Halloween Poems – Intro to Teen Witchcraft and Intro to Teen Girl Vampires! Plus Moon City Press and Other Fall Poetry News

: Pumpkins!

Happy almost Halloween! This year I’m giving you two poems about pop culture depictions of young women – witches and vampires! (And thanks to Atticus Review and Hobble Creek Review, who first published these two poems…)

Introduction to Witchcraft

Always these young women in search of power,
their eyes rolled back in their heads, midriffs exposed.
Always some girl with a candle in a dark room –
and poof, her face brightens as she achieves
some moment of bliss. The raindrops around her freeze

in midair, the wolves stop baring their fangs, and for a moment
the young girl marvels at her own invincibility.
But then it’s fire, fire, always someone with a stake or a knife
ready to do her in. She is a spark about to go out.

Introduction to Teen Girl Vampires

turn feral while defending their human boyfriends,
harmless and blond in Varsity jackets and crewcuts.
These girls just want to be loved, and fed,

in that order, and can we blame them? A nurse
here or there won’t be missed, or the guy playing
“second policeman.” Bram Stoker equated blood and sex,

Mina chaste and clever while hunting her Dracula down,
his bite awaking impulses that ignited and were ignored.
These days, teen vampire girls enjoy sex

with abandon, tossing lovers around like tree limbs.
These days, the girl doesn’t succumb to the monster,
she is the monster, teeth gleaming in the moonlight,

coquettish limbs and curls masking superpowers.
Oh, she still wants to be the prettiest girl at the prom,
and perhaps she mourns some future idea

of motherhood. But men line up for the promise
of her bite, her blood. And she has nothing to fear;
she cannot be broken, tarnished by age, her heart

impenetrable to anything except for that wooden stake.

How have you been? For me, it’s been a remarkable month for rejections, except for the good news from Moon City Press that my apocalypse manuscript is one of eleven finalists there. I also got the AWP schedule for my “Women in Speculative Lit” panel, which is scheduled for Friday afternoon (which is good news because I am useless before noon!) In the next few days, I’m visiting with a poet friend and her daughter, going to a fancy party for a mentor’s 80th birthday party, and of course, celebrating Halloween! So it’s going to be a social next few days! I’ve also been trying out some art supplies – oil pastels, alcohol ink artist’s markers, and watercolor pencils – I have very limited art skills, but it’s very relaxing and it kind of gives you good creative brain waves. The house hunt has been taking its toll, and it looks like we’re going into the holiday season as renters, with no new home on the horizon. At least I have a stack of pumpkins to celebrate with (from our many trips to the local pumpkin patches – that’s one nice part of living close to a few ruralish areas!)

A Week of Poetry and taking some downtime

: Great blue heron on our street

: Lit Crawl Seattle: Jean Burnet, Maggie HK Hess, and me at the LA Review reading

: me at Capitol Cider before the reading

It’s been an exciting week for poetry events, with a long trip over to Bainbridge Island for a book club visit on Monday, Lit Crawl in Seattle on Thursday, so I’m totally looking forward to a weekend of reading and looking for houses.

Lit Crawl Seattle was a ton of fun – besides the LA Review reading at Capitol Cider (a delicious and gluten-free bar/restaurant, by the way!) with Jean, Phil, and Maggie, which I thought was really high-energy and good, with lots of clapping, laughing, cheering (and look for it up on KUOW eventually -we got recorded!) – I went to the Kundiman reading to see Neil Aitken and Rick Barot, and then to the after-party where I couldn’t do much dancing (ankles still troublesome) but got to see a lot of people at the super-crowded bookfair upstairs at FRED Wildlife Refuge.

And now for some downtime – catching up with friends, family, and reading – and this great blue heron on my street is a reminder that if you look closely, there are miraculous things all around you, even in the middle of the crazy. Sometimes it’s the little things that give you the greatest boost – a little phone conversation with a friend, the glimpse of a heron in a pond you walk by every day.

We have Halloween and birthday parties and get-togethers scheduled all over the next week, so today, I’m looking at some houses, posting this, and committing to spending some extra time 1. reading 2. maybe writing? I got a little potential good news yesterday that I can share shortly too, which was nice after a month of a lot of rejections! And I got paid $$ (yay, speculative magazines that pay!) from my Eye to the Telescope poems, which was also a needed boost to my poetry self-esteem! So think good house and health thoughts for me as we wind into fall…

Turning Leaves, Lit Crawl Seattle, Bainbridge Visits, and Balancing Introvert/Extrovert Time

Can’t believe it’s already late October, with the leaves changing and the days growing darker and shorter as we slip towards winter. (Above is a shot of the Japanese gardens a few days ago…)

Got back yesterday late from a visit to my former home island, Bainbridge Island, for a visit to a book club to discuss Unexplained Fevers – proof that you just have to be up for discussing all your books all the time! Ha! Anyway, it was a little drizzly, but we did get a beautiful view of the sunset over the water, and then the Seattle skyline on the way home.

: Bremerton ferry at sunset from BI

: Seattle nighttime skyline

In two days Seattle’s Lit Crawl is coming up, and I’m reading at 7 PM at Capitol Cider with LA Review! There’s an after party at Fred Wildlife Refuge starting at 9 PM where they’re having a mini bookfair – and I hope I’ll see you there! I’m also hoping to meet in person old blog friend Neil Aitken who is reading for Kundiman. It’s so fun to see people you’ve been internet-friends with for years! This is the kind of thing that makes you feel lucky to live in such a cool literary town.

: Aw, Glenn and I at the Japanese gardens

: Me with red Japanese maple

Here’s a few more pictures from fall in the Japanese gardens in Seattle. We took a trip to Open Books and Bulldog newsstand too, which made it an almost-perfect fall day. We’ve been running around a lot, and for me, as a writer, it’s tough to keep up the balance between extroversion and introversion – fall usually makes me crave more alone time with my books and magazines, time to write and sip hot chocolate (or in my case, a cold-curing concoction of honey, cranberry and pomegranate juice.) I’ve been struggling with staying “up” for events and still having energy to do my writing stuff – I got a rejection from a state grant yesterday, which was rough, I’ve been sick and not sleeping well, and I’m still sending out the fifth manuscript hoping for good news there. The antidote for lots of writer events is downtime, and doing things that feed the writer spirit – art, coffee shops, reading, and solitude. It’s hard to have the perfect balance of the writing life – and October ended up being a lot busier than I planned – so I’m going to try to take a little more off time in November…

Eye to the Telescope, Mipoesis IArtistas, LitCrawl and Other October Adventures

Just in time for Halloween, there is a new issue of Eye to the Telescope, focused on issues of race and edited by Jason McCall, up, and I have three poems in it, “Horror Comics,” “Mermaid on Land,” and “Introduction to Alien Autopsy.” All kinds of speculative and scary stuff, and I think you’ll enjoy reading it. Check it out!

Also, I’m featured in the new Mipoesis IARTistas issue (click on “Preview” and go to pages 4-5 to see it or buy it!) thanks to Rita Maria Martinez-Puccio who wrote the feature! My name is a bit misspelled (it’s Gailey, not Galley) but it’s a really nicely written interview with two poems from The Robot Scientist’s Daughter in it. Thanks to editor Didi Menendez and Rita for their hard work!

I’ve got a bunch of exciting stuff coming up next week – a visit to a Bainbridge Island book club and a reading with LA Review at LitCrawl in the 7-7:45 slot at Capitol Cider (which I’ve been meaning to go to – a cider bar with an all gluten-free menu!) Both are going to be exciting!

I’m hoping to shake off a new ankle injury (after a dental appointment this week I was taking a walk to try to relax after a harrowing hour with a particularly aggressive dental hygienist …and attacked by a Cujo-esque off-leash dog, which didn’t get a chance to bite me, but I hurt both ankles in my escape…) Yes, I would enjoy a whole week in which I was neither sick nor injured. Come on, universe!

Here are two pictures wishing you a happy October from my husband G and I at two local pumpkin patches! Can you tell which is the most sincere? I now have an assortment of weird pumpkins – Cinderella pumpkins, ghost pumpkins – and gourds sitting on my porch. I’ve been putting sweet potatoes in my morning hash and delicata squash in all my desserts…and trying to ignore the increasing darkness (sunset at 5:30, now!) and the upcoming time change!

: Serres Pumpkin Patch with red barn

: Glenn and Jeannine at Dr. Maze’s farm

Melancholy, Saying Goodbye, Happy Mondays and Gray Days

Dear readers, I hope October has been treating you kindly – or at least more kindly than me! I got pretty sick almost immediately after my reading last Sunday, so for several days I couldn’t do anything more cerebral than drink tea and sleep and cough. Just got back from my chest x-ray – no pneumonia, but darn, may need a CT followup for this darn lung problem (fingers crossed I won’t, still waiting for the report from my radiologist and then my asthma specialist!)

The skies have turned gray, the mist has risen to put an almost invisible sort of chill on everything, and I’m especially sad as my dear poetry friend Kelly Davio is moving to London! I’m happy I got to work with her for almost a whole year and am wishing her amazing success and happiness in England, but boy, will I miss her! She has been a really positive force in the Seattle poetry scene while she lived here, and I hope she’ll be back in a couple of years!

In other things I am grateful for, I’m happy that Mary Carroll-Hackett chose me and The Robot Scientist’s Daughter as a “Monday Must Read” on Monday – I was too sick to post that day, but it definitely cheered me up and I was very thankful she did it.

These pictures are from the day of my reading, when we went out afterwards with my little brother and his wife to the beautiful Bellevue Botanical Gardens – so there are Glenn and I in the backdrop of trees. We were able – I don’t know if you can tell – to get pretty close to what (I think) was a red-headed woodpecker, though usually these guys are 1. too shy and b. don’t stay still long enough to get pictures of.

I heard it’s National Poetry Day today, so be sure to read a poem or at least flip through a favorite poetry book before you go to sleep. I am wishing friends Bon Voyage, watching the cold rain move in the sky, feeling a little melancholy with the falling leaves and the shortening days, waiting for soup to simmer and trying to remember the lesson of autumn – that while change doesn’t always feel great at the time, new beginnings are right around the corner.