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 want to congratulate a friend and poet whose MS I’ve had the honor to work with, Jeff Walt, on winning the Gertrude Press chapbook contest for Vows. Jeff is an amazing poet and I’ve been lucky to read his work on and off for the past few years and I keep telling him, “It’s fantastic!” You have to buy his chapbook to see what I mean.
In odd news, see this camp for women who want to become “Alias”-style spies. The knife-fighting class sounds interesting; the “sexy dance” class just sounds funny.
There’s been a lot of “dust up” in the blogging world lately. Most of it just makes me feel depressed. There’s nothing worse than thinking about the financial and political aspects of MFAs. I hate worrying about money and prestige and fame and the poetry point system. I’m still a naive idealist in that respect, I’m afraid.
In good-things-coming-from bad, though, I’m excited that Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, motivated by frustration towards opportunties for women in the literary community (cough, AWP, cough) are starting their own women’s lit conference.
I think we’re leaning towards Napa as our next place of living. Bonus? It’s 14 percent cheaper than Carlsbad, according to some cost-of-living calculators.
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.
