My Story of The Benefits of Wasting Time up at the Mighty, Fall Scenes in Woodinville, Anxiety and MRIs

Woodinville in November on the Sammamish River Trail

Thanks to The Mighty – My Story on the Life-Saving Benefits of Wasting Time is Up!

I hope this will be helpful to some of you! My personal essay “How Wasting Time Has Benefited Me with Chronic Illnesses” is up – I am a bit of a newbie with personal essays so I’m really excited to have this one published at The Mighty, and I’m especially excited because it includes my first ever published photo credit!  I started doing photography as a hobby back when I had that nasty cancer diagnosis two years ago now, and I haven’t stopped – I took photography classes back in high school, but the new digital cameras make the endeavor a completely a different kind of challenge – some things easier, some things harder – but I definitely don’t miss the chemicals! I may not have the phone selfie completely down yet, but I’m enjoying keeping a record of trees, flowers, and birds as I go.

November Rain and Un-Fun Anxiety-Provoking Things (Dental Work, MRIs) are Looming…

Mount Rainier, sunset, November

This morning it is raining here but I know the midwest and east coast got hit with scary snow and ice storms yesterday. November insists on proceeding whether we want it to or not, so we have to get out and appreciate the few days of sunshine we have left this year. I’ve got a few un-fun things coming up – today, an abdominal MRI to check on my liver, and some emergency dental work (I broke a filling – ow! Crumbling teeth are a drag…) a few days after Thanksgiving. Not things I would want to do for fun, sadly, but necessary nonetheless. Today I will think positive thoughts for shrinking (disappearing) liver tumors and I will try to keep my broken tooth from breaking further for another week! My ankles are both getting better so I hope to be almost normal by the holidays…

But At Least the Holidays are Coming…

Next week, we’ll celebrate Thanksgiving my little brother and his wife, which will be good. This is a picture of me at the local farm stand – a benefit of living in wine and farm country – which brings apples, pears, squash and other goodies from cabbage to carrots from their Eastern Washington farm locations as well as the little patches of things they grow here. I’ve been craving carrots, and they have these really ugly stubby yellow, blue, and orange carrots that taste amazing when we slow-roast them. I’ve been working on my own little garden – planted some bulbs, got rid of some leaves, replanted some things from containers to the ground. Sadly discovered our local deer had eaten the leaves off of a couple of my treasured plants – including a pink lilac (cry!) but that is part of sharing a garden with nature. Next stop – putting up some holiday lights! It sounds like it’s early, but honestly, it is so dark so early (4:30 PM is darkness time) that we need something to brighten things up. I don’t get a chance to travel much for the holidays these days, which it forces me to pay closer attention to the small beauties of winter in the Pacific Northwest, and spend time with friends I might not get a chance to see otherwise. What are your favorite holiday traditions? I love going out to the Bellevue Botanical and Zoo holiday lights, visiting the big hotels (like here in Woodinville, Willows Lodge, and in downtown Seattle, the Sorrento,) doing their fancy decor and lit fireplaces that seem like the perfect place to talk about art and poetry over a glass of something warm, the chance to spend time guilt-free in bookstores (hey, you’re buying presents, right?) Happy season of reading-and-writing! Hope you are keeping yourself surrounded by light.

 

Fighting Back Against SAD with Penguins and Holiday Scenes, A Poet Interview with Wombwell Rainbow, and More Cancer Tests and Poetry Lessons from Plath

Glenn and I pose with Molbak’s holiday mountain lodge scene

How to Fight the SAD with Holiday Scenes and Zoos

The days are so short now it is so dark after 4 PM that I can’t see my way to the car. That’s on top of the rain, the bad news that trickles in. I have a LOT of medical stuff to get through by the end of the year (including another cancer check this Friday), I’ve been sick with the sinus/respiratory sort of bug seemingly forever, I sprained an ankle a couple of days ago. Watching the horrible fires in California has been heart-wrenching, the smoke has finally arrived up here to cloud the air (and Facebook reminded me it’s been seven years since I moved back here from California – we only lived there for two years, and both places we lived succumbed to fire – and one to fire AND earthquake. Love to all my California people.) So this is the time of year that you just settle in under a blanket to read your new Murakami and your new volume of Plath letters, and just, well, maybe I could use a little break from that to cheer up.

So, whenever we had a little promise of sun, or I got so stir-crazy I couldn’t stand it, Glenn would whisk me up – cane, extra layers, a travel mug of hot tea – and go do something to cheer me up. One day it was the zoo – I had to use my wheelchair – we were hoping to get a glimpse of the new red panda cubs but apparently missed it by a week – but on our brief (less than one hour to see the whole zoo) whirlwind tour, the sun was shining, the penguins and flamingos and wolves were beautiful (and a local bird showed up for a photobomb.) I love animals – did I mention I took a class at the Cincinnati Zoo as an undergrad biology major and almost became a zoo worker? By the way, a beginning zoo worker at the time with a degree in zoology made about $26,000 a year. The jaguar and tiger were both out and the snow leopards – a mother and yearling – were very active. The gray wolves – which look like white ghosts in the woods – were so beautiful. And the flowers were blooming, as if by magic – pink camellia, roses, and a few others I couldn’t name.

 

The other day, it was pouring rain, so he took me to our local gardening center, Molbak’s, which is this crazy Woodinville store with a coffee shop and a thousand kinds of plants and trees and flowers and, at holiday time, about a hundred holiday scenes to goof around and pose in. I also, I am sad to say, came home with several more things than I needed (curse you, holiday ornaments that look like owls or arctic foxes!)

An Interview with Me!

Thanks to Paul Brookes, there is a new interview with me up at Wombwell Rainbow today!

Cancer Tests and Lessons from Plath

Yes, it’s been nearly two years since they discovered that my liver had a bunch of tumors in it, which look like cancer, but may or may not be cancer, so I have to keep having tumor marker tests and getting MRIs to make sure they haven’t spread or grown. I don’t like having MRIs, and I don’t like being reminded of the many many thing that are wrong with me, so these tests always put me in a bit one edge. I’m also claustrophobic and I lost my liver cancer specialist when he took a new job on the East coast, so I’m meeting with a new guy at the end of the month. My MS new drug stuff has been put on hold briefly because the MS drug can be dangerous for livers, so I’ve got to go complete a whole new batch of blood work. Fun stuff, right? You can see why I’ve been needing the cheer factor.

But I’m trying to glean some lessons on surviving the tough rigors of the life of a poet from Sylvia Plath – The Letters of Sylvia Plath, Volume 2, which just came out. You know, we assume that Plath had little or no success while she was alive, but W.S. Merwin and T.S. Eliot tried to help her out, she had her first poetry book, The Colossus, in the US published by Knopf (not too shabby, even though she was discouraged that Marianne Moore gave it a bad review and she had been aiming for the Yale Younger Prize.) Even with Merwin’s good word at the New Yorker, it took her ten years to get her first poem published there, and that was after a year’s worth of back-and-forth edits on her poem. She had written and published The Bell Jar, been anthologized in several big time anthologies of American and English poetry, and been paid to read her poems on the radio. She talked of needing “a little of our callousness and brazenness to be a proper sender-out of MSS” – I definitely need that as I’m sending out my sixth book manuscript to publishers. All this is to say that she worked at poetry like a “real job,” besides being a typist, teaching, researching, and other side gigs, on top of having two babies and a pretty solidly terrible husband who messed around on her and didn’t do much cleaning up, cooking, or childcare. I think a little more money would have helped her too – she had to side hustle pretty much all the time to make ends meet. All in all a kind of cautionary tale – she had a lot of ingredients for success, and sometimes I think, if she’d waited a few years, if the medications of the time (right before the birth control pill and a bunch of mental health breakthrough drugs) had been better, if she’d cultivated friendships with women poets instead of getting so wrapped up in her toxic husband, if the literary world hadn’t been so solidly misogynist during her time – I mean, sometimes I think, if I could only tell her how successful she’ll be. She’d be around 85 now. Anyway, in no way was she a perfect person – she had a mean streak which probably lessened her social support circle and was deeply flawed as well as talented – but I do think that anyone who thought she was weak or didn’t work hard for her success should read these letters.  It’s a wonderful (and terrifying) portrait of the woman writer’s life in the late fifties and early sixties. I’ve been working my way through the letters of women with different illnesses – Flannery O’Connor’s life as a writer with her lupus, Elizabeth Bishop and her depression and alcoholism, Sylvia Plath – in order to glean something – strength? Advice? Lessons in what to do and not do? All of these women were very prodigious letter writers, too – in turns, funny, warm, bitter, and a lot about money stress and success (or the lack of it.) And women writers still get ignored, underpaid, under-reviewed, published less often by the big names. That hasn’t really gone away. I think I’m looking for a path that may not exist yet.

The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia, Looking for the Magic, and Guarding Your Mind/Time

Perfect Poet Background at local holiday display – I call this one “poet with crazy insomnia with giant moon and owl.”

The Urge to Protect and Post-Election Insomnia

I’m not going to lie – two nights in a row, I couldn’t go to sleep. I finally drift off after 3 AM only to be woken by the alarm at 7 AM, usually with a fresh dose of horrifying news. This morning it was a shooting in a neighborhood I lived in from ages 1-3, Thousand Oaks in California. Both nights when I slept, I had horrifying dreams of trying (and failing) to protect others – in one, I was a child abductee who tried to free the other children before the guy who meant to rape and kill us came back, in another, I was Wonder Woman, but couldn’t protect a dog who was shot by a supervillain called Dr. Pastrami.

I was cheered by the number of women (and the number of “firsts”) elected on election day, and more diverse people who more accurately represent the people of America (who are younger, and mostly NOT old white men.) Changing numbers of young voters and women voters were encouraging. Then the President alarmingly fired Sessions, which is definitely interfering with justice and basically spitting on the constitution, and banned another journalist from the White House (shades of The Post, which I just watched on Election night, where Nixon banned The New York Times and the Washington Post from the white house right before Watergate happened.) Oh, and after the pipe bomb thing, calling journalists the enemy of the people again. Whew. I am waiting (sadly, mostly hopelessly) for the Republicans who swore they cared about the constitution to protect out country, but I rely on the new, more female, more diverse voices in congress to move towards justice, hopefully swift justice.

snow geese in flight

Looking for Magic

I went to our local gardening store that was starting to decorate for the holidays, and this background seemed more spooky than Christmas-y, but I thought it seemed very appropriate for right now. There’s fog outside this morning. Yesterday I felt sick and cranky, running a fever and having to go to a painful physical therapy session (love for RBG, who fell and broke her ribs – I just had two ribs “realigned” after throwing them out coughing, and that was painful enough to make me cry, and I’d say I have like a level 9 pain tolerance system and breaking ribs is worse.) But as I drove to my house, exhausted and in pain, I saw a large flock of white snow geese lift off into the air – snow geese being rare in this area at this time of year, and against a rare bit of November blue sky and right afterwards, a WWI-era biplane flew right overhead. It reminded me of the magic that can appear unexpectedly.

Sylvia the cat with Sylvia’s second volume of letters

There was more magic in the mail, as a late birthday present came, Sylvia Plath’s second volume of her complete Letters, along with the latest American Poetry Review, which had poems by people I like, like Jericho Brown and Kelli Russell Agodon, so I was especially excited to read it. There is almost nothing I like better than a stretch of time with no commitments when I can sit down and read. Sylvia the cat almost immediately claimed the Plath book for herself – she knows her namesake! After finishing Finks (see previous post), I wish I could reach out through time and tell Plath that she wasn’t paranoid – her work was being suppressed and ignored because she was a woman – that presses and literary magazines were purposely ignoring women in her time – and that later, a ton of people would read and love her work. It might not have fixed her life – that ignores a host of other issues including mental illness and an abusive and unfaithful husband, not enough money and not enough of the right kind of medical care – but if she had known the inner workings of a lot of the literary world, she would have seen she was working against a huge wall of misogyny and prejudice. Just like our congress, the more that the literary world of arbiters – those giving out book contracts, prizes, and grants – represents what our culture actually looks like, in terms of diversity – the less women and people of color and anyone who thinks differently will feel like they are scaling an impossible wall to get attention for their writing.

The one benefit of the insomnia is that I am writing extra poems. I am daydreaming about presses I’d love to work with and trying to believe in my work as I send it out. And I did get an acceptance yesterday, which was nice. Hopefully a book acceptance is on the way soon…

Guarding Your Time – and Your Mind

When the news is as stressful and horrifying as it is these days (a mass shooting in 2018 an average of once every four days, political madness, etc) you have to be careful to preserve your time and your sanity. I was talking with a writer friend about how to protect our reading and writing time, how to avoid spinning our wheels on social media. I am noticing that I am putting my phone down – or even in another room – and get much more done that when I keep it nearby. She was talking about shutting off her phone or computer after fifteen minutes of social media – sounds like a great goal.

You know I love taking pictures of hummingbirds. They represent something about my soul – always in a hurry, and attracted to flowers. I think that we have to watch how to take in the stories of our world – reading books an antidote to the confusing and jarring barrage of bad news and bad things happening in the world – because they force us to slow down and consider things more deeply. Spending time with people on the phone or in real life is different than e-mail or texting – it helps us integrate with our communities.

When you’re a writer, and if you feel your writing in important, it is essential to guard your writing time. For me, it’s after everyone is asleep – when the inner editor is quieter (editors often go to sleep at 10 PM, I think) and my mind is freer to make connections. I’ve been writing poems outside of any planned “book project” – letting myself write whatever it wants, from flash fiction involving time travel to poems about Game of Thrones. It’s clear from the insomnia and nightmares that I’m sensitive to what’s going on in the world, not to mention the stress of trying to get all my medical tests and appointments in before the end of the year, when my deductible flips over and I have to start paying out of pocket again. Emily Dickinson is my symbol of the poet isolated from the world, and yet, had a tremendous life of the mind in her rooms and gardens. She really allowed herself time to write and even more, time to notice things. Instead of allowing our minds and attention to be constantly drawn to the latest scandal and tragedy (and there are plenty of those), scanning instead of truly paying attnetion, how do we hold ourselves steady? Meditation, prayer, reading and writing, and if possible (which it isn’t always, in winter) spending time out in nature. If you have other answers to this modern dilemma, let me know. How do we put into practice embracing the things that are truly important to us?

 

What to Read at the End of the World, November Gloom, and the Benefits of Waiting

November Gloom and Conspiracy Theories

Greetings from early November in Seattle – that’s my red maple with a little brief flash on sunlight between the glooms. The electricity went out Thursday night for about five hours, a reminder that the windstorm season is back. Tomorrow we’ll turn back the clocks, and darkness in the afternoon will start at about 5 PM – and get worse from there, until next year. (No wonder so many of us start putting up Christmas lights early in November – we literally need the lights!) The news last night – another shooting, this time in Florida, and our own Seattle downtown had a stabbing incident – was not good, either. I’ve already voted, but the political ads keep running. I hope you are planning to vote on Tuesday (or before, if your state allows it.) We need some new leadership, some hopeful voices in this country.
I have a bit of a cold I can’t shake so even though there are two poetry events (one of friends at Open Books, the other the Jack Straw reading at Seattle’s beautiful downtown library, I am going to stay in and read this morning, seasonally appropriately in their melancholy. I’m eight chapters into the new Murakami novel, Killing Commendatore, his homage to Gatsby, and so far it has a lot of melancholy and romantic notions of the lonely (ahem, male) artist who hides away in the mountains. I’m also reading Joel Whitney’s Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World’s Best Writers, which contains a lot of reminders that the free press has been threatened by the government and that “fake news” has been around since at least the fifties. The racist and sexist history of The Paris Review is pretty shocking (like, four interviews with African-American writers in about fifty years of publishing, and women being considered as nothing more than typists and volunteers, not writers. Charming. Sylvia Plath, you were not being paranoid – the system was against you!) Also, a reminder of the importance of a free press as an essential part of any democracy. I guess I was a little shocked at how many book prizes were given out because the government wanted those books to be prestigious and make America look good, the publishing history of Dr. Zhivago, and how many poets and literary magazines and writing programs were involved in government sponsorship/censorship, CIA recruitment, etc.   On the other hand, a kid who grows up in a “Secret City” who knows her phone lines are tapped when she’s seven years old is never too surprised by government conspiracies, right?

What to Read When the World is Ending – The Rumpus

Now, a little happy news…thank you to The Rumpus for including my book Field Guide to the End of the World in their feature “What to Read When the World is Ending.”  This was definitely a nice pick me up in the November, and also seems extremely seasonally (and mood-wise) appropriate – I’m ready to read the books on the list for sure. Here’s a little clip about my book from The Rumpus:

One last spooky pic of me dressed as Poe’s “The Raven” on Halloween – a big hit with the kids, by the way!

The Benefits of Waiting

Generally I am an impatient person – you may have noticed that tone in some of my blog posts. I’m in a hurry to get my next book published, for researchers to find a cure for MS, for a better government in America (and elsewhere – whew, a LOT of fascism is happening around the world right now – feeling very pre-WW-II-y out there). But I was just musing on the benefits, sometimes, of waiting. The autumn months, which involve more hibernation and inevitable postponements due to colds and flus and bad weather. Sometimes waiting means you are able to gather more information – like getting a second opinion before starting a drastic chemo med, for instance, or maybe getting a rejection from one press means you end up discovering a new and different press that might be a better fit for your book. Even waiting for the lights to come back on, like we had to a couple of nights ago, can be seen as an opportunity to spend time being quiet and not being so goal-oriented.

I feel like I don’t talk about the benefits of holding off on things here most of the time – because of my health issues, I’m probably more keenly aware that mortality means we don’t have limitless time, so I’m mostly a hurry-up-get-it-done girl. But faster isn’t always better. Your first solution may not be the best one. And taking it slow can mean the difference between choosing the right thing and the most expedient.

Sylvia meets The Raven

One thing Murakami isn’t wrong about – sometimes spending time alone (in an isolated cabin in the mountains or no) can help us confront issues that have been bothering us, bust through any kind of artistic block, or spend time getting better at anything from perfecting a recipe to a novel. I’m spending time working on my sixth poetry manuscript before I send it out again, catching up on the very tall list of “to-read” books, and reading up on the latest MS research. I may be missing out – I’m frustrated I haven’t been able to take advantage of the many art and poetry events in Seattle recently – but the quiet rain is the best thing for revisions, reading, and, let’s face it, getting some extra sleep to fight off autumn colds and flus.

Sylvia illustrating what happens when we get overwhelmed by our “to-read” piles.

So if you are forced to stay indoors this weekend against your will, think of it as a time to rest, recharge, and revisit the benefits of waiting. And finally shorten that “to-read” stack!

Halloween Poetry, A Melancholy Season, and More Thoughts as We Move Into Darkness

Pumpkin Display with flowers

Halloween and Poetry

My traditional Happy Halloween greeting feels muted this year, as our country grieves the unnecessary and tragic killings in Pittsburgh and Louisville, deals with the true horror of people who dare to stand up publicly to Trump being sent pipe bombs. Many of my friends do not feel safe, and I cannot blame them. All I can do is vote, and encourage you to vote, and send money to anti-bigotry causes across the country, and try to spread love instead of hate.

But I usually post at least one spooky Halloween poem so I’ll post one, “Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales,” from Field Guide to the End of the World. (And for more Halloween-appropriate reading, check out the lunacy issue and moon poems from Escape into Life I posted about in the last week.)

Season of Melancholy, Changing Leaves, and Moving into Darkness

Yes, the darkness has figuratively and literally moved in here in the Seattle area, where it’s dark now at 6:00 PM and after Sunday, ouch, it’ll be dark at 5:00 PM. The news has been relentlessly dark, with the hate crimes leaving my heart feeling especially heavy. We are supposed to be a nation that welcomes immigrants instead of fearing them, and supports its diverse mix of religions, races, heritages, cultures. If you are for those things, and against people seeking to hurt and kill others simply because they are different, please get out and vote before November 6.

November is typically a tough month to find the joy in living in the Pacific Northwest – a time of shortening days, mostly filled with driving rain. But it’s not all melancholy and darkness. Meanwhile, some pictures of local scenes that might cheer you up: some snow geese mixing with the local Canadian geese and their hybrid babies in a Woodinville yard, me in my yard with the maple trees, and me and Glenn in front of some pumpkins.

As the world turns towards darkness, I want to keep my eyes on the light. I’ve been writing poems about the end of the world again. Tomorrow I’ll be dressing up as Poe’s “The Raven” and handing out candy to the local kids, maybe playing a few vintage Buffy the Vampire episodes. I will wish you a happy Halloween, as happy as possible, and not to give in to the despair that seems so easy this time of year. We have to work harder to look for reasons to hope, to feel there may be better days ahead, and offer help and support to those who are struggling.

Me with my mom’s beloved 100-year-old copy of the Complete Works of Poe I read as a kid.

 

Glenn and I dressed for Halloween as Poe’s The Raven and a mad scientist –

As promised, here’s a picture of me dressed as Poe’s “The Raven” and Glenn as a mad scientist…Have a happy Halloween!

 

Poems on the Moon, Going to Book Club, and How to Try to Do Good and not Despair

Cat musicians and a seal at a local nursery

Poems on the Moon

First of all, a thanks to Escape Into Life for including me in their issue on the moon: Lunacy. There are poems by my friends Kelli Russell Agodon, Erica Goss, and Kristen Berkey-Abbott as well as beautiful art work. (And you can read my previous Escape Into Life feature of moon poems here in case you missed it.)

This week’s news did not get better after my last post (heartbreaking shooting yesterday of  11 people at a synagogue reminded me of a bombing when I was in fifth grade at a friend’s synagogue’s child care center – I remember it was the second time as a child I’d encountered incomprehensible hatred – the first was watching klansmen walk down my street in Tennessee when I was seven.) We have a President who literally irresponsibly whipped up hate at rallies against the very people who were threatened with bombs this week, the week people were shot in grocery stores and their places of worship. This government is shameful and propelled by the very worst impulses of Americans. It’s very important to vote for people who do not encourage hate and racism. You are responsible for your own government – so don’t forget to vote! (And there have been reports of voting machine irregularities, so double-check if you can vote with a paper ballot in your state.)

Yesterday I went to a local farmstand and then visited a nearby nursery and saw this charming display of cat musician and seal fountain statues, and thought you deserved to see them too. Ah, for a yard full of musically-inclined cat statues. I’m itching to plant an apple tree, too.

Going to Book Club

Today I’m going to get up early and get ready for a “virtual” book club visit to talk about Field Guide to the End of the World. It’s a good opportunity to talk about poetry with other people who care about books, which is always cheering. One of the ways I cheered myself this week despite rejections and relentlessly terrible news was turning off the television and computer and reading books. Books remind me of how I developed my own set of ethics as a kid – how The Lorax helped me develop into an environmentalist and Horton Hatches a Who a reminder of keeping promises. How reading books by different authors from different countries helped me imagine what it was like to live in a different country, speak a different language – how The Diary of Anne Frank and Elie Weisel helped me understand the horrors of what people did to Jewish people just because they were Jewish, how reading Cry, the Beloved Country helped me know the evils of apartheid, all the dystopias I read about as a kid – from Handmaid’s Tale to Brave New World to 1984, from Ray Bradbury’s Illustrated Man and Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone stories – illustrated the possibilities of evil, and how to stand up against it. Madeleine L’Engle’s Swiftly Tilting Planet and the nuclear fears of the seventies and eighties. Books changed who I was and how I saw the world, how I saw right and wrong, and this gave me hope. Maybe by writing something – we can help others understand and empathize and connect with a world not their own. We should fight for libraries and help teach books that reach beyond out own experiences and encourage others to read and talk about books as much as we can.

My two watchful guardians

How to Do Good

If you, like me, have been struggling with despair in the face of horrific hate, racism, and evil, think of what we can do to bring light. Yes, books – reading and writing and encouraging others to read them. Yes, voting – even if you feel like it’s a pain and you’re worried your one vote won’t make a difference, it can. Yes, giving money to charities – from fighting diseases to fighting childhood poverty to support for causes like the environment or ending racism or rights for the oppressed and refugees – and if you can’t afford to give money, as I couldn’t for some years, you can volunteer, which always helps you to connect to your local community, which can lessen a feeling of alienation. I had a dream last night where I was asking famous women about how to do good, and they sat down and talked to me about practical ways to put good into your world instead of evil. Spreading a little kindness – I talked in my last blog post about telling writers who have inspired you about how they’ve impacted you, but calling a lonely relative or friend who’s been going through a hard time, standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves – all work. I woke up feeling less despairing – the brief blue sky that appeared this morning didn’t hurt – and maybe I’m naive, but I still believe – just as much as when I was a kid – in facing evil and fighting it with the resources we have.

As October comes to an end, I hope you get a chance to see the moon through the clouds – and the light, even as the darkness seems to stretch out and overpower it.

Resilient, Cheerful Chipperbot Me Refuses to Reboot: a Week of Mostly Terrible Things

When the Inner Chipperbot Will Not Reboot (AKA When The World Seems Like a Trash Fire)

The rain has returned to the Pacific Northwest. That’s normally not something that depresses me, I’m a lover of fog and mist, but somehow, with the news cycle full of evil hate and poetry deaths, a week of being sick (and that feeling that I’ll never be well again), and seven (!!) rejections in as many days including one from a press of my new book that I was pretty hopeful about, has meant – well, the inner chipperbot in me refuses to reboot. The cheerful, resilient me – the me that looks at the bright side and makes gratitude lists – is noticeably absent.

I’m tired of hearing a non-stop news cycle that includes a student athlete being shot by an ex-boyfriend she had tried to get protection from but of course everyone failed her so she’s dead, a racist shooting people in a Kroger too close to my old hometown of Cincinnati (in Louisville), and even more disturbing –  some asshole sending pipe bombs to anyone Trump has ever publicly encouraged violence towards which is 100 percent the fault of the President even if he didn’t physically send them, and political attack ads on every second (I’ve already voted, television, stop playing those ads!) I am tired. I am sure you all are tired too. Feeling angry, feeling helpless. At least we can vote – so make sure you make your voice heard. But sometimes even that can feel too small.

Appreciating Writers Before They’re Dead, and Trying To Stay Happy (or at Least Balanced)

I was reading the essays praising Lucie Brock-Broido in the latest issue of The Writer’s Chronicle – which were nice, but I thought, wouldn’t it have been nice if she had had this kind of tribute while she was still alive? Then Tony Hoagland died, of pancreatic cancer. Lots of posts on social media about how much he meant to different people…we’ve been losing poets at a fast rate. It seems to me that if you like a poet go write them a note immediately, write a review of their book – write that essay while they’re still alive to appreciate it! Go buy their book and ask them to sign it. Life as a poet is tough. (Don’t I know it!) So if you love a poet, show them their value now. You never know what they’re going through.

And I went to the hospital last week with a surprise attack of violent vomiting, where I apparently picked up a bug that’s left me feverish and achy all the rest of the last week. With the fever, comes the inevitable MS symptoms – weak legs, dizziness, mood swings. I’ve been sleeping a lot, only waking up to receive rejections and see the terrible news get even worse. I had a specialist visit where the doc expressed some skepticism about the latest MS drug I’ve been assigned, which – I mean, sorry to say this to my fellow MS-ers, all the treatments really suck both in terms of effectiveness and scary, terrible side-effects. With my other issues – the problems with surprise vomiting attacks, the liver tumors, my allergic reactions – it’s tough to find a drug that doesn’t make you worse rather than better. Sigh. Because they don’t really know how MS works, they don’t really know how to treat it, cure it, or even make the symptoms better. Some of my MS friends have had great results on their MS drugs – for ten years or more – but others have had miserable side effects and had to quit them all.  That’s why I support charities that specifically work for an MS cure, like Accelerated Cure Project for MS.

I’ve tried some of the things recommended by my MS-therapist and others: trying to rest, draw pictures of birds, write poems to express my feelings (mostly GAH), gentle stretching, listening to music, watching only classic movies and kitten videos. None of these things has worked to alleviate my overall bad feelings. One thing – and I’ll be honest – that gets me down after twenty years of banging on doors in the poetry world is still getting them slammed in my face. No, I’m not good enough for that press, this grant or fellowship, that journal, whatever. Ugh. It just makes me want to give up. If you’ve ever given up on a job or a dream, I will not be the one to throw judgement at you. Life is mostly hard, and when obstacles keep getting thrown at you, sometimes you have to pick and choose what you want to continue to really pursue.

The Importance of Your Support Network

One thing I’ve thought about is the importance of a good support network – friends you can count on to listen and not just talk about themselves and their problems, family that will go the extra mile, former students and mentors – and the importance of nurturing that network. Because you can’t expect friendships to run on nothing – you have to put in the love and encouragement and little things that make a relationship good. When something like a chronic illness or political upheaval or a work reverse in fortune hits, it’s important to have friends to help you navigate, to help remind you the world isn’t a vast curtain of pain and chaos. Someone who will listen to you when you’re in a bad mood, maybe play a game or invite themselves over for coffee and a visit. I have some really lovely friends that don’t live nearby who show me love – whether by sending long letters, flowers, cards, donations to an MS charity in my name – and those people really make a difference. It might seem small to you, but it probably isn’t small to the person you’re thinking of. You are probably making a difference and you don’t even know it, to someone who really needs it. Right now the world really needs a little extra sunshine, love, candy, and kitten videos. I know this post hasn’t been at all upbeat, but I am grateful to the people who go out of their way to be kind – thank you.

La Conner and Woodinville Fall Scenes, Seattle Poetry Readings, and MS

Mount Baker sunset in La Conner WA

La Conner Autumn Scenes and MS, the Least Wanted Visitor

I ended up in the hospital after this day trip, but it was an absolutely gorgeous visit to La Conner, so I thought I’d post some of the photos anyway.
That’s MS for you – it acts up when you least expect it, it kind of messes up your holiday plans and fun, and is basically like a really unpleasant friend or relative that shows up when they are least wanted. (To be fair, this hospital trip, the MS could have been combined with a food allergy reaction, so…) I was so sad that Selma Blair announced she had MS today, but she’s being very brave. Her experiences sounded shockingly similar to mine – vague symptoms for about ten years, the clumsiness, the memory problems, worsening things like legs and hands not working – and an MS diagnosis at 46 – mine was at 44 – when the average age for women to get diagnosed is much younger, usually in your twenties and thirties. There is no cure, and the treatment options are scary, full of unpleasant side-effects, and not very effective (typical effectiveness rates hover in the 30 percent range, and all of the side effects resemble chemo.) I’m not saying this to frighten anyone, or to trumpet self-pity, but I hope to encourage more awareness about MS so we can get more funding for research, treatments, and cures.

Anyway, we don’t get that many beautiful sunny days in October, and it was a good day to remind ourselves of some of the unique beauties of the Northwest.

We saw herons, bald eagles, deer, seals, and snow geese! We visited a ton of farm stands and stopped into the Roozengarde Gardens (off-season, it’s empty and gorgeous.) Wish you were here!

Local Poetry Readings

Seattle never lacks for poetry readings, but since I was basically in the hospital overnight that knocked out a whole day of doing anything besides recovering. Tomorrow (Sunday, the 21st) there are three readings at the same time – a Raven Chronicles reading, a staging of Claudia Castro Luna‘s Killing Marias, and the Floating Bridge winners reading. I’m sad to miss the first two, but excited to go see my good friend Natasha Moni who’s reading from her Floating Bridge prize-winning new chapbook, Nation, tomorrow at Elliot Bay Books at 3 PM (a wonderful bookstore, but not very handicapped-friendly.) I haven’t socialized much since the latest flare, and even now I’m kind of worried about how normal I’ll seem, if I’ll have the energy to have a conversation afterwards, or stand long enough to chat with folks normally. I’m a very social person, so I’m excited to see my friends, but still a little anxious. It is funny how many things happen here on the same day – you can’t complain there aren’t enough choices for literary events here. Anyway, I hope to see you there!

Woodinville in the Fall

Since I’ve been taking it easy, I haven’t gotten out much since the hospital, but I wanted to document some of the beauty of ordinary fall days in Woodinville – local wineries, visiting deer, and changing colors. The one thing I didn’t snap but should have? A vineyard walk of a fully-costumed Wookie holding a wine glass.

Anyway, even with the bad things that happened this week, I couldn’t help but notice how beautiful the place I live is. I am thankful for that. I am thankful for poetry readings and deer and changing leaves, and for nice EMTs and ER nurses who know how to put in an IV the right way. I am thankful for the good days, and well, on the bad days, not as thankful, I’m just hoping to have as few of them as possible as I learn to manage my crazy health issues. I did write poems this week, send out poems, and even voted in the midterms! I started reading Murakami’s new novel, Killing Commendatore, at the hospital, and Glenn and I played Murakami bingo with the first two chapters: a missing wife, cats, mysterious dreams, pasta cooking, too many descriptions of women’s breasts, a preternaturally charming 13 year old girl: check, check, and check. I’m noticing the new poems I’ve been writing don’t go in the sixth book – they have a different tone, different subject matter, different mood. This means I have to start thinking about organizing the new poems pretty soon…

Escape Into Life Moon Feature Poems, Autumn Scenes from Seattle

Japanese Garden closeup of red leaves

Escape Into Life Moon Feature

Thank you to Escape Into Life for including a  art and poetry feature containing my poems about the moon and some gorgeous art work. And I promise you, these are not your old run of the mill moon poems. There are universes being torn asunder, menacing Blood Moons, magical nightflowers, and some gorgeous art work. Here’s the link and a sneek peek:

Escape Into Life Moon Feature by Jeannine Hall Gailey

Here’s a sneak peek (and isn’t that art beautiful?)

Glenn and I post with changing leaves at the Japanese Garden

Seattle Autumn Scenes – the Japanese Garden’s Turning Leaves

Seattle’s warm temps and sunshine have allowed a little more autumn exploration than usual, so we visited the Japanese Garden for the “Maple Festival.”

Usually by the time the leaves change, there’s a terrible wind gale storm and all the leaves are down, so it’s kind of nice to have this unusually sunny warm stretch.

Also, I was describing on Facebook how every time I have a bad stretch (like my long illness and multiple hospitalizations recently) I focus on a list of things that I want to do when I get better – going to the pumpkin farm, visiting the Japanese Garden and Arboretum, visit the zoo to see the new red panda babies (they’re not out yet, but I can’t wait) and visit La Conner. I was thinking about how focusing on the good things you want to do motivates me to do things like eat healthy, take vitamins, do my physical therapy exercises so I can get well enough to walk in aforesaid places.

 

 

Think good thoughts for me as I’m on this road to recovery. I was in the hospital again last night after 1. eating something I was allergic to and having a pretty violent reaction or 2. having food poisoning or 3. overdoing it with the sunshine and then the MS acting up but anyway it was a pretty miserable night and I am once again on a liquid diet for safekeeping. Ugh. I hate the up and down nature on my health stuff, some days feeling fine and then slam! A hammer reminder that my body isn’t always going to cooperate with me and my lofty goals of walking through parks with pumpkins etc. I hope you are all taking good care of yourselves. Take a little joy in the good days.

October Adventures, Playing Catch Up, Art Gallery Openings, and Autumn Downtime

Pumpkin Patch, Woodinville, with scarecrow

October Adventures

It’s been shockingly beautiful, cool and sunny. We entered October a bit worn out, honestly, so besides playing catch up from a month of illness and hospital trips, we decided to try to spend some time taking advantage of the good things going on around us. This shot was taken at the local farm stand that we get our apples, squash, and hatch chilies (!) from, with sunflowers, scarecrow, and pumpkin patch (if you squint you might be able to see Mt Rainier in the background too.)

My neighborhood is truly pretty ideal for autumn downtime. I even got Glenn to stop in a local winery and do a teensy bit of wine tasting! These shots of the dahlia garden at Matthews Winery.  And Glenn used some gorgeous delicata pink squash and local apples to make this ginger-maple pumpkin-apple bread. Perfect for the slightly chilly nights we’ve been having. And we got the chance to see the Chateau St. Michelle peacocks again, too, along with swarms of Canadian geese eating the grapes off the decorative vines in front of the winery.

Roq La Rue Re-Opens

There were a lot of wonderful things going on this week but one of them was the re-opening, after two years, of pop-goth-surrealist art gallery Roq La Rue. Glenn and I got dressed up and made our way downtown, checked out the art, and then went to some cool shops and a boutique ice cream shop, Salt & Straw, where Glenn tried their strawberry balsamic black pepper. The people watching at Roq La Rue, on top of the art, is fantastic, but it’s almost like Comic-Con in that no matter how I dress, I’m always a little bit underdressed. I almost came home with a very Halloween-appropriate black cat lamp with light beams coming out of his eyes. I tried to get a pic of us dressed up before we left because it’s so rare and the two of us dress up for an outing any more! Anyway, I was very happy one of my favorite Seattle art galleries is back.

Heartbreaking Storms and Climate Changes and Mid-terms

It was heart-breaking watching Hurricane Michael hit the East coast. My thoughts are with all the victims who are still struggling to get power and get rid of debris. There was also a very apocalyptic climate change report this week to remind us that things are not normal, and more violent hurricanes are supposed to be coming more frequently. With an administration rolling back protections for air, water, and radioactive pollution, remember to vote (and make sure you are registered to vote) in the midterms as more is at stake than just our present problems, but future problems caused by this government’s reckless behavior. (By the way, the most hilarious (and heart-stopping) thing for me as a science person on the new EPA web site is that “a small amount of radiation can be good for you, sort of like exercise.” This is absolutely 100 false balderdash, FYI. There is no end to the lies this government will push on its unsuspecting audience.)

Playing Catch-Up

I was also determined, since I lost a little over a month of writing and submitting time, to get back on track, so I sent out a couple of submissions, but I notice that the way my brain functions since the MS, I’m a little slower putting together submissions, making sure I’m following the guidelines of different journals…what used to take twenty minutes takes more than two hours now. My reading times have also slowed, although my vision didn’t get worse – it just takes my brain longer to process a poem, a page of prose. I should send my book manuscript out some more as well. I had to catch up on e-mails and phone calls, too. If I owe you something, a blurb or an e-mail, please send me a note to remind me. It’s also possible I’ve lost a lot of time watching Rita Hayworth movie marathons, planting things, watching hummingbirds and flickers and woodpeckers fight around my back deck, scanning Netflix for Halloween-appropriate programming, and well, just sleeping. I’m still waiting to get my “bounce” back, to get through the stack of books by the bed. My legs are still a little weak (I can now stand for a grand total of fifteen minutes at a time) so I’m taking short walks each day that I can to build them back up before the rainy season is upon us…which will probably be upon us sooner rather than latre. In the meantime, please go out and enjoy as much sunshine, leaf-turning, dahlia-strewn birdwatching as you can. Autumn downtime seems so decadent, to me – a time supposed to be a flurry of business, returning to school, coming back from vacation, paying bills, rearranging closets to reach coats and scarves and boots – but it feels the most necessary, too – extra sleep, extra vitamins, extra consumption of pumpkin and apple. It seems like good poetry-writing time. My own recent poems, I notice, have been full of death and dahlias.

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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