Escape into Life, Disappointment and Longing, Scientist’s Daughters and Poetry
Well, the job I interviewed for this Monday had already been filled in the five days since I had been contacted about it, so that was a bit of a disappointment. I have to admit, the sudden longing for this particular job surprised me in its force. At least now I have an up-to-date portfolio, resume, and sample links.
In other sad news, Booktour.com is shutting down. I admit to never fully utilizing its capacities, but it seemed like a really great place for authors and for people who like to know who is reading in their town on a given date, so that’s too bad.
In positive news, Escape Into Life is featuring a few of my poems today – a couple from my “Robot Scientist’s Daughter” manuscript, one from She Returns to the Floating World, and a brand new poem! Check it out! http://www.escapeintolife.com/poetry/jeannine-hall-gailey/
A poet’s progress: I have been dabbling in fiction writing lately. Do all poets take a flight into other genres at some point? Of course, I have worked as a technical writer, a journalist, a copy editor, and am still an active book reviewer, but as far as “creative” writing, in the years since I started really studying writing, I had stuck to poetry. And now I appreciate what trying out another form, another genre, can do for your ideas about poetry. What can poems do that stories cannot? What can prose offer that poetry cannot?
Tracy K. Smith’s story about writing Life on Mars had a few familiar aspects: she was born a year before me, her father was a scientist (an optical engineer who worked on the Hubble telescope instead of a robotics engineer) and she takes aspects of mythology and science and applies them to autobiography in some interesting ways. It made me think about women poets whose fathers were scientists, including: Rachel Dacus, whose “rocket kids” blog was named after her adventures as the daughter of an actual rocket scientist; Margaret Atwood, who was the daughter of a biologist; Louise Gluck, whose father invented the X-acto knife you might have worked with in science lab or art classes. And Tracy K. Smith. And me. Are there more? Is there something about being a scientist’s daughter that drives us into poetry?
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.
Sandy Longhorn
Congrats on the EIL publication! I’ve bookmarked the poems to be read when my brain is fresher. 🙂
Kristin
My dad is a computer scientist, but until your post, I never thought of myself as the daughter of a scientist. And now I can hardly think of anything else.
My dad approached computer programming in similar ways that writers approach their tasks. It was equal parts play and being stymied and coming up with solutions and being creative in envisioning tasks for the computer that took it beyond its current realm.
Thanks!