She Returns to the Floating World – Webbish6

Say Anything Thursday

Jeannine Gailey — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 16:43:00 +0000

September 1, or Say Anything Day!

Well, for all you folks who are still in love with Say Anything, Cameron Crowe has posted new deleted scenes from the original script on his blog. I love this movie more now than I did when I first watched it, because I understand some of the subtext of talking about success in blue collar, Boeing-dependent Puget Sound. (This was pre-Microsoft-taking-over-Redmond, of course.)

It’s September, so no more “it’s August, the last summer month in the Northwest” procrastination is allowed. In the last 24 hours, I revised my “Robot Scientist’s Daughter” manuscript, updated the acknowledgments page (three accepted poems since last month!) and sent out a packet of poems. This makes me feel like less of a slacker and more like a real writer.

I am still working on my gigantic job application for desired academic job #1, and I’ve gotten into a sticky wicket where I’m wondering whether the sample syllabus should be my actual syllabus from classes I’ve taught or something else? (Anyone out there with advice, I’d be grateful to hear! Like, do they really need all of the grading and ethics information on there, or just the content stuff?) It also requires a writing sample (do I use poems from both books, or new work?) and a letter of something called a “commitments to creative writing and poetics” statement (no idea what something like that is supposed to contain. And I call myself a book critic!) Whew! My tech writing job applications are way easier to do.

I’ve been angsty about whether I’m doing enough to promote the new book, and how much is too much, and how many readings to schedule and where, and I realized that though having a book come out is something to celebrate, it can also provoke a lot of anxiety. My first Seattle reading will be on the 25th of September at Open Books, my very favorite bookstore of all time, so if you’re my friend and will be Seattle that day, come by and wish me luck! Or better yet, stay for the reading (at 3 PM.) I’m putting together the reading list for that, too, and practicing the new poems out loud. I heard Obama will be in our fair town that day, and I told him it would only be a 45 minute reading, and afterwards we could go out for gelato, so I hope he shows I think it would be good for poetry and for presidents if presidents went to more poetry readings. Plus, I’ll read about politically important subjects like nuclear environmental challenges. Fun for everyone!

Today I’m nervous also about going to the dentist for multiple fillings (ouch!) and excited about seeing my friend N who is back in town tomorrow. It’s always good to see old friends. Not sure I can say the same about the fillings!

Exciting Deliveries, Interview in Womens Quarterly Conversation, Guest Blog Post and Seeing Old Friends

Jeannine Gailey — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:59:00 +0000

Yes, this is the first little author copy batch of She Returns to the Floating World that showed up in my mailbox! I have to admit that other pictures may have been taken, including one that may or may not have included a pink rhinestone tiara. However, I am not posting that picture. I will, however, post a picture in which my cat Shakespeare shamelessly flirts with the camera next to my box of books.

And I’m very pleased to post a link to the very interesting interview series at Women’s Quarterly Conversations, which just interviewed me (and also features writers like Katie Farris, Anne Waldman and Patricia Fargnoli.) Here’s the link: http://womensquarterlyconversation.wordpress.com/2011/06/20/profiles-in-poetics-jeannine-hall-gailey/

Then read the interviews with the other writers, because they are super smart-sounding!

Because I am everywhere all at once these days, I’ve also got a guest blog post up at the magazine Trachodon’s blog on giving a reading!

I’m going to see some friends from my MFA program this week, and I’m looking forward to catching up with them. Yay for seeing old friends.

Father’s Day Poems

Jeannine Gailey — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 15:09:00 +0000

Interesting how fathers show up in poems. Kelli Agodon’s second book, Letters from the Emily Dickinson Room, has several great poems about fathers in it (here’s a link to one of them.) Spencer Reece has a poem about his father who worked at Oak Ridge (!! – Just like my “Robot Scientist’s Daughter” series) in the latest issue of Poetry. Spencer Reece, are we long-lost twins?

She Returns to the Floating World does dwell on my relationships with guys – mostly my brothers and husband, but it has a few poems where my father turns up as well. (My new manuscript, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter” is really a tribute to my father.)

So here is a poem for Father’s Day from my new book:

Chaos Theory

Elbow-deep in the guts of tomatoes,
I hunted genes, pulling strand from strand.
DNA patterns bloomed like frost.

Ordering chaos was my father’s talisman;
he hated imprecision, how in language
the word is never exactly the thing itself.

He told us about the garden of the janitor
at the Fernald Superfund site, where mutations
burgeoned in the soil like fractal branchings.

The dahlias and tomatoes he showed to my father,
doubling and tripling in size and variety,
magentas, pinks and reds so bright they blinded,

churning offspring gigantic and marvelous
from that ground sick with uranium.
The janitor smiled proudly. My father nodded,

unable to translate for him the meaning
of all this unnatural beauty.
In his mind he watched the man’s DNA

unraveling, patching itself together again
with wobbling sentry enzymes.
When my father brought this story home,

he never mentioned the janitor’s
slow death from radiation poisoning,
only those roses, those tomatoes.

Happy Father’s Day. Love, Jeannine

Poets and Artists, Biker Bars, and More Prep for the Book Release

Jeannine Gailey — Sun, 29 May 2011 02:08:00 +0000

First of all, I want to say that I have really felt blessed to spend time with interesting people in the last few days. I had a good talk with my poet-friend-in-the-Bay-area Natasha (featured in this article on a 14 Hills reading in SF Weekly, with amusing results) and then had a coffee meeting with artist Deborah Scott who talked in a fascinating way about the artistic process of her paintings (see a few of them here) which reminded me of all the ways that poets and artists work in common. We looked at Tarot cards and talked fairy tales, which was really fun.

But Natasha reminded me that she had been reading my blog and didn’t see the full title of my upcoming second book anywhere! Egads, PR disaster! She Returns to the Floating World, due out officially at the end of July, has arrived in ARC (advanced reader copy) form. Contact Kitsune Books (contact at kitsunebooks dot com) for a copy! You can pre-order it now too. I got a copy of the ARC and have become so excited about the physical artifact of the new book – I mean, I can’t imagine getting so excited about the launch of an e-book, can you? Seeing the cover, the back, the little ISBN number…yes, I’m a paper-book-geek all right.

And those of you who’d like to know what this second book is all about? Well, one of the Tarot cards I picked up while visiting with Deborah was a picture of a young woman holding a lion by the mouth. One of the interpretations of the card is about how a person interacts with their animal nature, especially a woman – the being inside us that is instinctive, fierce, blood and lust. That is one of the themes of the new book – one of my abiding interests, including how to be heroic, is the idea of the transforming woman, in between states, from fox or willow tree or seal or dragon and back into a human body again. The book has a series of poems about little brothers and big sisters, another about the frustrations and beauties of married life, and a third about the dangers to our earth, the apocalypse. It is also a book about the intersections between Japanese and American folk and pop cultures.

More About Japan

Jeannine Gailey — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:26:00 +0000

Yesterday they declared a nuclear disaster on the scale of Chernobyl in Japan (more here from the BBC )
And here’s a little bit about risk and probability and what we can learn from Fukushima – thanks for the link from Dorianne Laux.

The bottom line is, for companies, human costs are usually not as important as profits, and therefore, nuclear stuff isn’t built as safely as it should be.

Roland Kelts writes a beautiful meditation here on how physical distance from the tragedy has been affecting him: http://japanamerica.blogspot.com/2011/04/disaster-and-distance.html

Disaster narratives have been woven into the fabric of Japan’s art – ancient prints of giant waves hanging in museums, numerous tsunami-savior stories told to children, stone tablets set in the ground warning people not to build below a certain point. The famous Gamera and Godzilla movies, where the monsters were metaphors all about the ravages of the nuclear threat. I heard several versions of the following story, called “The Burning Rice Fields,” while I was researching “She Returns to the Floating World.” Here is one version of it I found online. The version I originally heard involved some self-sacrificing cooperation between an elderly farmer and a fox, and it inspired this poem from “She Returns to the Floating World.”:

“The Fire of Foxes”

In another story a man lights a fox on fire to save others, to warn them of tsunami. The fox is a willing partner, burning brightly in the night to tell the village and his own people to flee. The men and foxes see the fire and run. The water comes and swallows the burning fox, the old farmer who lit him, and all the farmland. But the families of fox and man are safe. The rice smolders underwater. The fox is rewarded with eternal life; his eyes and tail become stars in the sky. At least that is the version I have learned by heart.

Why I Write About Japan, with links, Part I

Jeannine Gailey — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 17:30:00 +0000

When Asked Why I Write Poems About Japanese Mythology
— A letter from the suburbs of Seattle to the suburbs of Tokyo

I will send my voices out over the water
where the same cedars that litter my coast
used to tower over yours. Once green,
your cities have nibbled forests into bonsai.
Our hinoki trees are shipped across the ocean
for your sacred temples now.
Postcards of volcanoes rise from a blue sky
in the background of our homes, we share
zones of tsunami, seasons of weeping cherry.

I read about women’s spirits
haunting peony lanterns in the forest.
Men follow them, fall in love
with women long dead. In shallow graves
rotted with tree roots, they still sing.
And here in pages hammered
from your language into mine,
sometimes with clumsy fists,
I have listened to the bush-warbler
mourn her children, the fox-wife’s eyes
in the darkness have warned me
of the growling of dogs and fire.
And when they disappear in silence,
it is not really silence. Their echoes
burn themselves into stone,
into the living screens of my childhood,
fill my mouth with ghosts.

Ghosts sit in my mouth and sing.
Our grandfathers were at war.
I grew up in the birthplace
of bombs that poisoned children,
burned holes into your sacred earth.
Their poison is part of me.

In the shelter of a shrine, a small girl
holds an umbrella. She becomes a white bird.
She whispers and a thousand cranes,
a thousand burning flowers
pile up inside me, spill out onto these pages.
Forgive me, ghosts, for my hard,
unbeautiful hands, for my tripping tongue,
as you demand a healed future, some untorn prayer.

This poem was written some years ago in response to a question from Marvin Bell about why I decided to write the book, She Returns to the Floating World. It was published in Redactions and will appear in the upcoming book.
The Japanese disaster has weighed on me heavily for the past week or so, and I thought I would write here a little bit about how my life has been tied to Japanese culture since my early childhood. Then I’ll post some links from other sources more useful and possibly more coherent and lovely than my own, including meditations on the quake by Mari L’Esperance and Marie Mutsuki Mockett.
Part I
My father was a robotics expert, and so, as a child living in California and Tennessee in the seventies, we had frequent visitors from Japan, mostly other robotics experts, and family trips to Japan happened on a regular basis – once I had measles so I couldn’t go, another time I had scarlet fever…etc…so although every other member of my family has been to Japan, I never got a chance to go. (This is still true!) My father and brothers would come back with stories, dolls, paintings, new words. I had a collection of Japanese picture books and folk tales, and occasionally, the wives of my father’s business associates would teach me how to make a dessert (I remember something with rice and red bean paste) or teach me how to say a few words in Japanese, or how to sing a Japanese song.
I watched my first Miyazaki movie, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, when I was ten years old, on an ancient primordial version of the Disney Channel. My brother and I sat transfixed, and watched the movie over and over again, its figure of a girl riding on top of giant caterpillars, a boy and girl trapped underneath a poisonous forest in a crystal cavern, frightening war figures and women warriors with metal limbs. This was my first introduction to Japanese pop culture, before we watched Transformers and Voltron and the other imports that would become popular in the eighties. At this same time, I read a terrifying book about the bombing of Hiroshima told from the perspective of a young girl (don’t remember the name of this novel, it was in our school library so I never owned it.)
I started to make the connection between the work done by my father at the neighboring Oak Ridge National Labs as a consultant for nuclear waste disposal methods and the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. (In case you’re wondering why I’m anti-nuclear bomb, anti-nuclear power, this set of incidents – watching Nausicaa, the book on Hiroshima, and early fourth-grade era research on nuclear pollution impacts – are probably key. And that grad-level class on Ecotoxicology I took during my Pre-Med days. Plus growing up with a Geiger counter in my basement and helping Dad edit papers on nuclear waste cleanup in high school, pretty bleak stuff in case you’re wondering.)
Part II to come.

Some links:
Marie L’Esperance’s meditation on the quake
Marie Mutsuki Mockett’s meditation on Japan from the NY Times
The Future on Nuclear Energy Around the World
My second book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is donating a portion of their sales to the Japanese Red Cross

Radio Interviews, Covers, and other poetry news

Jeannine Gailey — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 17:06:00 +0000

Yesterday I got to talk with host Xochitl-Julisa Bermejo and fellow female comic book superhero enthusiast Ramona Pilar Gonzalez about Wonder Woman, Joss Whedon as high priest of the religion of television, feminism and comic books, the need for goddesses in pop culture, the VIDA count, the Geek Girl Con, and a lot more. You can listen to it here.

I promised you could see the cover of my upcoming book She Returns to the Floating World soon, and here you go. It’s only the front cover so far, but the front’s the exciting part, right? Let me know what you think. The art work is Rene Lynch, a piece called “The Secret Life of the Forest (A Different Sleep)” which works really well with the themes of the book, I think, all about dream worlds and transformations.

I got to see Martha Silano read from her new book, The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception. The last time I saw her read at Open Books, we were reading for our books Blue Positive and Becoming the Villainess, partners in crime with Steel Toe Books. Her children were babies then – now they’re darling children, complete with giant stuffed ponies and mops of hair, nearly teenagers! Ah, nostalgia. We had a lot of fun and got to hang out with a lot of poets I love that I don’t get to see very often. (Update: for a better recap – with pictures! – check out Kelli’s blog, )Of course, we were nearly done in by a surprise blizzard that shut down the road in and out of our apartment complex, but we managed to get in and out okay (when I got home and saw the news and all the wrecks on the road near our house, I felt like a big risk taker. Then I dreamed about being Buffy and getting electrocuted. So, all in all, a normal day.) This morning the world is frosted in snow, though this being late February, it’s sort of odd for Seattle to be quite this snowy. I am very ready for spring.

Happy Valentine’s Day – News and Love Poems

Jeannine Gailey — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:45:00 +0000

Happy Valentine’s Day!

First of all, you may have already read about Eduardo C. Corral’s good news – he has won the Yale Younger Poets Prize! I’ve been admiring Eduardo’s poetry since I discovered his blog in 2005, so I felt really happy about this. A great Valentine!

A nice shout-out from one of my mythology heroines, artist and writer Terri Windling, here.

I was honored to be nominated not once, but twice, for something called a Memetastic Blog Award, once by Marie Gauthier and the other time by Kristin Berkey-Abbott. (I will post more fully on this later, but wanted to thank them both for the nomination!

Two love poems from my new book, She Returns to the Floating World (due out in July from Kitsune Books!)

Love Story (with Fire Demon and Tengu)

Maybe in this version you are a bird, and I have become an old woman. Maybe you ate a falling star. It’s hard to love someone in a castle—they always feel distant. I will open a flower shop and learn to speak German, take to wearing ruffled dresses and straw hats. You’d like to pin me down, but you could tell my feet weren’t touching the ground. I called your name over and over, but you couldn’t hear me above the din of the bombers. It was like movies of wartime Japan. I looked up and there were planes bulging with smoke.

The blue sky kept getting darker –
sometimes, I thought,
with your shadow.

In the end, I have a dog in my arms and a scarecrow for a friend, but I never make it to Kansas. The field is wet and stormy, I kiss three men goodnight for their magic. The door to your childhood is opening for me. It allows me passage into a brick wall, my fists full of shiny black feathers, the shell of an egg, the howl of cold wind against a mountain. Don’t worry, your heart is in good hands. Let me keep it a little longer; its blue glow illuminates everything.

He Makes Dinner

The thick knife gleams under your strong hands,
slicing carrot, onion, garlic, pepper,
scattering slivers into the air,
staining your fingers with their gold juices.
You chop so quickly the definite line
between “hand” and “knife” dissolves.
You strew pieces into the skillet,
listen for the right sting and sizzle of oil and wine,
waiting to feed me the work of your hands,
that broken finger, the tiny cuts
that lace and scar your surfaces.

Cover Art – Rene Lynch’s Secret Life of the Forest "A Different Sleep"

Jeannine Gailey — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 22:34:00 +0000

News! The official cover art for “She Returns to the Floating World,” my new book forthcoming from Kitsune Books in late 2011, has been chosen. It is from Rene Lynch’s series, “Secret Life of the Forest,” and this painting is titled “A Different Sleep.”

Thanks so much to Rene Lynch, one of my very favorite super-talented artists, for her gracious permission to use this amazing image. I encourage you all to visit her web site and see more of her work. I actually wrote a poem after seeing her exhibit in San Francisco for the first time called “Secret Life of the Forest.” She’s very inspiring!

Kitsune Books – She Returns to the Floating World

Jeannine Gailey — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:05:00 +0000

So, since my new publisher just tweeted about it, I guess I can make the news official:

Kitsune Books, a wonderful publisher down in Florida of all kinds of speculative lit, has decided to accept my Japanese-folk-tale-and-anime-themed manuscript, She Returns to the Floating World, for publication (tentative publication date – late 2011!)

I am so excited to be working with them and to have a new book on the horizon! Second book second book second book!!! Thanks to everyone who has read it for me and kept encouraging me along the last few years.

Also, thanks for Valerie Loveland for her kind review of my first book, Becoming the Villainess, here.