Dream Versus Reality: Confession
Ah, the dream of being a writer/poetry teacher. It’s very glamorous. In my head I am sitting somewhere like the garden of The Barefoot Contessa, in bare feet surrounded by flowering herbs. I am studiously and enthusiastically penning long notes to students, continually getting inspirations for my own poems as I do so, jotting notes down on personalized stationary that I carry with me at all times, along with a beautiful old-fashioned fountain pen. I am pretty sure I’m wearing some kind of floaty-but-perfectly tailored sundress. And the sun is shining.
Reality: I have had a nasty virus for four days, all of Memorial Day weekend in fact, so my days have gone something like this: try to grade a five-page final book paper, nap. Wake up, eat jello, drink water, take pills, try to make cogent comments on twenty-page chapbook. Nap. Try to make interesting comments on interview I’m working on for intelligent, academic blog. Look out window at rain. Drink broth my sweet husband made. Take my temperature. Nap. Wake up in a panic, send out online submission while balancing cat on my laptop. Grade two more papers. Ad infinitum.
All my glamour remains on the page, and in my imagination, I’m afraid.
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.
