blurb for the third book, Unexplained Fevers. Nothing could have made me happier this weekend…thanks R.G.!

C. Dale Young says goodbye to blogging after all these years. His was one of the first blogs I read, along with Kim Addonizio’s and Kelli Agodon’s…don’t go anywhere Kelli!

 I was joking that our moving truck was filled with fifty percent boxes of books, twenty percent furniture, and 30 percent kitchen stuff. I’m afraid that might be true. We have two bookshelves Glenn built by the fireplace, plus three Ikea seven-foot bookshelves, and they’re all already full. But the books still surround us! Do I have a problem?

When Poets Do Too Much…

I am operating on about four hours of sleep every night since last weekend. In the last nine days, I’ve been in the middle of renovating multiple projects at the new townhouse as the seconds ticked down to our move-in date this weekend (final projects to be finished this weekend;) I went on an overnight trip to a poetry festival last weekend; this week I guest-taught a class at Cascadia Community College and drove the 6-hours round-trip to Port Townsend to do a reading. Today I packed up the last of our unpacked belongings, an overnight bag for the transitional day, and tried to remember everything you have to do before you move out of a place: cancel utilities, change the address with bills and insurance and all that. Every night I’ve been having anxiety dreams about not getting everything done, for some reason.

My friend Annette and I had a lovely time at last night’s reading in Port Townsend, with the Northwind series. The host Bill was very gracious and I even recognized a handful of people in the audience! A really gracious group to read for, and they always buy books! The weather was just gorgeous, we saw about six deer and all the mountain ranges were visible, and when we went out to dinner beforehand, the waiter remembered me from a reading I did last year at the Writer’s Conference. Hilarious! I do not have the kind of fame where I’m recognized in restaurants often, in case you were wondering. We did miss the ferry going back, so while we left the house at 2 PM, we did not make it home til past midnight. And we had to be at the new house to let in the glass installers this morning at 8 AM. Good times. 

This note is a reminder that we all have an energy bank we draw from, and sometimes we (and by we, I mean I) need to learn when to put on the breaks. For instance, the week you are moving into a new house, perhaps you should not schedule several public appearances where your brain has to work in order for you to be successful. You would think after the thirteen moves in the last fourteen years we would be better at it, the planning, the packing up, the organization…But no. We are just as crazed and disorganized as usual. Oh well! At least we don’t foresee moving again for a few years at least! The wind is crazy outside and our power is flickering on and off, a pathetic fallacy that is echoing my blinking inner energy lights. When I post next time, I’ll be moved in, a real homeowner again, with a park next door and a little garden plot for me to try to attract hummingbirds with. Wish us luck!

Reading in Port Townsend on May 24; Cascadia Community College Class

Tomorrow I’m traveling to the lovely seaside resort town of Port Townsend, WA to read with my friend Annette Spaulding-Convy at the Northwind Arts Gallery. I hope to see you there!

More Notes from the 2012 Skagit River Poetry Festival – with pictures!

Above: Me with the lovely and talented Jericho Brown, Me with Motley Crew including Kelli Russell Agodon, Lana Ayers, and Jared Leising…

SO I am back home safe from the excitement of the Skagit River Poetry Festival in La Conner, Washington once again. There were some wonderful readings yesterday, in particular the reading where every single conference participant read one poem (a great way to see people you missed during the weekend – every conference should do that) and the evening reading with Nikki Giovanni (a revelation – and so beautiful!), Bob Hicok (yes, as funny as advertised, but also more moving that I remembered his poems being) and Marie Howe (whom I already knew I loved.)  Through the festival I got to see old friends (Rachel Rose from Canada for instance) that I usually only get to see at AWP, meet other friends like Marci Ameluxen and Lorraine Healy that I previously only knew by e-mail. And I discovered new poets who live right in my hometown – Karen Finneyfrock, for intance, who has not only a great name for a poet but wrote poems that just really resonated – and had an excuse to catch up with poets and talk poetry during a really busy and stressful time in my life, which is never a bad thing. After stopping by a poetry reading on the way out, I felt really happy we had decided to go despite our need to pack, build things, prepare, work, etc. This festival only occurs once every two years, so you’ve got to seize the day and go when it happens. These events remind me that I’m not just a teacher, I’m a writer, and I like being with other people who care about poetry, an eccentric but lovely crowd.