Minor Disasters and Lost Voices, The Importance of Friend Support During a Plague Year

Songbirds – goldfinch with fountain and sunflower

Minor Disasters and Lost Voices

So, this has been a stressful week of minor disasters – the biggest one being not mine, but my husband Glenn’s. Right after his 50th birthday, he lost his voice. I booked him an appointment with an ENT after he tested negative for strep and covid, and a couple of days ago, we found out the reason for his lost voice – one of his vocal cords is paralyzed. Sometimes this can be fixed by surgery, sometimes not; it can be caused by cancer, benign growths, neurological problems, or even a virus. We’ll get him a CT scan next week to rule out anything scary, I mean, hopefully we rule it out. And then we’ll start figuring out accommodations, like maybe getting an intercom for the house so I can hear him from a room away, or a special microphone for his zoom calls.

In case you’re wondering, the goldfinches seem to me to represent Glenn – he’s blond, and loves to sing and talk, and is suddenly unable to. Hopefully he will get his songbird voice back. It might not be the prettiest voice, but I’ve gotten to be fond of it over 27 years of marriage, you know?

Songbird on sunflower

I am pretty tough when it comes to scary diagnoses for myself, but I was pretty distraught when I heard this. Glenn just got a new boss, he’s in the middle of graduate school, both of which require a LOT of talking clearly over Zoom, and he just can’t. He was so frustrated by his inability to communicate, sing, or even be heard across the room. I’ve written my share of poems about the Little Mermaid’s terrible trade of voice for legs, mostly in relation to losing my mobility periodically due to MS; I’d never written about it from the other side, what you might trade to have a voice. Glenn has a doctor’s note for his, what they are calling, possibly permanent disability. I’m hoping it doesn’t hurt him too much at work or at school; with us, our relationship can weather a whisper, although I grieve for him, because he really loves singing and joking around with others, and he feels very unwillingly-quieted by this new development. I’ve had to take over all phone duties for the house, and try to communicate with his family for him, that sort of thing. Of course, we have text and e-mail, but it’s not quite the same, especially long-distance. So if you’ll send good thoughts for his healing, for his CTscan (that they don’t find anything scary,) and that he has some success with vocal therapy, which might help within a year (the doctor was careful to say maybe on this) I would appreciate it.

Hummingbird in flight

Friend Support During the Second Plague Year

One of the things this week reminded me of was the importance of the support of friends and family during hard times. Nearly everyone I know has had some hardship with mental health this last year and a half, and we are all in need of more kindness, more tolerance, more support. This week I talked with family, friends all over the country, and even caught up in person with one this weekend, all of which helped me and Glenn regain some sense of normalcy with all the craziness.

The whole thing with Simone Biles, who had a very challenging childhood even before she was sexually abused by her US team gymnastics doctor and went on to become the face of the 2020 Olympics, made me think about how even the very best, most talented people are challenged by the past year’s super stress, that a lot more of us are at our breaking point than we might think. I am wishing that Simone gets all the friend support she needs after this very public “failure” or more accurately, “refusal to perform while she wasn’t feeling up to it.”  It’s a reminder that we are more than our performances, and we all deserved to be valued as human beings, not just gymnastics medal winners, or for the things in our past that we’ve accomplished.

I had tea with fiction writer Roz Ray, yesterday, who was just a ray of sunshine, and we talked writing and Glenn even got to talk-whisper a little bit about data science, which is what he’s studying in grad school. It was a nice reminder that life can go on, even with modifications. I guess I feel discouraged and overwhelmed – summer is very tough on my MS symptoms, and dealing with this health crisis of Glenn has left me generally worn out.

I was very much looking forward to starting virtual Breadloaf next week and then my residency in September, which I hope will help inspire my writing and my motivation to work on a new book, but now I just hope both me and my husband are well enough to make it through both and that the Delta covid doesn’t get to us. I’m trying hard not to anticipate the worst, but to be prepared for it, and to have self-compassion as well as trying to practice greater compassion for not just my spouse, but everyone around me. We need to be there for each other more than ever. I’m wishing you all health and happiness. Take a deep breath.

Zoo Visit with Dinosaurs and Red Pandas, Speculative Poetry – Practice and Teaching, and The Importance of Fun for Your Health

Allosaurus, very scary

Zoo Visit with Dinosaurs and Red Pandas

Let me just say two things: I freaking love zoos and I love dinosaurs. If you know anything about me, you should know that these qualities imbue my writing and thinking.  I took a college course during my three-year biology pre-med degree on how to be a zookeeper (a real investment) and seriously considered it as a career (til I found out the starting salary was $24K a year and a zookeeper lost her arm to a polar bear that year.) And I’ve been obsessed with dinosaurs since I was a kid. I love paleontology and also briefly considered studying ancient botany. And growing up around robots, I am frankly in awe of walking, talking dinosaur robots (better known as animatronic dinosaurs.)

So a visit to Woodland Park Zoo was just what I needed after a week of strange insomnia and high anxiety (days with only one or two hours of sleep in a row, which almost felt like no sleep.) Hell yes, I paid extra for the “Dinosaur Experience” and then hung around the red panda cubs (mostly grown now) that I visited in November. It was wonderful to be outside on a serene cloudy day, with so many happy children (kids love dinosaurs, which they definitely should) and I came home, had dinner and slept blissfully for six straight hours. Doing what you love is absolutely good for sleep. And good for your writing. I hadn’t submitted any poems this month, but the day after my visit I submitted to two places.

Glenn with T-Rex model head

Dinosaurs and Red Pandas Are Good for You

Okay, I may not be able to prove that a visit to to a local zoo with animatronic robots will fix your insomnia and boost your will to live. But just look at those pictures of baby dinosaurs and try not to feel joy!

But I stopped to look at a few actual real animals too – herons and penguins, my red panda twins, a sleeping snow leopard. This was one of my few planned outings to public places – I’m still being fairly conservative with my coronavirus risks, but I felt this one was fairly low risk and worth it.

Speculative Poetry – Teaching and Practicing

Fox statue, Woodland Park Zoo

In preparing for today’s Speculative Poetry Class, I learned some things – Zoom classes really require PowerPoints instead of handouts, and there aren’t a lot of resources out there for people who want to teach speculative poetry. It’s considered a niche, though speculative fiction is widely known and widely popular, still. I hope that spreading the word about the class – and hopefully, introducing some poets to the idea that speculative poetry is as old as Gilgamesh or at least the Goblin Market, and not at all strange (even if the subject matter is.) I wanted a few different exercises, which meant I had to try out a form I hadn’t really before – scifiku – and trying to select which poems to teach was hard! There are so many good speculative books of poetry, but to choose only a few poems to represent all of speculative verse? Tough.

Heron among penguins at feeding time

Stress Relief is Necessary, not Optional

At last, I’ll leave you with the thought that during these still very uncertain and fraught times, it’s important to grab joy and try to go do the things you know are life-giving, inspirational. I am very happy to have made a brief foray downtown this week to the zoo (and afterwards the Woodland Park rose garden, just to smell the flowers.) If you get stressed out by something – like I occasionally do by giving Zoom readings and classes, and much more seriously, by the dubious covid comeback that’s constantly in the news – then make sure you schedule yourself some downtime, some self-care, something you enjoy. Don’t continue to push yourself until you break teeth (I’ve broken six this past year and a half) and make yourself miserable. This summer I’m trying to both re-enter “regular life” at a very slow pace and stay cautious and put my own health – including doing things just for fun, as well as things like dentist visits and MRIs – as a priority. It’s a tough balance. I know I can’t stop worrying about some things – and the summer is usually my “down time” because my MS symptoms tend to act up in the heat. But I can choose to do what I can, when I can. And seriously, doing something you enjoy just might be the key to keeping your sleep schedule on track which helps your immunity.

So wish me luck on my speculative poetry class tomorrow, and in relaxing my over-anxious self afterwards. And I am wishing you all calm, peace, poetry, and if possible, fun.

Poetry Salon Reading and Class, Glenn’s 50th, Finches and Sunflowers, Thinking of the Future

Red and Pink sunflowers

Busy Week of Birthdays, Readings and Classes

Happy mid-July! It’s been so busy I’ve barely had time to catch my breath! Last week was my 27th wedding anniversary. Then we had Glenn’s 50th birthday party, I did a 15 year anniversary Zoom reading with Soul food Books, I’m doing another Zoom reading with The Poetry Salon tomorrow (Sunday) and then a Speculative Poetry Class with the Poetry Salon next Sunday. I’ve been working on finding great examples of speculative poetry in all its diversity. It’s good practice for me doing teaching and readings again after a year and a half of pandemic-induced non-activity. speculative poetry and thinking about how best to talk about speculative poetry, what kind of exercises to use, etc. It’s made me start to think about the future, about maybe setting up a writing residency/conference/publishing seminars. I may be disabled but I still want to share what I know with others. This pandemic proved to me that I love interacting with other writers and I missed it more than I thought I would.

Goldfinch with fountain and sunflowers

Finches and Sunflowers

One of the joys of July in the Seattle area is spending the roughly fifteen hours of daylight in nature. Here I’ve been building up my garden with new additions (like I grew some sunflowers from seeds) and I added a solar fountain/birdbath for the birds, and they love it. As you can tell from my pictures, I’ve enjoyed watching the birds drink, flutter through, and dunk their heads underwater. There are some summer activities I’ve yet to do – like going to the Seattle Art Museum for the Monet exhibit, or visiting the animatronic dinosaurs at the Woodland Park Zoo, or visiting some of my favorite art galleries. I’m still not sure what is “safe” or “not safe” for me with the current levels. Even though I’m fully vaccinated, some doctors are saying to stay away from public places. Anyway, I’m trying to find as much joy as I can in between things I “have to” do.

Poetry Salon Reading Sunday

The Poetry Salon Reading and Speculative Writing Class, Plus More Futuristic Thinking

So this Sunday (technically, today) at 2 PM I’ll be doing a Zoom reading (a link to the Facebook event – I think you have to sign up for an e-mail to get the Zoom link) with The Poetry Salon and next Sunday I’ll be teaching a class on speculative poetry (which you can buy tickets for here.)
They’ve posted one of my poems and more info on the speculative class here. And you can go The Poetry Salon’s web site for more info.

Like I said, I haven’t done a class for a while and I’m trying to rework my usual “handout” class plans for Zoom. It should be fun! Maybe I’ll see you there.

So I’m thinking about maybe finding a place where I could do writer’s retreats, classes and residencies in the future, a place that’s accessible – so many residencies aren’t – and in a place that inspires people. Watch this space – I’m out hunting for the perfect writer’s retreat in my spare time. Do I want to start a press, or a journal, or a charity for writers? See? I don’t want to go for crazy ambitions, but I want to do more than I’ve done in the past two years.  I’ve got two more years til I hit 50, and I want to dedicate some time now to figure out where I want to be as a writer by then. Maybe I’ll even have another book or two myself by then!

Anniversaries, Big Birthdays, Birds and Upcoming Readings and a Class on Speculative Poetry!

Glenn and I with lavender at Lauren Ashton Cellars

27th Anniversary and Glenn’s 50th Birthday

So this was a week of celebrations, low-key. Our 27th anniversary we celebrated by listening to music from 1994, the year we got married (Nirvana! Soundgarden! TLC! Tori Amos! Veruca Salt!), dressed up and visited a bunch of local wineries where lavender, roses, trumpet vine and lilies were in bloom, and did a little garden shopping.

Glenn got me chocolates, flowers, and a new eternity ring (rose gold with pink sapphires – so what I would pick for a wedding ring now instead of when I was 21! I was so traditional back then, plus jewelry was boring in the 90s.) I tried to dye Glenn’s hair dark blue, and it came out lavender, and got him a rare orchid. Well, we tried to have a punk rock anniversary, anyway. The couple that dyes together stays together!

Next up is Glenn’s 50th birthday, which we’re celebrating with my little brother and his wife, decorating with all-black decor, and making Blackout Brownies for Glenn’s cake. Glenn doesn’t like to be the center of attention and is a huge introvert, so having any kind of celebration is a big deal. We’ll try to make sure he relaxes a little and at least tries to enjoy his big day.

Swallowtail on purple phlox

Birds and Butterflies This Week: Bushtits, Swallowtails and Hummingbird Showers

This week, I got quite a show – a swallowtail butterfly who visited my phlox, hummingbirds enjoying my new solar fountain, and bushtit action shots (which sounds dirty, but is really cute.) We are lucky that this week hasn’t been too hot, but we’re in an official drought and there’s fire danger already, they’re saying. I’m ready for some of that famous Seattle rain now!

So we put out an extra birdbath with a solar fountain to provide extra water for our hummingbird population, and they love it! I see at least one hummingbird a way splashing through it. Bushtits are an underappreciated but adorable bird, in my opinion, so here’s a picture of a bushtit in flight and a mother bushtit feeding its baby.

Upcoming Reading July 15 and a Fancy Speculative Poetry Class

First I’ll be doing a 15th anniversary reading at Soul Food Books with Annette Spaulding-Convy on July 15 at 7 PM Pacific. Can I believe it’s been 15 years! No! Annette Spaulding-Convy is one of the two editors at Two Sylvias Press and a great poet. Here’s the link for info and to get to the Zoom reading! 

I have an upcoming speculative poetry class at 2 PM Pacific July 25th – only $50 – that you can sign up for on eventbrite.

Here’s the description:

Here’s the link for tickets!  

A Poem “Divination” in the new issue of Shenandoah, Birds, Heat Waves and the Fourth, Good News and Gardening

Bald Eagle

Poem in the New Issue of Shenandoah

Happy to announce that I have a poem in the new Spring 2021 issue of Shenandoah, which also has work by friends and amazing writers like Lesley Wheeler, Ann Fisher-Worth, Erika Meitner, Anna Marie Hong and Lisa Russ Spahr. Here’s a link to the poem but read the whole issue, it’s great. I’m very thankful to be in such a dream magazine with so many great writers.

Here’s a sneak peek at my poem in the issue here:

from Shenandoah Spring 2021 issue

Birds and Heat Waves

It was a brutal week here last week, getting up to 110 degrees in our backyard, almost everyone, including birds and flowers, miserable. I tried to keep the bird watered and the garden watered and called and checked on friends without air conditioning, but it was stressful. The heat makes my MS worse, and I almost fell a couple of times out of nowhere, so that was scary. I have to remember to rest on hot days.

We’ve also got wildfires now in BC, Canada, and the smoke is lingering in the sky high overhead. Many places here cancelled their fireworks shows due to the dry and the heat, but some idiots will insist of lighting off their own fireworks and possibly starting fires. Fourth of July has never been my favorite holiday (smoke! loud noises! asthma attacks from the terrible air quality!) and now with the threat of fires, even less so. Oh well. We’ll hope for the best.

And in the meantime, some pictures of birds (and a Townsend chipmunk) that visited us this week, to cheer us all up. And I’ll post a picture of Glenn and I on the 4th with blue and red hair!

Glenn with blue hair, me with red, Happy 4th with roses and Lake Washington!

Happy 4th and A Bit of Good News

I was thinking about the way we think about good news, and the way we poets are always waiting for good news, and get a lot of rejections, and steel ourselves against disappointment, sometimes so much so that when we actually get this long-awaited good news, we underplay it, to keep ourselves from further disappointment. Isn’t it hard to celebrate? So much easier to expect the worse than to even dare to think about expecting the best possible thing? Is this a writer thing?

And here are some flowers from my garden, a little bit of Seattle in July. In the garden, I expect the deer to come and eat some flowers, and for unexpected plant illnesses to kill some of my favorite plants sometime. I just shrug and go ahead planting different plants and hoping for the best. Gardening is so optimistic – you plant some seeds, and you hope some of the seedlings survive and flower. I planted a bunch of poppy and sunflower seeds last year, and although the didn’t all come up, a lot of them survived and gave me flowers I didn’t have before. If you plant a tree in the wrong place, or with the wrong conditions, sometimes it dies. But if you fertilize, and water, and protect it from predators large and small, eventually, you will probably have a full-grown awe-inspiring tree. Trees make me happy. Flowers do too. Maybe the attitude I have towards gardening should also be the attitude I have towards my writing life.

My Interview with Kelli Agodon in Redactions, Some Scenes of Hummingbirds, Supermoons, and Mt Rainier, 100 plus Heat Wave

Sylvia with Redactions Issue 25

My Interview with Kelli Agodon in the new Issue of Redactions

Happy to have an interview I did for Redactions Issue 25 with poet, friend, and publisher Kelli Russell Agodon about her new book with Copper Canyon Press, Dialogues with Rising Tides, available online and in the new print issue. Here’s a quick quote:

“JHG: You have an interesting philosophy about the attitude of competition and scarcity in the poetry world. Could you talk a little about that?

KRA: I guess I do have an interesting philosophy in that regards – I believe in the poetry world, there is enough for everyone. I reject the scarcity mindset that the field is only big enough for so many of us and only so many can come to play. That’s nonsense, we can always use another poet. And we don’t have to feel threatened by them, that now there will be one less spot for me to publish my poems…Just because a poet doesn’t win a prize, doesn’t mean that their book isn’t changing someone else’s life this very moment or having a profound effect on someone. I have never believed success can be measured in art – people try to measure it based on American beliefs such as “this book is better because it 1) sold more copies 2) won a prize 3) was published by a certain press 4) was featured in a certain journal or magazine 5) got an excellent review 6) made the author earn X number of dollars” and so on. . . . Who said that was success? Who wrote that definition? That’s not my definition of success – my idea of success isn’t built from opinion and numbers.”

Here is a link to read it.

Strawberry Supermoon

Some Scenes of Hummingbirds, Supermoons, and Mount Rainier – and 100 Plus Heat Wave

We’re going to break some heat records in the days coming up, which means probably a lot of people sickened – as a city we’re only 44 percent air-conditioned, so getting up to 109 (!!) on Sunday and Monday is a bid deal here. Let me tell you the many reasons spring and fall are my favorite seasons…I saw as I try to save my flowers from the 102 degree heat today. Even the sunflowers think it’s too much sun!

Since this week has been hot, that means my MS acts up a little more than usual, and I spent more time than usual observing birds and flowers and staying up for the Strawberry Supermoon. I also got a beautiful shot of how clear Mt Rainier was one day. But I haven’t had the energy to do much besides water my garden and take photographs. I’m also anxiously checking my e-mail every night, hoping a note from a publisher will come through on one of the three manuscripts I’m submitting. Not very productive, either. Supermoons always interrupt my sleep and make me anxious. I don’t know why, even though they are beautiful.

A Port Townsend Visit, Happy Solstice, and Appreciating Things While the Sun Stands Still

Me with Discovery Bay garden

A Port Townsend Visit – Poet Friends, Eagles and Seals, and a Change in Perspective

One of my favorite places to visit in the Pacific Northwest is the little, haunted Victorian town of Port Townsend. I even lived there for a year once. Even though Woodinville is beautiful, every once in a while it’s nice to get away and get a change in perspective – and goodness knows after the year and a half we’ve had, we needed one. So we booked a cabin, packed up, and went during a couple of rainy/sunny days. (Rain/sun is the main kind of weather most of the year in Port Townsend.)

One of the wonderful things about Port Townsend is the ocean and the wildlife – so different from the woods and gardens of our home. We saw at least ten seals, several eagles, and tons of deer, including two little fawns. It was odd to go back and find some things changed – an old boat dock at Fort Warden that otters used to love to run across with their pups was torn down, to our dismay, and a roundabout in the road that was never there, plus some ugly development where there used to only be old growth forest. And an old-growth rose bower at Chetzemoka Park had been cut back almost to the root. We’ve only been absent a year or two, and yet…all these changes.

Red Rhododendrons with sunbeam

Another wonderful thing about Port Townsend is that besides offering beautiful views, fascinating flora and fauna, is that several of my friends (and soon, my little brother) live nearby. So I got to have a spontaneous afternoon coffee visit with poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon. We got to catch up on poetry news, then we hiked around a bit, birdwatched, and got rained on multiple times.

We talked about her latest book from Copper Canyon Press, we talked about my projects-in-progress, and generally I was reminded about the positive way that writer friends can help support our dreams and goals. After a year and a half of mostly staying in touch through phone calls, it is especially nice to be seeing people in person. It made me feel grateful.

Glenn and I with ocean overlook

Glenn and I got to visit our favorite spots – Chetzemoka Park, the lighthouse at Fort Warden. We walked on the beach, and were surrounded by walls of yellow lupines, which smelled like honey and salt. We explored around Discovery Bay – the place we stayed had a beautiful overlook among historic cabins. The only thing we skipped were indoor things – no shopping or restaurants this time around, just in case. Visiting Port Townsend was like visiting an old friend – observing things that had closed, or that were still open, or how an old madrone tree had finally disappeared after all the years of clinging to the cliffside. Here’s where Glenn met a coyote on his bike, or where I encountered a white deer. Little things. But it did allow us to appreciate how much the ocean, the trees, just the chorus of frogs so loud at night and birdsong so loud in the morning, can shift perspective. I am always happier when I am close to nature. I don’t have a body that supports most rugged individual sports, but it does allow me, even with MS and all my other nonsense, to get close to seals, and swallows, and deer, and look at the sky overhead, and laugh when it rains on me even when it’s sunny (yes, it’s happening in quite a few of the pictures here.)

Me at Chetzemoka State Park

Happy Solstice!

Well, we have a new holiday – Juneteenth – to celebrate, as well as the Solstice, and Father’s Day. I am so happy to have a President who actually agreed to make Juneteenth a holiday – can’t see that happening with the last guy – a holiday that’s long overdue. As we approach the longest day of the year, as the day lasts long into nighttime, I can appreciate the good things around me even though things aren’t perfect right now. Do I wish I had some things easier, like my health stuff or career stuff? Or that we hadn’t just gone through a year and a half of pandemic (that’s still not over in some parts of the world, or really even all the way here?) Of course. But with the flowers blooming, and feeling thankful for family and friends, and the beauty of the world around me, it’s easy to feel celebratory. Hopeful.

I don’t have all the answers. I’m two years away from fifty, and I’ll be celebrating my 27th year of marriage next month. I’m feeling the years, but also feeling grateful I’ve had so many of them. The sun appears to stop in the sky around the summer solstice, although we know it never really stands still, and neither do we. What does the future hold? Nothing stands still. We just have to stop and appreciate what’s beautiful and good around us, right this minute.

A Stormy Week, Both Weather and Health-Wise; a Few Literary Things to Look Forward To

Black-Headed Grosbeak

A Stormy Week, Weather and Health-Wise

It’s June, or as some on the West Coast say, June-uary, and we’ve had a bizarre week of low and high pressure systems, storms, sideways rain, hail, cold, and wind. On top of this, I had one of my rare migraines with aura that took me out for an entire “day in bed in darkness” followed by a few days of a stomach bug. Fun, right? So, the weather and my health have been equally gloom-inducing. But strangely I have not been feeling as down about my writing life…see below for a few reasons I have some cheer in that department.

Female black-headed grosbeak

So I have not gotten as much done as I was hoping, besides which, it’s not feeling very summery. On the other hand, lots of opportunity to photograph by birds when my headache wasn’t too bad, so I have pictures of Hairy Woodpecker mothers feeding their babies, all kinds of hummingbirds, and black-headed grosbeaks.

Me with sequins and typewriter. This is how I always dress to write!

A Few Literary Things to Look Forward To

But I do have a few literary things to look forward to. I’m working on a speculative poetry class I’ll be teaching online in July. I applied to Breadloaf for the first time since I was a young writer and I had just quit my job to try and be a real writer (but was too poor to afford to go), so I’m going to the all-virtual Breadloaf in August, which I’m pretty excited about – because having this event virtually allows someone like me, with disabilities and chronic illness, to attend. I’m an extrovert who can’t travel and go to as many literary things as she would like, so this is something exciting for me. Maybe conferences will start having a virtual component so those of us who can’t travel easily can still enjoy the cool opportunities, readings and classes – I mean, this year proved we could do it, right?

Then, I’m going to my first residency in a very long time on San Juan Island, one of my favorite places, in September for ten days, where I’m hoping to get to serious work on a new poetry manuscript. There will be foxes and otters and deer and seals and bioluminescent life forms right on the water to help me write, and maybe, if we’re lucky, dolphins and whales. I haven’t been to the San Juan islands in six years, even though it’s one of my favorite places to visit in the state, so I’m really looking forward to this (and crossing my fingers that my body is cooperating with me health-wise that week, and no wildfires.) I’m also feeling a bit more positive about finding a publisher for my book manuscripts. I’m thinking of starting a newsletter, too, pre-book, just to start up another way to outreach. Anyway, hope your June-uary is going as well as possible!

First Butterflies, Sunny Days and Speculative Poetry Picks, Broken Teeth and Meditations on Melancholy

First Swallowtail butterfly of the season, on lilacs

First Butterflies and Sunny Days

I saw my first Swallowtail butterfly this week, and that is a sure sign summer in near. Although I mistrust a string of sunny says, we’ve been trying to make the most of them, getting out to see the early summer flowers and enjoying gardening late with the longer light (til 8 PM now!) Sun can slow me down, as heat makes my MS symptoms act up, and I broke a tooth again this week requiring an emergency dentist trip. So that’s the downside of this week for me.

As people get more and more vaccinated in my area, you see happier people, friendlier faces. I stepped into an indoor farm stand (with a mask) for the first time since the pandemic – so much fun to see the produce in person.

I also am so proud of my planter-based culinary herb garden I started last year – with parsley, chives, pineapple sage, chocolate mint, mojito mint, tarragon, and a mini-rose for no reason. The hummingbirds and bumblebees love sage and chive flowers. If you need to garden but have accessibility problems with diggings, bending, and weeding, it’s a perfect container project. Highly recommend! This planter is sectioned so the herbs don’t take each other over, and there are planters (more expensive) that are even self-watering. But I like watering, pinching things back and smelling each herb close up. In my real-life-sized larger garden, roses and peonies are blooming, sugar snap peas are ready for harvest, and strawberries have baby strawberries on them now.

Me with newly extra-pink hair in Kirkland

Speculative Poetry Picks

I also had the honor of helping curate a Speculative Poetry page for our Seattle poetry-only bookstore, Open Books.

Here’s a link if you want some of my favorite books of speculative verse! 

It includes everyone from stellar popular prize-winners like Tracy K. Smith to robot-loving poet/scholars like Margaret Rhee, and I tried to find all kinds of speculative poetry – sci fi, scientific poetry, futurism, pop culture.

Besides the books listed at that link, I highly recommend Sally Rosen Kindred’s upcoming Where the Wolf, from Diode Editions, Celia Lisset Alvarez’s Multiverses, Jason Mott’s Hide Behind Me (hard to find now – he’s just putting out a tremendous new book taking on race, celebrity, and a book tour haunted by ghosts called “A Hell of a Book”) and Jason McCall’s Dear Hero (also out of print, but worth tracking down.)

Glenn and I with Lake Washington and roses

Meditations on Melancholy

So, despite these smiling pictures, I’ve been struggling with melancholy lately. Something like breaking a tooth (the fifth one since the pandemic started) or waking up with MS-related joint pain and fatigue, or another rejection of my manuscript-in-progress, can kick off a cascade of catastrophic thinking. Why do I send out my poetry at all? Why do I work so hard on my health (eating carefully, meditating, physical therapy, etc) only to face setbacks I can’t do anything about fixing? Is aging just one health disaster after another? (The answer, children, is yes! No, no, I’m sorry. I’m sure that’s not true. For some lucky people.)

One way I comforted myself about my broken tooth was to think about Emily Dickinson, who probably had very little help from dental technology when she inevitable broke her teeth, or the way her vision problems caused her headaches (and she had to write longhand via candlelight.) My paternal grandmother had to have all her teeth pulled by the time she was 40. Another friend my age told me she’d had ten – ten, not two – root canals. I may be more unique in that I have autoimmune problems that make dental work complicated, as well as allergies to pretty much all painkillers and Novocain, but lots of people have battles with their teeth, which is somewhat comforting.

As far as my Multiple Sclerosis, I’m lucky it doesn’t give me more trouble than it does, so when I wake up with nausea and vertigo (telltale signs I need to slow down and take care of myself) or I’m so fatigued I can barely walk across the room, I try not to panic, and to be extra careful to stay out of the hottest part of the day and take my vitamins and just generally pay attention to my body’s signals. I’m due for another brain MRI soon. Do I want to do this? It makes me really anxious because I’m claustrophobic, and of course the possibility of the bad news of progression of damage to my brain and spine. I’m also facing the question – now that I’m vaccinated – of starting a new disease-modifying medication. Sigh.

And in my writing life, it’s been a season of rejection, rejection, rejection. Yes, I try to comfort myself that I’ve been lucky enough to have five poetry books published, or that I’ve gotten into some of my dream journals, or that I have wonderful supportive poet friends to help celebrate the wins and mourn the losses. But sometimes I wonder if the rewards are worth the effort. So, if one day I just stopped writing or sending out poetry, it’s not like anyone would demand it or clamor for my next book. To be honest, I also wonder about the effort of keeping this blog up as well – it does take time and energy, and I’m not sure that many people even read it (thanks, those that read and comment though, of course!)

I don’t want you to think it’s all gloom and doom in my head; it’s not. And I certainly recognize that many people, including some of my friends and family, have had it much worse than me lately. Every poet probably struggles with rejection, and we do tend to be prone to melancholy; it’s been a hard year for everyone; I recognize that catastrophic feelings don’t help anything. I think it would be nice if I could feel like I was able to do something useful again in the world, get paid for my work, or at least feel like I was helping others. I’m writing an essay for an anthology on speculative work and I’ll be offering an online class on speculative poetry soon (of course I’ll post details when it’s closer.) So those projects are good. And I really am thinking about moving forward on acquiring a place to use as a writer’s retreat – La Conner, WA or Port Townsend, WA maybe? So I’m trying to see the good things coming. I promise.

Almost Summer – Memorial Day Weekend, Supermoons, and Dreaming Some Poetry Dreams

Pink Peony – Signs of Summer

Signs of Summer – Memorial Day Weekend

Happy Sunday, readers. Are you seeing signs of summer yet? Here, after a fairly rainy and cold May, we are finally seeing and feeling a little summertime vibe. Like the blooming – peonies, roses, and lavender – all definitely summertime flowers here – and the baby birds of all sorts. It was a lovely 72 degree sunny day yesterday, one of those impossibly blue-sky, happy almost-summer days we get here, and I took a walk on the Sammamish trail, observed tons of baby things, listened to the wind in the trees, and the air smelled sweet – not yet full of wildfire smoke (hopefully we’ll have less this year) and there’s a sense of happiness and buoyancy all around.

The end of the pandemic is not here yet, but it feels close. I can tell you I feel more optimistic this May than I did last May – with more knowledge, vaccines, monoclonal antibodies, and hopefully some good antiviral meds on the way. Now they’re saying immunity after being ill with covid-19 lasts at least a year.  Anyway, we have a reason to be optimistic again. Not that I’m off to ride a crowded subway or sit in a movie theater yet, but a trip to the bookstore again (even a poetry reading?) seems within the realm of the possible.

Flower Supermoons, Eclipses, and Feeling Restless

This week we also had a lunar eclipse of the Flower Supermoon. I also get weird around Supermoons – I sleep poorly, I’m moody and restless. Am I the only one this happens to? It’s also this time of year – the changing weather (fifty and rain one day, eighty and sunny the next) that throws me off.

Flower Supermoon, pre-eclipse

Supermoons also make me think about the future, for some reason. I always have weird vivid dreams – this week, among others, I had a poetry dream where a person was helping me sort one of my poetry manuscripts with blue drawers along a wall, and another where a man told me “No one wants to hear from a woman over 35.” (I mean, that seems like it is true in the poetry world, sometimes, doesn’t it? Or in the whole world? Women in my age group (late forties) seem to be mostly ignored, when we are in major energy mode in terms of knowing who we are, what we want, when we are gaining in inner powers.) Anyway, I have been feeling like I’ve been hearing an awful lot of “no” from the literary world and started thinking about what I might be able to do about that. I know I can’t just “will” good things to happen, but sometimes it seems like forward motion comes from a kind of crisis.

Which leads me to…

Towhee with pink flower

Poetry Dreaming

So, last week I talked about discouragement from the whole rejection-cycle of being a poet. This week I’m going to talk about poetry dreams. The sort you’ve thought about for a while and think – now may be the time to take steps towards making them a reality. You know, I’ve been sending out resumes for jobs in the literary world (this is a big secret) but it got me thinking about what kind of work I could start on my own. I’ve thought a long time about opening up my own press, and lately I’ve gotten to start thinking about Virginia Woolf – the way she cultivated her own circle of talented artists, writers, and critics, and invited them to her home because her health didn’t do well when she was away. I thought about maybe investing in a little writer’s retreat cabin in a resort area that I could use, but could also rent out to friends (writers and artists), and maybe even running a little writer’s retreat of my own. I think that would be within the range of things I could do without endangering my health, especially if I had an accessible place to host from. What do you guys think?

The main thing keeping me from starting a press in the knowledge that while I have some gifts that are good for running a press – enthusiasm for getting underrepresented voices out into the world, a great reader (and pretty good editor, if I do say so myself), PR and marketing know-how, a pretty good idea of how to run a business – my worry is that I recognize I don’t really have a great mind for detail (even worse since the MS). I wonder if I could get a partner in the press who was great at detail-work. I know that the caveat of a one-or-two person press is that if, for instance, one person’s health fails (which has happened at two of my own publishers) then the press is gone. Thus my hesitance to “go for it.” (Well, that and paperwork – one of my least favorite things in life.)

Goldfinch with rose bush

So the kinds of jobs I’ve been applying for would be doing marketing and PR for presses – or even acquisition editor, a job I’ve had before in my previous life at Microsoft. While it would be fun to be part of a team in that case, would it be more fun if I had more ownership?

So, even if I don’t have the money, partners, or plans completely available right now, there’s no harm in putting these things out into the universe, is there? Please chime in in the comments if you have any thoughts, encouragements, or ideas about what I’ve posted here….