The Importance of Your Writing Community – More Lessons from the Hunger Games, Catching Fire

It was just last night while reading some of the final letters of Flannery O’Connor (so sad to think about, that we see the end is coming and she keeps saying “I’m in no hurry to publish, I’ve got plenty of time…” and contemplating the Hunger Games (specifically, Catching Fire) that I was thinking about the importance of writing community to, yes, our survival in a (sometimes) cold and barren landscape of writing. (My first post, in case you are interested, on writing and lessons from The Hunger Games can be found here.)

Katniss’s support system – including her fellow players, her stylist, and her love interests – all play a key part in helping Katniss become a hero and surviving a set of games designed specifically to destroy her. Cinna’s magic wedding-dress-becoming-a-mockingjay represents a fantastic PR move that Katniss probably would never have thought of on her own, making her a rebel icon. Everyone in the Catching Fire games was trying to help Katniss, though often she didn’t recognize or appreciate the help she was getting, and didn’t actually like or trust at least half of the people helping her. Katniss becoming a hero to the masses was actually orchestrated by a group of people she didn’t even know behind the scenes. Isn’t that the way it is with writing success as well? If we’re going to succeed as writers, we need help from beyond our own small minds and reach – friends who watch out for us, critics who champion us, publishers who back our work – a network that will catch us when we fall, when we fail,  when we flame out. Like it or not, though writing may seem like the quintessential loner’s quest, it is actually quite often an activity that requires building and hanging onto a community in order to succeed.

Flannery O’Connor’s gigantic amount of correspondence with other writers represented her 1. isolation in a small town in Georgia where she remained often due to her lupus 2. her desire to reach out and communicate with the writing world despite that isolation. Her shares her good news and her struggles, her grumpy reactions to her reviews, her uncertainty about aspects of her work. She argues with people, encourages them, and keeps strenuously in touch with writers living thousands of miles away. She reviews and recommends books, offers congratulations, sends gifts. In this web of correspondence, we see her efforts to stay connected.

The writer’s life involves a lot of plain old rejection, being turned down for jobs and grants in ways that seem intensely personally hurtful, and those rare moments of celebrating good news – which are always less fun celebrating alone, or with people who don’t understand why an acceptance from one magazine is more exciting than an acceptance from another. It is important for us to reach out to other writers in our community – whether it’s meeting for coffee, favoriting a tweet, or reviewing a book of a writer we’ve never met but admire the work of. It’s important for us, like Katniss, to get over ourselves and maybe our personal prejudices and see that we are all in this together, that survival is only certain if we accept the help from those around us.

So go ahead – plan a meeting, a party, a get-together. Make a phone call, send an e-mail. Let others know how you are doing, or what you might need. Let them know you’ll support them too. Someday soon, you never know, you might need to be helicoptered to safety, and the people willing to do it might be around you right now, waiting for the signal.

Polishing up the CV and looking to the future

So, I realized I hadn’t updated my CV in a little while, and I’ve now officially quit working for National as a poetry instructor, so I’m looking to new vistas and possiblities! Looking into teaching positions at low-residency MFA programs, querying agents about memoirs – I’m entering new territory! Nerve-wracking, but good! And it helps me shake off the cobwebs, take a look at what I’ve been doing and what I want to be doing, and how to close the gap.

Updating the CV always makes me remember that even when it doesn’t feel like I’ve been very productive, there have actually been a lot of activities: readings, publications, reviews, etc. Which is reassuring. You always celebrate a little when you remember: oh, right, I did publish in that awesome journal I’d totally forgotten about. I did do x thing I’m really proud of. Good to keep records.

I’m also considering re-opening my poetry manuscript editing services just for the summer, even though the web site says I’m not taking any new clients right now. So if you have something and you’ve been wanting me to read it, now is the time to let me know! I actually have energy and enthusiasm right now, so jump! (Email me at jeannine.gailey at live dot com if you’re interested.)

Saw the movie Maleficent, which I loved. I thought the script was creative – I didn’t neccessarily see everything coming, the special effects were beautiful, and Angelina Jolie was wonderful in it – a lot of “eye-acting.” Movie studios, take note: when you have 1. a female lead, and 2. the story is about a heroine (or villainess)’s journey, instead of just about the heroine finding true love or whatever – guess what, you make more money!  So I hope this leads to more woman-centric stories in Hollywood. We do like to see movies, after all, we just don’t neccessarily want to see the same movies 14-year-old boys want to see. That’s the second movie I’ve seen in the theatres (though both were matinees) in the last month! Crazy! I notice that movies are very good at transporting me away from current stress and help me relax enought to see the big picture.

Then I came home, read a few pages of a book I’ll be reviewing soon (Matthea Harvey’s If the Tabloids are True What Are You?) and wrote two new poems, one of which I liked a lot. So relaxing = more creativity? My mother-in-law looks to be recovering as well as can be hoped and my little brother is hopefully going to be in Seattle soon, both of which are good developments (though the anxiety dreams continue…)

 

Beautiful Weather, Anti-‘s last issue, The Rumpus Review, Summertime

My ankle was better enough to be able to hobble around well enough yesterday to get out and enjoy the perfectly beautiful summer weather – it does seem summer has arrived early here (it doesn’t usually happen til after July 4) – 72 degrees, a bright breeze, lots of wildlife scampering around. A perfect day to be on the water. Too bad we do not live on the water, but there’s lots of it in driving distance. eaglekirk2014 j9kirkland

That’s Lake Washington in the background, and there’s that sneaky eagle again. Too bad we did not get pictures of our local osprey. a long-tailed chipmunk climbing a tree with a flicker and a flicker’s nest in it, and various small rabbits and ducks. Anyway, it’s hard to feel too anxious or upset with such a summertime wildlife/weather thing going on right outside your door.

In other news, Anti- magazine’s last issue went up today, along with my poem “Dorothy: If I Stayed in Kansas, I Knew my Future:”

http://anti-poetry.com/anti/gaileyje/

It’s a wonderful issue, so a big thank you to Steve Schroeder for putting it together, and all his hard work at his quirky, enjoyable online journal.

And the link has gone up to my review of Rachel Zucker’s The Pedestrians over at The Rumpus, too. So that’s live.

A big thank you to all of you who have been sending good thoughts and prayers to my mother-in-law – her latest blood work shows a lot of improvement, more than we could have hoped for, which is very cheering, and it seems my little brother in Thailand may be moving back to the States, somewhere close to here, hopefully, in the near future, so that’s two things worth celebrating! And less things giving me ulcers and nightmares! (Another end-of-the-world Buffy nightmare last night! Oh, you guys don’t get those?)

I’m pretty sure I should be outside again today as much as possible, with the birds chirping and sun shining and all. All deep thoughts will be put on hold til after I’ve spent at least sometime out in nature. (Besides playing in the dirt being good for us  – a bacteria in dirt increases seratonin levels in humans – I read yesterday that, true to Nausicaa and her forest-love, that trees and plants put out a chemical that literally makes us happy, which makes the Japanese idea of Shinrin Yoku (forest bathing) seem like a lot of sense. Being in nature truly does literally trigger chemical responses that makes us happier. So wishing you all a happier, nature-filled weekend…

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thailand, Author’s Notes, and Query Letters

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

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

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

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

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

 

Skagit River Poetry Festival Report, Mark Doty on Routines

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

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

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

Skagit River Poetry Festival – Where I’ll Be

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

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

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

tulips20142

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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