A brief trip to Oregon and Kelli’s big news

I am back from a two-and-a-half day quick trip down to Forest Grove, Oregon, to see some old friends – my former advisers, old friends (among them, writers Michelle Bitting, Felicity Shoulders, Rusty Childers, Lisa Galloway, Leslie What, and a host of others,) and it was fun to meet some of the new students too. Patricia Smith was there – one of my favorite practitioners of persona poetry – and the guy that wrote “The Financial Lives of the Poets” which I happened to pick up at an airport one time – and I got to see Kwame Dawes read. That was fun. Bonnie Jo Campbell gave me a tattoo at a wine bar. I’d explain that last sentence, but because I am super geeky, you probably already know it was temporary.

I also saw four white egrets – a bird I thought I had left behind in California, but that I was happy to see this far north – a tree with wild turkeys on all its branches – and I had my first ever experience with someone stealing gas out of my car. (Forest Grove is, besides being a cute little college town, a huge meth center full of tweakers. I remember walking past a police shootout at a meth bust one time on the way to class some seven or eight years ago.)

And now, for Kelli’s big news. Her second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, which I had the pleasure of reading when it was still in manuscript form, has just won the Foreward Magazine Gold Book of the Year Award. Go over to Facebook or her blog and congratulate her!