Happy New Year! Major Awards, Things I am Thankful For, Wishes for 2016!

Happy New Year’s Eve to all of you! 2015 was a tough year for many of us, so I am wishing us all a more joyous and peaceful 2016! Solar flares mean northern lights may be visible tonight, so keep an eye out after the ball drops!

It was dry and cold last night so we finally got the chance for one of my favorite Christmas traditions – albeit post-Christmas – going to see the Bellevue Botanical Gardens holiday lights. We met my little brother and his wife there and enjoyed the festive glow even though I couldn’t feel my hands after about fifteen minutes outside, despite wearing gloves (I’ve become very bad about the cold – it was around 30 degrees – since moving to the West Coast. My midwestern former self would not be impressed!) It did remind me why I hold on to some traditions – being outside with the lights, even in the cold, made me feel appropriately holiday-esque instead of grumpy and house-bound (We had some unending gloomy freezing rain – and about ten seconds of snow – the week before and of Christmas, so there was not much getting out and about.)

: Undersea lights scene at the Bellevue Botanical Gardens

: Me and Glenn with light peacock and flower garden at Bellevue Botanical Gardens

: Dragon lights at Bellevue Botanical Gardens

Some good news to share – thanks to the SFPA who finally sent me the certificate for winning second prize for the Elgin Award 2014 for my book Unexplained Fevers. It was a nice surprise to get it in the mail!

Other book news to be grateful for: thanks to Donna Miscolta for including The Robot Scientist’s Daughter in her list of favorite reads of the year and to Karen J. Weyant who included it on her Best Poetry Collections of the Year list – it’s so hard for small press poetry books to make any kind of list, so I’m very thankful to be on these two!

So what are your wishes for 2016? I’m hoping for more days of good health, more ability to spend times with friends, a new one-story home for us (we’re still on the search for a ranch that’s affordable out here on the East side), and of course, thankful for the Moon City Press people for putting out my apocalypse-themed Field Guide to the End of the World next year! I’ve planned a little travel – presenting at AWP LA to begin with in the spring, then some readings across the country later in the year – so maybe 2016 will be a better year for being out and about! What are you hopeful for?

Happy Holidays! Snow, Star Wars, and Other Rituals to Prepare for the New Year

Woke up to snow this morning after a week or two of miserable cold rain. It was nice to see! But brrr! We Seattle-types are not used to the snow – I’ve had to dig out earmuffs, the “warm” coat, snow boots and mittens this last week! Meanwhile, my midwestern family has been bragging about their 69-degree Christmas weather.

Hope you all are having a wonderful holiday week. We were lucky enough to have a quiet cheerful Christmas with Glenn cooking a delicious Christmas dinner and my little brother and his wife coming over to eat and exchange presents. Below are pictures of the cat dressed in his Santa cap and me in my “Mrs. Claus/Snow Queen” faux-fur sweater set with Glenn in his red sweater for Christmas.

The day after Christmas Glenn and I finally saw Star Wars (Loved it! And finally appreciating the “Emo Kylo Ren” twitter feed!) and then came home, made cheeseburgers, that humble antidote to fancy Christmas dinners, and slept in blissfully til noon. Then got to editing, returning e-mails, and actually felt well enough to think about sending out poems again! This nasty bronchitis really took me out for about a month. Now, the week ahead holds dental appointments, an appointment with a new neurologist since my old one retired a few months ago, and my poor husband getting a CTscan to make sure his diverticulitis has resolved. Yes, let the good times roll! Ha! But seriously, it’s good to get in this medical and dental stuff before the end of the year, because when our deductible resets in January it’s alllll out of pocket for a while.

So, what are you doing to prepare for the New Year? Do you have things you do to get ready to ring it in, besides a glass of sparkly stuff (and a kiss) at midnight? I usually make a “New Year” playlist to set the tone for the new year. Last year’s was pretty melancholy, which seemed right – it was a pretty downbeat year for us. This year’s playlist so far is cautiously upbeat – a little folksy, maybe – some Lord Huron, Vance Joy, and that terrible-but-catchy “Renegades” song I can’t get out of my head! I’ll try to upbeat it a bit before I’m through. And I’m collecting images for yes, another collage-type vision board this year. I think they’re a useful enterprise for people like me who tend to live in language and in their heads, because it requires thinking visually and using your hands to make something, which, as I may have mentioned before, I’m pretty sure I was not too good at in Kindergarten and remain not so good at. My vision boards tend to be dominated by images like typewriters, butterflies, robots, foxes, and women holding birds, for some reason. This year did have several fox visits (mostly because of my visit to San Juan Island for a residency) so maybe these things do work! Wishing you all a very happy 2016, however you choose to mark the New Year!

Copper Canyon Parties, Dean Young’s Robots, and New Anthologies

I missed some of my favorite holiday parties this year, but did manage to arrive (if slightly sleep-deprived and bedraggled due to heavy rain) at the year-end Copper Canyon party, where I got to see one of my poetry heroes, Dean Young, read, as well as Deborah Landau, and say hi to some of the people that make Copper Canyon Press and Hugo House what it is. Dean Young read at least two poems mentioning robots, and drew a robot in the book he signed for me, thereby procuring my admiration for all time. Seriously, his reading flew by, leaving all of us wanting more. I remember reading his poems years ago and thinking, what a weird (and wonderful) brain! I feel very lucky to have such vital organizations in my town (plus I got to hear the inside scoop from one of the interns on Dana Levin’s new apocalypse themed book coming out in 2016!) Here’s a pic of Glenn and I on our way out the door and me with fellow East-side poet Sarah Jones!

Two anthologies recently came out – so recently I don’t even have the contributor copies in my hands yet – that I thought you might like to know about for the holidays. One is an anthology of poems related to television, Rabbit Ears: TV Poems
which includes a poem of mine about engineers and Wile E. Coyote as well as work by Dorianne Laux and Billy Collins, and the other is an anthology of speculative fiction and poetry from Mythic Delirium, Mythic Delirium: Volume Two: an international anthology of prose and verse, recently reviewed by Publisher’s Weekly, and containing a poem from me but also work from spec stars like Jane Yolen. Anyway, both would make great gifts!

I finally slept all the way through the night last night – and by that I mean, from 1:30 AM to 7 AM – for the first time in over two weeks. I was telling a friend that this virus has been like having a really evil, uncute baby that wakes you up every forty-five minutes. So I’m hoping that by the time actual Christmas rolls around I’ll be all recovered and hearty! I’ve got tickets to see the new Star Wars right before the new year (don’t buy your movie tickets late in a geek-driven town like mine, or you’ll wait a week to see the movie!) and got all the Christmas presents for faraway family out the door yesterday, so I think I’m ready for the holidays! 2015 has been a tough year for a lot of us, so I’m wishing us all a happier 2016!

This Post is Redacted: Authenticity, the Holidays, and the Problems of Shiny Instagram Life

Sometimes I struggle with what to put in this blog post. How honest should I be? What should I include? What should I censor? Everyone knows that any writer’s life is more than happy pictures and thoughtful meditations.

I want to avoid giving anyone more bad news, even if it’s just about me. You know if you read my blog regularly I have some health issues, including an immune deficiency that makes me particularly vulnerable to pneumonias and other upper respiratory infections. A day or so ago I was in the hospital struggling to breathe, with a high fever and an upper respiratory infection that activated my asthma, a migraine that almost made me pass out, a cough so violent I actually vomited a few times, unable to get a breath, and hurt some ribs. A couple of days ago I couldn’t talk, or walk across a room, without collapsing into a coughing fit. Scary stuff, and yet, part of me did not want to write about it – don’t want to put my vulnerabilities out there, or give anyone bad news during a time that has enough bad news. Plus, we all have fair-weather-only friends – and even family – people who only want to be on your side when you’re winning, who only want to hear your good news – and there’s a fear that admitting our weaknesses makes us look weak, makes our problems more real.

Besides the illness, I’ve been feeling discouraged, isolated, unmotivated. Like all writers, sometimes I lose hope and momentum. I can’t get out as much when I’m sick, and the lack of social interaction can make me feel worse, as I’m sort of a social girl. And no doubt the weather (windstorms, mudslides, downed trees, massive amounts of rain) isn’t cheering anyone here in the Seattle area up.

In my Newsfeed, I’ve been trying to avoid reading any news about another shooting, terrorism, details of another good guy gone bad. Instead I read about a white Bengal tiger cub frozen to death in Crimea, the rising levels of Cesium-137 off the shores of Oregon and California, the news the seagulls are smarter than we think. It’s the holidays. I look for any shred of news that’s even slightly cheerful: astronaut cats, for instance, or robot arms to support you while you read. Margaret Atwood’s writing a comic book about a cat-bird-man. (http://electricliterature.com/margaret-atwood-is-writing-a-superhero-comic-book/)

What do we redact from our lives in our Facebook posts and Twitter feeds, Instagrammed moments of perfect cupcakes and outfits? Does that hurt our world, drain our authenticity? Does blocking bad news from your feed prevent it from happening? If I don’t tell you I’ve been sick and discouraged, does it make it disappear?

As the daughter of a scientist who did government consulting on Superfund sites, I am used to being around “Redacted” documents. When I was doing research for what became The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, I found a lot of the environmental reports for the Oak Ridge area were heavily Redacted. This didn’t mean there wasn’t radioactive contamination – it just meant no one wanted to talk about it. Or know about it. Or think about it.

There’s a danger to keeping secrets, to pretending to be invulnerable. No one can – or should – be “rah-rah” all the time. And I think it’s okay to admit that. During the holidays there is even more pressure than usual for us to present a cheerful picture, even if we’re not actually cheerful (which I believe is one of the lessons of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special, that most spiritual of holiday shows.) But here, let me say that it’s okay not to be perfect, and not to pretend everything is okay when it isn’t. Struggling is part of the normal human condition. There’s a pressure for people with chronic illness, especially, to reassure others and present a “happy face” (http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-1209-baer-sickness-upbeat-notes-20151209-story.html) and that’s not necessarily true, or healthy. Admitting our problems, our vulnerabilities, our pain, our struggles – that’s part of being fully human. And sharing those things lets in a crack of light, perhaps – opens a conversation, reassures someone else they’re not alone. The friends and family who love and support you, in the cliché terms, – in sickness and in health, in good times and bad – the ones you are able to be most authentic with – are the ones you should keep close.

Our job as writers – despite the pressures of increasingly shallow and shiny social media – is not to present a perfect façade, but to crack ourselves open a bit – to let both the light and the dark co-exist together. That seems to ring especially true near the coldest and darkest day of the year, also one of the world’s most celebrated holidays. Festivals of light, renewals of hope, narratives of rebirth and redemption – these are all the more necessary because we live in an imperfect and broken world, in mortal bodies.

Science Poetry Gift Books! And writing for ghosts

Thanks to the folks at the Lofty Ambitions blog for including my book on the five science poetry books to buy as gifts for the holidays! I’m honored to be in wonderful company with poets like Tracy K. Smith and Sandra Alcosser – go check out the list!

I’m a little late on writing about this (lots of doctor and dentist appointments in the last week…) but I wanted to make a little comment on the essay On Pandering that was published up at Tin House.

It made me think about the audiences we write for, acknowledged and unacknowledged. Are we writing for ghosts? Claire Vaye Watkins writes that she has written consciously for an audience of white males, who still sort of rule the literary world, a world where sentimentality is the ultimate sin and everyone wants to be Franzen or Hemingway, to be included in the “literary canon.”

It made me think about who I write for. When I got my Master’s Degree, I literally had no creative writing teachers who were women or people of color – they were all white males with a somewhat formal bent. Did that influence my poetry or who I tried to become as a writer? I think what had more influence on me was working with younger kids in volunteer work, because I remember trying to write a kind of poetry that might be interesting to younger people who mostly didn’t read poetry, who played video games and read comic books – and the result was Becoming the Villainess.

Since then, I got an MFA where I had women mentors as well as male ones. I’ve even taught at an MFA program myself, where I (hope) I encouraged wide and diverse reading. I’ve been published by mostly smaller publishers, and I’ve never been reviewed in the New York Times – I think in a way I’ve been okay with writing somewhat out of the mainstream, being feminist, or speculative, or super-science-y, or whatever would take me out of the running to be acceptable to the white male invisible ghosts out there who decide what is or isn’t acceptable or literary or whatever. Has it hurt not to win the big book prizes, or get reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly? Of course! But I don’t think I would change what I write to gain approval of an invisible set of judges. I’m not really haunted by ghosts. My literary heroes (and heroines) – Margaret Atwood, Dana Levin, Denise Duhamel, Dorianne Laux – all sort of stand out and have their own styles and quirks and that’s the reason I think I was drawn to them. They’re not afraid to be angry or emotional or funny or try something different, and they’ve all found audiences and even acclaim eventually.

Anyway, it’s an interesting essay that makes us think about who we are really writing for, and why, and is that authentic? Is that truly us? Does our writing really represent us or what people expect us to be?