As a young teenager, one of the only things I liked about living in Ohio were the beautiful November sunsets. The baleful orange glow on the horizon…
Yesterday there was a beautiful sunset, but the baleful orange glow on the horizon wasn’t from a big ball of flame in the sky, but a wildfire on Camp Pendleton, a Marine base a few miles from our house. It put out a plume of smoke that could be seen from fifty miles away at least. Welcome to California! It is a land of natural disasters.
On the plus side, the watermelons are $1.50 a piece at the local market and avocadoes $2 for a sack full. With the economy the way it is, well, at least we’ll be able to afford to eat!
I’ve been a little discouraged about my two book manuscripts lately. I feel like the checks just keep going out and nothing comes back in. Not good economics. I’ve also has a string of rejections lately, then a punctuation mark of two acceptances in two days. Sometimes I feel like the poetry world takes so much (volunteer work, subscribing, writing reviews, checks to contests and open submissions, rejection slips) and gives back…well, not so much.
The Santa Ana winds are approaching.

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.


