Overscheduled but Happy on a Rainy Weekend
This morning I woke up early (at the crack of a very grey dawn) to Skype-meet with a class of students in New York state (hi Dustin’s class!) and frighten them with stories of learning to shoot a gun in Tennessee when I was seven and the sexual connotations of the joystick. When will I learn to be more appropriate? Then I sped down to physical therapy (where my PT person recommends socializing less to relax my jaw and help it heal – whoops!) and then raced home to change and meet my friend, rising star Sci-fi/Fantasy writer Felicity Shoulders, for coffee in downtown Seattle. I just got home from a rainy, traffic-y drive after stopping off at our poetry bookstore, Open Books, for a copy of “Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets,” which looks fantastic.
Then I got the welcome news that Redactions had nominated my poem, “She Justifies Running Away, from the newest issue 13, for a Pushcart Prize. You can read all of this year’s nominees from Redactions here: http://redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp
Now I think I will have a hot bath and some cider while simultaneously catching up on some bad tv and reading magazines. Tomorrow I go into downtown again for the 3 PM Crab Creek reading at Elliot Bay Bookstore with contributors Erin Malone, Kevin Miller, Peter Pereira, Michael Schmeltzer, and Martha Silano. A lovely group, I think you’ll agree!
Jeannine 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.
