Two days and counting…
Well, the time has come to leave San Diego. I just saw my doctor and got my records, got a teeth cleaning and my dental records, and got my hair cut (while being admonished for leaving Carlsbad too soon by my very sweet hairdresser.) My apartment is nothing but boxes now – my toaster was missing this morning when I looked for it, and Glenn couldn’t remember where he packed it. My poetry office is one of the last things to be packed – I’ve been sending out work right up until the last minute. I’ve put in address changes with my PO box and my post office. We called the cable company, the phone, company, the electric company, to set up stuff for the new apartment. So much busy work to moving! I confess I haven’t written a poem for a couple of weeks. We did manage to squeeze in a quick visit to the San Diego Zoo Wild Animal Park to say goodbye to the meerkats, the cheetahs, and the lorikeet house. (The lorikeets were a bit too enthusiastic when we fed them, and had a gang fight right on my bare arm!) The weather has been so warm – mid-eighties – I barely believe it’s mid-September. Eek!
Onward, to Napa! If you need my new address or phone number, drop me an e-mail! Have to admit Glenn and I are looking forward to the trees and even a little bit of rain…I’m hoping to make new friends, enjoy a little better physical health, and get to know a new part of California. I promise I’ll be back to talking about poetry again soon…
I’m definitely in a melancholy space. I’ve been running around like mad doing last minute things before the move – a physical, a haircut, getting prescriptions filled, then getting the stomach flu – not fun! Of course, we’re taking loads of things – books to the used bookstores, clothes to Goodwill – out of the garage since we won’t have a garage in our next place. After a dazzling set of sunny September days (during which some of my Ohio family and friends were without water, electricity, or internet because of hurricane-wind-storms!) the rain and grey skies have returned to Seattle. And all the goodbyes to friends are a little hard. I hate goodbyes.
Oh yes, a shameless plea: my dear Seattle-area friends, if you’re free on the 25th, we’d love some help loading up our truck! Pizza and love to all who apply 🙂
And a little good news – on September 22nd, the autumnal equinox, Seattle NPR affiliate KUOW will re-broadcast the show “The Beat” that features me reading Becoming the Villainess at Open Books. So tune in if you missed it the first time!
I’m also re-reading Rachel Zucker’s Bad Wife Handbook and Beth Ann Fennelly’s Unmentionables for an upcoming essay. And, I’m still trying to figure out the ins and outs of the software used by the college where I’ll start teaching in two weeks.
I’ve had so little poetry news, either electronic or snail mail, lately…although the stack of “to review” poetry books on my office shelf – now to be packed up until goodness knows when – makes me a little depressed. I can’t review the books as fast as they’re coming in! It’s madness, I tell you! Seriously, there are a lot of good books on the shelf. But they’ll just have to wait til after the move.
I can’t believe in a week we’ll be on our way to San Diego! We’re renting a little one-bedroom in a northern suburb, about two miles in from the ocean. Hope there won’t be any wildfires this year. Crazy sunshine, here we come?
Now I can focus on…moving? Eek!
So, I am feeling much better (thanks to a few doses of antibiotic) and the Port Townsend Writers conference is officially over, so I can get back to regular life. Regular life, right now, equals figuring out:
1. Where to move (city) – looking for hot, dry climates for my asthma. I have to take this breathing stuff seriously for a little while until my lungs get back into working shape.
2. Where to move (neighborhood) – checking Craigslist for rents, etc. If anyone one has any recommendations for neighborhoods around Scottsdale/Phoenix (the most likely city contender at this time) I am all ears.
3. Looking for possible work in the area (also appreciate any tips in that arena…)
4. Getting rid of some stuff from the house so we can move only what we have to (like turtles with our house on our backs)
5. Organizing garage sale (??)
6. Getting ready for family visits from my parents and then my little brother and his wife.
7. Where to maybe send some work out? Waiting for various checks I am owed? Nervously whittling on my two manuscripts or trying to work out some new poems?
8. Wonder why I am having pain in my neck?
Poetry is a weird ride. Sometimes I feel like, yes, I am making a difference, writing poems is really worth it when someone reads them and gets them and maybe it helps them a little bit. Then other times I feel like I am working on some antiquated art form no one cares about and certainly no one wants to pay for so why am I doing it?
- At November 12, 2007
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Moving Time
9
Moving Time…You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here
Moving again? Well, by now it’s become old hat. Since 1998 I’ve moved…let’s see, Cincinnati to Virginia, Virginia to Seattle…9 times. I’d like to point out that’s nine times in less than ten years. I don’t recommend that kind of behavior. It’s expensive and really puts your writing life into disarray. For instance, right now I’m desperately grabbing copies of Margaret Atwood, Dorianne Laux, and Matthea Harvey’s books for my reviews, in case I need to quote something from one of their earlier books, as my husband deconstructs the poetry bookcase and packs my books (there go the anthologies!) into bins. All around me are boxes, boxes with shoes and dishes and life’s every day chutney-of-stuff. Hard to write when the dust hasn’t settled, the dust of the mind, I mean.
I moved around a lot as a kid, too. My Dad, looking to land that ever-elusive tenure-track professor of Engineering position, moved us (four kids and wife, plus, sometimes, animals) from – let’s see – from Missouri to Yale U to UCLA to U of Tennessee to U of Cincinnati, where he still teaches. As a kid I used to think everyone moved as much, and as dramatically (my parents often finding a place to live at the last minute, giving us a week or two notice, packing ourselves into moving trailers, driving 21 hours a day on route to the new place) as my family did. When I found out there were people who stayed in the same place their whole life, I felt sorry for them. I thought they were really missing out – the new friends you’re forced to make, new scenery to admire or grumble about, the new horizon – plus the whole self-reinvention thing you get to try out.
Now, I’m not so sure. I think moving so much may have done something to my mental processes, the way I process memories of places and people. I often don’t put as much mental or emotional energy into getting attached to new places or people as I probably should – investing the kind of emotion neccessary – after all, in the back of my mind, I’m pretty sure I’ll be leaving as soon as I’ve started to get used to them. Everything physical is temporary – that is a lesson I have definitely learned by heart.
So will the new place be Home? In the words of OK Go, “So here I go, here I go, here I go again…”
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.
