Hey, dear readers! Well, AWP Atlanta is coming soon – I’ve already starting getting stuff together, shampoo, toothpaste, shoes. Is it going to be warm enough to pack sandals, what poems should I read during my five minutes at the Frock You reading, etc.
But, at the top of my mind, I have another aunt in the hospital (this time my mother’s oldest sister) with a serious lung infection (she has emphysema, so every infection could be life threatening.) My mom flew out to see her at the hospital, and is currently cleaning her sister’s house, because her husband is also sickly and can’t do a lot of that kind of stuff anymore (open heart surgery, passing-out headaches, etc.) I really love this aunt and uncle, who have always been funny and kind, and it’s hard to see them – still in their sixties – in so much physical hardship. I always give too much advice when I’m anxious – air-purifiers, humidifiers, electric teapots, organic house cleaners that don’t bother my aunt’s lungs. Advising my mom and uncle to press the doctors when they say they don’t know, and don’t know how to find out what’s wrong. That’s never a good sign. I’ve had pneumonia more than ten times myself (*thank goodness for the pneumonia vaccine – I haven’t had a case since I had the shot a few years ago) I know the antibiotics backwards and forwards, the pros and cons of steroids, the enemies – mold, dust, other people’s coughs – of fragile lungs. Anyway, whenever medical problems arise, I feel the need to be there, to hold hands, to ask doctors questions myself, to make sure the nurses don’t put cleaning fluids in the IV (that actually happened here at a Seattle hospital a few years ago.) It’s my control-freak nature. I want to save everyone. I want to hold them myself to keep them safe.
Got our taxes done this weekend with husband G’s help. He has been putting all the forms in TaxCut as they have come in, so it wasn’t that much work beyond adding up receipts, figuring out the sales tax deduction, things like that. A relief to not have to worry about that at least any more.
Still no place to live, and we have to be out of our current place of residence by May. No steady job. I don’t feel very settled. Anyone feel like putting a nice poet and her husband up for a year in their Seattle-area condo/house/etc? Will write poetry for rent? We Tauri (the plural of Taures? Taureses?) like to have things settled. But everything is up in the air. Last night I dreamed I was on top of Whistler mountain, riding a ski lift, with no coat. Later I dreamed I was attacked by multiple killer octopi, pulling me underwater and when I woke up I was coughing and coughing. A sympathy asthma attack, perhaps.

I was really looking forward to seeing two of my fave Seattle peeps read tonight at Open Books, the lovely and talented Rebecca Loudon and super-smart Ron Starr, but unfortunately, my sciatic nerve-back injury thingy was killing me and I ended up flat on my back again this afternoon after a day or two of tentative walking/bending/etc regular life. Argh! I bet they rocked the house. You know what is NOT good for romance on Valentine’s Day? Back injury. Sigh! And now I might have to get some xrays too. I’ve got mild scoliosis and they think I might have done something to a disk (disc?). I’m feeling 73 instead of 33!! I’m hoping to be walking tall by AWP with no problem – two weeks from now.
In the mail today, a contributor copy of Diner, with a review in it by me and a beautifully-written review of my book my someone named “Susan Frickshorn” who I believe to be wonderful blogger-poet Suzanne Frickshorn in a possible double/alias. Thanks Suzanne! I felt very honored!
In other news, have a happy Valentine’s Day tomorrow – do something fun, eat some roses, enjoy candy, in general.

First of all, thanks to all of you who left wonderful responses to my last blog post – funny, encouraging, thought-provoking. I should always post about rejection and depression – I get such good insights! I injured my back last week right after the post, and had to be away from the computer, basically flat in bed doing nothing. Ironically, this made me feel much better and more productive.

For those of you interested in Kate Greenstreet’s series of interviews – here’s a switch – Kate is on the other end of the interview table in this! (PDF file: http://www.saintelizabethstreet.org/iss5/greenstreet_intrvw.pdf)

Chapbook Mini-Review

Lana Ayer’s chapbook, Love is a Weed, from Finishing Line Press.

Lana exhibits both wit and passion in this collection, which has poems that imagine Dorothy touring Italy after her return to Kansas, Atlas’ wife controlling the weather, Violet after George Bailey commits suicide in an alternate “Wonderful Life” reality. In between myth and fairy tale are poems of a couple’s travel from first love to affair to breakup, and all the stops in between. Lana is at her best when her dry sense of humor and turn of phrase work together, as in “Dorothy Does Italy:” “Jolted from her reverie by a timid waiter with tinder-blue eyes,/ she nods yes for another espresso and wonders if tonight’s the night/ her ruby dancing shoes will raise one hell of a memorable gale.”

I sent out two submissions which took what seemed like superheroine strength, to Swink and Alaska Quarterly. Now I am going to shape up and print up my second book manuscript for another round of submissions.

Here’s a link to Rebecca Loudon’s Sylvia Plath party!

And again, no pressure, dear readers, but there’s a free copy of my book hanging around with Galatea Resurrects and it’s waiting for a reviewer… http://grarchives.blogspot.com/2007/08/available-for-review.html

Self-Promotion, Bellingham-Style – Children’s books for various holidays – and an interview with Catherine Brady

All right, Bellingham-ians! We need a few more people to sign up for the Jeannine Hall Gailey/Martha Silano tag team Village Books Workshop or we’re going to have to cancel!!
You have til Feb 5 to sign up – but the sooner the better – here’s a description of the workshop:
Time: Tuesday, February 6, 2007 6:00 PM
Location: VB Readings Gallery
Memory & Mythology: Transforming the Personal into Poetry.
Join poets Jeannine Hall Gailey and Martha Silano for a night of workshopping (one poem by each participant will be discussed), two short generative writing exercises, and the sharing of work by poets (such as Louise Gluck and Li-Young Lee) who transform personal experience into powerful and moving poetry. Jeannine Hall Gailey is the author of Becoming the Villainess and Martha Silano is the author of Blue Positive.

Call Village Books today at Tel: (360) 671-2626 to reserve your spot!

A thought-provoking interview with Catherine Brady (bringing up such salient post-MFA worries as: how can I get a job teaching if I have no teaching experience if no one will let me teach because I have to teaching experience? And what about the state of book publishing today?) on the After the MFA blog.

I’ve been a little blue since my Aunt passed away on Monday night. I realized that even though I believe in an afterlife, it doesn’t always help – I still can’t visit my Aunt any more, or call her on the phone, or see her IM ID pop up on my computer. My husband G took me out to cheer me up, since I won’t be able to go to the funeral, to celebrate her life. My most vivid childhood memory is when my Aunt flew my whole family out to visit her in Colorado, the first time I’d been there, for Easter. This was when my Dad was a struggling assistant professor with four kids and my mom was still in school, so we would never have been able to afford a trip like this. The sky was beautiful and clear and the mountains were so unlike the low, tree-covered Smoky Mountains that I was used to. She bought me and my brother these amazing sugar-eggs, with little scenes inside, just like my favorite Easter children’s book, “The Country Bunny and the Little Gold Shoes.” (It’s a story of feminism, hope, struggle, and ultimately, love. Check it out if you have kids, or even if you don’t!)
This reminds me: For Valentine’s Day, go out and get a copy of the beautifully-illustrated children’s book, “The Valentine’s Cat.” It’s about a starving artist whose life is changed by a chimney-sweep cat with a curious mark on his forehead. And no, it’s not the mark of the beast. Here’s a link to The Valentine Cat on Amazon

More mini-reviews in the next few days…

I’ve been researching rents, neighborhood crime statistics, and pet policies. Not for fun. You guessed it, we are moving – again. The nice people who own our condo actually want to live it in now, so we have to skedaddle and find a new place to rent. In Seattle I never hope to own unless I win the lottery or the MacAurthur or something (practically the same odds, I bet.) It’s overwhelmingly expensive. We have moved about six times in seven years, which can be a little wearing. Although, we have gotten to visit some cool neighborhoods – Bainbridge Island, where I commuted to work by ferry, and Sammamish Plateau, when it still was overrun by quail and deer instead of condos and strip malls, which gets about five times the snow as other neighborhoods. I hope to find another neighborhood for a more extended visit. Please God, at least two years this time? I hate boxing and sorting and packing and all the discombobulation that goes with moving so often. Although it forces you to break ties with your stuff – a healthy exercise.

If you or some poet you like lives in Bellingham, be sure to sign up for Martha Silano and my workshop at Village Books on Tuesday February 8th. (I know, $20 a pop for a workshop is steep – but it’s two poets for the price of one! And I have a handout with real poems in it!) After the workshop we’ll be hanging out and getting drinks and enjoying the town.

My aunt is in a coma but breathing on her own. She’s two years older than my Dad. Thanks for those of you who’ve sent good wishes. Things like this are so unnerving. I don’t like losing people.

A few mini-reviews of chapbooks I’ve been sent or acquired:

Alan King, Transfer. This small self-published chapbook from a 25-year-old slam poet in Maryland defies expectation – the poems don’t let the reader off easy, they shine lights on issues of race and class and gender, and there’s a great moment when men in a barbershop consider 9/11 with the right balance of unease and grace. The juxtaposition of casual overheard language and song lyrics and the prickly insights of the internal life of the speaker make for interesting reading. When talking about violence between men and women in a poem called “perceptions,” the speaker imagines himself “protecting her/ from anglers she will mistakenly see/ as angels” Other poets make appearances in this chapbook (AI, Maya Angelou) as do nightclub scenes, Al Green, and, oddly, Steve Irwin. Entertaining and slightly caustic, I look forward to more of King’s work.

Kristy Bowen, The Archaeologist’s Daughter, Moon Journal Press. I was a huge fan of another of Bowen’s chapbooks, Errata, and so was happily anticipating this work. This collection, published two years before Errata, is more narrative and less experimental than Errata, without the feel of collage in that chapbook, but it brings up many of the same themes. Bowen conjures up the life of a young woman (perhaps the speaker’s grandmother) at the turn of the last century, examines archetypes of women transforming (Mermaids, Daphne) and women who bring destruction (Witches, Guinevere, Helen of Troy.) The same sense of a femininity singed with rage and oppressive shadows sang through this collection. I can’t wait to get ahold of Feign. Kristy Bowen is the next big thing. Trust me.

Wanton Textiles by Reb Livingston and Ravi Shankar, No Tell Books. This collaboration between two poets has the immediacy of reading someone else’s heated e-mail exchanges, but with a heightened imagination and lyricism you would generally not expect in an e-mail. The two poets playfully employ sensual imagery and undercut this with unexpected comedy. Some of the entries read like travelogue, others like lovers’ confessions filled with flip innuendo; for instance, “My Wilted Turtledove, my mate in linguistic perpetuity, you are the impetus for lace and dictionaries, you are divide and tangled…Hope you have shoe soles thin enough for this./ Love, Reb” and the next page’s response: “The whole shoal charges changed. Halleluiah! I’ll ogle you from the next drifting feather./ Yours, Prometheus in Drag” A fun collection!

A weird day. It was my little brother’s 31st birthday – Happy Birthday Mike!
One of my father’s older sisters had a heart attack.
My college roommate (hi, Dr. Tara!) wrote me out of the blue, along with one of my co-workers from Virginia! (Did I mention how many of the friends of my youth are doctors? Like, a dozen. I am seriously the black sheep of my set. Poet. How many lives are poets saving? Of course, poets like Dr. C Dale Young and Dr. Peter Pereira are excluded.)
And a little poetry news in the midst of all this – one of the poems from my book, “Persephone and the Prince Meet Over Drinks,” will be anthologized in the 2007 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Pretty exciting.
And, Steve Mueske’s Poetry 365 will feature the poem “My Little Brother, in Parts” this week. Thanks Steve!

But enough about me – go congratulate Suzanne!

Ladies, He’s taken…but his press is looking for Ms. Right…

Steve Mueske’s Three Candles Press is looking to read manuscripts by female poets!

Thanks so much to all well-wishers and congratulators. It is all much appreciated, especially in my anxiety-ridden current post-MFA state.

More lunatic ravings of a recent MFA Graduate:
One goal of the MFA is to teach writers the ability to be self-critical. True or false?

The ability to be self-critical seems like an absolute necessity to a writer. I don’t know exactly how to teach it or how I learned it, but I suspect it has to do with my mother, fresh from her BA in Journalism, covering my second grade book reports with red ink, which made me cry, because as a kid, you just want your mom to say, “It’s terrific, sweetie,” not have her try to make you a really good writer when you’re like, eight years old. On the plus side, I swiftly became a straight-A English student under the influence of my mother’s red ink. I think it’s the same when you grow up and write things (poetry, fiction, blogs, whatever) and you want someone to tell you “it’s so terrific,” but really you are still learning and need to be trying to push yourself to be better all your life, because there’s no single second when you’re going to be the world’s most perfect-ever writer, and even if there were such a second, you wouldn’t know it and no one would tell you. I mean, I think T.S. Eliot peaked at thirty, and went downhill (a lot of other people argue otherwise) and do you think Eliot writing Prufrock etc was thinking, “This is the best thing I’m ever going to write?” I mean, that would make you really crazy, right?

So, in my experience, the MFA was a way to learn not to be more self-critical but more self-exploratory (not in a sexual way, you dirty readers! Shame on you!) To seek out what makes me “me” and put that into poems. To put more of my world into poems. To try to write more adventurous poems, new kinds of poems, about new things. To never be satisfied, but at the same time, to have more fun with my writing.

On another note, going out to dinner with G to celebrate the first day on a new position at his company, and then, tonight, a new episode of Heroes! With more T-Rex than any previous episode!

Unrelated Notes: Warning, Written While Groggy

Anne McCaffrey was inducted into the Seattle Science Fiction Museum Hall of Fame today. While she gets lots of accolades for her series Dragonflight, but her best work, in my opinion, was her Dragonsinger trilogy for young adults.

I think I’m still recovering from my graduation residency. I’ve been sleeping a ton and I still feel groggy, tired. Also I’ve been anemic (with low ferritin as well) this past month or so, which does nothing for energy levels (PS I have a chronic bleeding disorder, so this isn’t really shocking. Just annoying. Usually eating the right things brings me back into balance in a week or so. I’m addressing this issue this minute with french toast and scrambled eggs. With vitamin C! Eggs have iron, right?) Good thing I’m not a marathon runner in my spare time! Anyway, I’m putting off any overdue partying (you know who you are! Sorry!) for a few more days.

If you are still interested in reviewing Becoming the Villainess and just haven’t gotten a chance, Galatea Resurrects has a copy available for review. I’m writing my first review for them as we speak.

In other poetry news, good friend Jennifer Thorton (Box-of-Birds) lent me the slam-bang magazine of scientific and nature-oriented poetry, Isotope. It’s pretty cool. I like discovering new magazines.

So, if anybody has post-MFA advice for me, (you know, what to do in the first six months, how to keep building steam, etc…) lay it down in the comments field.

The Golden Globes…of Poetry?
Thanks to Mary Agner for sending me this link to the lit mag Siren. They have a page on the Best New Poets and Books of 2006. (A great name for a lit mag, too!) Among the best new poets listed, bloggers Jenni Russell, Teresa Ballard, Kate Greenstreet, and Oliver de la Paz appear…and Dorianne Laux (thanks Dorianne!) listed Becoming the Villainess as one of the best books of 2006!! Well, I would say Facts About the Moon is up on my list of best books of 2006 too!
That’s a nice thing to come home to, after graduating and having one of those two-hour panic attacks about “what the heck I’m going to do next with this darn MFA?” on the ride home last night…
And this morning, I woke up to Seattle covered with snow. It’s a freakin’ Christmas card out here!

Today is graduation. My husband G and my friend Lana are up to celebrate it with me. Seemingly appropriately, the sun in shining, and although I’m exhausted – the bad beds, bad food and grueling hours can be taxing – I feel happy that it’s finished. I’ve enjoyed the readings, the talks, even teaching the class and having the thesis review were pretty fun. Highlights – Sandra Alcosser’s and Dorianne Laux’s readings, sitting by fiction faculty Claire Davis while she drew sketches of the backs of the heads of other faculty, talking to Valerie Miner and Peter Sears, listening to the new students’ readings – really good. We have a new cadre of girl-power writers – mostly prose writers – but maybe some of them will convert to poetry. Oh, and standing on my balcony and watching a comet over the ocean’s horizon. And running through the snowy sand the morning it snowed. I forget how magical snow can be, and how I’m really more of a cold-weather than warm weather person. Marvin Bell kept saying how I should get a Phd. LOL. Maybe I need a short break from school first.
I haven’t written much since I’ve been here, and trying to keep up on my freelance work in the middle of the ten-day crush of events has been tough. But hopefully I’ll write some new poems when I get home. That’s usually how it is for me – I’m more of a contemplative writer, I need those hours-long stretches of free time, apparently. We had a good panel on publishing yesterday, I got to talk to Christine from Lost Horse (who’s advice on starting my own publishing conern was “It’s like having a baby – if you think too much you won’t do it. I say, jump in!”) and Michael from Copper Canyon. I’m even more excited to start my own magazine and book publishing thing after this. I think I’m going to try an internet quarterly with a print version yearly, and then maybe one or two books a year. Still going back and forth on the POD thing.
Also, nagging at the back of head is the notion I still need to buy tickets to Atlanta for AWP (check out this awesome reading!) I’m trying to talk Tom from Steel Toe into having Mary Biddinger and I do a book signing together at the Steel Toe Books table. I think that would be much more fun than standing there by myself. Also, I have to represent Pacific at the table on Saturday. So, it seems important that I actually get there. Which, from Seattle, is proving to be complicated. Very few direct or inexpensive flights. Oh, curse you, overly complicated and expensive air travel! If only I was like my friend Alaskan ER doctor Kathy McCue, I’d be able to just hop in my own plane and fly myself there.