After getting better briefly, my tonsillitis has returned – even worse! Argh! If this keeps up I don’t know if I can go to NYC. If I can’t talk? Yikes!
And, the Redmond Post Office is still losing my mail sent to my PO Box and can’t explain to me why. Just returning it to sender “undeliverable.” This means no rejections or acceptances, or book contest notifications. I just sent out about ten e-mail notes to editors who had accepted poems that I probably haven’t received any contributor copies sent in the last three months, either. Three months! And I paid a hundred dollars to have this PO Box during my move, so I’d be sure to get my mail. Urgh! I don’t know what to do about journals I haven’t heard from. Would you recommend trying to contact them, even if it’s only been three months, because of the liklihood that the SASE they sent me was tossed?

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.


