Late Holiday Celebrations, 10 Questions with Massachusetts Review, After the Snow, Floods, and Next Week, a Speculative Poetry Class
- At January 08, 2022
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Pink Flowers and Flooding Creeks, Woodinville, January 2022
Happy Post New Year! Floods, Variants, and Small Celebrations
Hope your New Year has gone well so far. After our week of being snowed in, the whole state dealt with snowmelt and constant rain, resulting in a ton of flooding. We were very thankful to have our trash picked up after two weeks of being skipped for bad weather.
This picture on the left is usually a tiny trickling creek in our Woodinville neighborhood, and the flowers blooming in January are, I think, viburnum. The water was so high and moving so fast it actually blurred in the picture! We live on a hill, bad for snow and ice, but good for floods, so we were okay, but all the stores are still dealing with shortages from the snow last week, employees being out sick (really high Omicron levels here) and trucks not being able to cross the mountains for days to get from one side of the state to the other.
me, Glenn, little brother Mike, and sister-in-law Loree at our after-New Year’s party
Despite all the weather crises and Omicron crises, we had our first holiday celebrations – first, with my little brother Mike and sister-in-law Loree, where we celebrated Christmas, New Year’s, and both their January birthdays with a celebratory brunch – and later in the week, with my poet friend Kelli Russell Agodon and her husband Rose, celebrating Christmas, New Year’s, and Kelli’s birthday, also in January with champagne and cupcakes! We also did a little toast to my new book contract with BOA!
Is it nerve-wracking meeting with other humans during Omicron’s numbers, overrun hospitals, and daily news? It was! Was it worth it? Well, neither Glenn and I (who tested before and after) got sick, our guests didn’t get sick, and everyone was vaccinated (most triple-vaccinated, except me) and we were running four air purifiers and kept windows open (circulation still important!) so definitely yes. I have missed other humans! It’s just not the same over the phone or over Zoom. And Glenn really enjoys cooking for humans who aren’t quite as jaded to his excellent food as me and the cats have become.
While Rose and Glenn bonded over Seahawks and cooking, Kelli showed me how to share an Instagram story (Instagram is still a new skill set for me) and we talked poetry, PR, the problems of launching books during a pandemic…you know, typical girl stuff! Seriously, family bonding and writer-friend bonding felt really life-affirming. It also felt unfamiliar – seeing people in person. When this pandemic is over (someday soon, hopefully,) I’m going to have to re-learn my socializing skills. What is it going to be like to do a poetry reading in public again?
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- Poet Friends with sparkles
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- Glenn, me, Kelli, and Rose
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- Kelli and me
An Interview with me: 10 Questions with The Massachusetts Review
I was lucky enough to have a new interview up with The Massachusetts Review. You can read it at this link, and a sneak peek below.
Screencap from my interview
A Speculative Poetry Class Next Saturday
Have you ever wanted to write poetry that was…a little outside of normal? Did you write about fairy tales, comic book characters, space travel? Did you know that you were writing speculative poetry? In this master class, we’ll talk about what speculative poetry is, read a few example poems by writers like Tracy K Smith and Lucille Clifton, talk about markets that publish speculative poetry, and do a poetry exercise or two.
It’s next Saturday the 15th starting at noon Pacific time. You can sign up for the class for $5 here:
