Happy St. Patrick’s Day, a rainy reading, and Poetry and Science

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! I hope you are enjoying some spring weather wherever you are. I always like to take today to remember to read a little Irish poetry and some Irish fairy tales. I found out recently through DNA that I am almost 70 percent Irish genetically, though neither set of my grandparents really knew much or talked much about their Irish heritage. (I may also watch The Secret of Kells, which, though set on the ancient Scottish island of Iona, depicts beautifully pieces of ancient Irish folk culture, including a Miyazaki-esque spirit-fairy-type character who can change into a white wolf, and follows the history of the famously illustrated and historically-important-to-Ireland Book of Kells, which you can view online here.) You can also support a genuinely Irish poetry press by buying a copy of Unexplained Fevers (published by New Binary Press) today!

I’m blogging elsewhere today – on Tahoma Review’s blog about Poetry and Science!

We had a lovely reading on Bainbridge on Sunday and got to see some good friends there, though we had a nasty storm that day (that made the three-hour round trip commute, complete with hydroplaning on waterlogged roadways, a bit dicey). I am thankful for my poetry community that turned out despite the deluge and it was nice to see Eagle Harbor Books, a charming Bainbridge Island bookstore. Here’s a pic from the event, with my fellow reader Carol Levin and some local poets and spouses – you may recognize some current and former Crab Creek Review and Two Sylvias editors in there!

Speaking of Two Sylvias Press, I think you should sneak a peek at April’s issue of Oprah Magazine, which features the fab local women-run press on one of its pages!

Sunday Robot Scientist’s Daughter reading on Bainbridge; new review of Unexplained Fevers; a little post-publication letdown

First, my very first reading for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter happens Sunday, March 15 at 3 PM on Bainbridge Island at charming local bookstore Eagle Harbor Books, where I’ll be reading with Carol Levin. Hope to see some of you there! Read more about it on their site here.

And I have to say thank you to The Next Best Book Club and their reviewer Lindsey for this unexpected review of Unexplained Fevers.

Another unexpected attention for Unexplained Fevers is Sundress Publications’ Best Dressed Feature (that was “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle) this whole last week. Here’s the newest: “Rapunzel Considers the Desert.” Thanks Sundress Publications!

So it’s very funny, when you start sending out review copies for one book, sometimes there is accidental attention to your other books it seems! As a writer of poetry, I’m always grateful for attention to my work, no matter when it arrives!

It’s interesting, but there’s sort of a letdown when your new book actually comes out—at first you’re all excited when the book arrives, you take a picture of the box of books, and you send out your e-mails and postcards, and people congratulate you—but that sense that well, maybe nothing will happen with this book, maybe everyone will hate it, starts to creep in after, say, a week. I know I have friends who call me right after their book actually makes it out—not when it’s accepted, but when it’s out into the world—to say how much they hate the book, how other people will hate it, etc—so I know it’s not just me. (Plus, Sylvia Plath killed herself the month after her book The Bell Jar was released, which is not really ever discussed, but I’m sure it contributed to her depression—like oh, the book isn’t getting the attention is deserved, etc.) So even though I’m technically just going to my first event this Sunday for The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and I’m very grateful to already have a few reviews of the book out there this early—I’m feeling a bit of discouragement, letdown, fear of failure, like oh, this is my fourth book, and I’m still struggling? Like I said, I’m only talking about this here because I feel it is a fairly common phenomenon, and you and all your friends should be ready for it, and have a little party/get-together/ice-cream-coffee-preparedness session in the works. My “official” Seattle book launch isn’t until April 16, which is still a month away, but I think it’s a good thing to have an official celebration, to invite your friends, to have some champagne and chocolate and say “Yes, I did this thing!”

None of this means I’m not extremely grateful for the good things people have said about the book so far (I really am!), it just means that sometimes our negative voices can talk over the positive ones, and we have to guard against that as writers. It’s always: when I get my book accepted, when it gets published, when it gets reviewed, well, things are going to change. And then that happens four times, and things still don’t really change. But I still have goals, I’m still working on the next manuscript, sending out my apocalypse poems: that’s what I have to focus on. Stop checking my Amazon ranks and get to work on the next thing.

Poem on Fukushima on KUOW, Squeezing in Real Life, and More Book Stuff

If you listen to “The Record” on KUOW today at noon, from 12:25 PM to 1 PM, you may hear me read a poem commemorating the fourth anniversary of the Fukushima disaster, about the sunflowers that were planted to uptake cesium from radioactively contaminated soil. If it’s any good, all the credit goes to Elizabeth Austen, who recorded and edited our segment on Fukushima and Oso.

And the podcast will be available later on in the afternoon (think 5 PM Pacific time and afterwards) at this link:

http://kuow.org/post/sunflowers-fukushima-foxglove-oso

This has been a crazy busy week, plus I was kind of knocked out by the time change (fell asleep accidentally around dinner time two days in a row) but I had to take a second to photograph some of the early cherry blossom frenzy here and to walk through a farm and pet a miniature horse who put out her little nose for me to scratch (hoping for apples?) and watch some baby goats jumping and frisking around a couple of rocks at our local farm/park. (Farrel-McWhirter Park in Redmond—I highly recommend it for both animal lovers and people with kids.) Do you ever get the feeling you’re trying to squeeze in moments of “real life” in between work, doctor’s appointments, physical therapy, errands, etc? Yeah, me neither 😉

Let’s see, I’m doing my first reading for the new book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, this Sunday at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge Island (3 PM with Carol Levin) and I’m looking forward to it—it’s a lovely bookstore and I love seeing my island-living friends out there—but I’m also strangely nervous. It’s a tough book to pick poems from, for some reason, and because the poems are a little more personal, harder to read out loud.

I wish I could tell you I was being some kind of PR wizard with the book but honestly I still feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what I ambitiously set out to do. Maybe that is a thing for all poets—most of us have so much else going on, including our writing (!!), that we barely have time to do any promotion for those books we worked so hard to write, send out for publication, and then, after years of suffering, patience, and hard work, have published! And you sort of wish people knew about your book without you having to tell them about it, right? (This is why famous writers have PR people! It saves so much psychic draining.) That’s also why every author is so grateful when someone reviews their book on Goodreads or tweets about it or mentions it on their blog at all because it means “Hey, someone besides me cares about the book!”

I hope it’s all right to document the trials and tribulations of the book’s launch here, and I hope it’s helpful to someone. And thank you to everyone who has mentioned my little book, even if it’s just to your mom or your friend.

New blog review of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter by Lesley Wheeler and Sundress Publications Best Dressed!

Lesley Wheeler writes a bit about my newest book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, as well as its journey to publication, and the concept of poetic difficulty, at her blog here.

Thank you to Sundress Publications for choosing a poem from my third book, Unexplained Fevers, for this week’s “Best Dressed Feature” “I Like the Quiet: Snow White”.

Yesterday we spent a beautiful afternoon over at my little brother and his wife’s rented house (where they kindly allowed us to do laundry, since our washing machine remains broken) and we took a gorgeous walk at downtown Seattle’s Seward Park, which was lovely. This was the view of Mt. Rainier from the lake there:

It’s easy to love Seattle in the sunshine, with the mountain out, and all the water shining and blue. Hyacinths, cherry blossoms, daffodils, and I even spied some early magnolia trees blossoming downtown. Seattle’s usually a moody, grey, difficult-to-love city in March, so this is quite extraordinary. I also spied two bald eagles this week.

We’ve been house-hunting as well, and I’ve observed even a lousy neighborhood can appear beautiful with shafts of sunlight hitting the puffy white and pink cherry tree branches. I’m a bit behind of all my writing obligations, but in my defense, it’s hard to concentrate with all this getting ready to buy and sell a house/appliance breakdowns/allergy testing/sunshine going on. It’s supposed to be 63 outside today…

Recording Poems for the Radio and the first week of the book launch

Yesterday I had the opportunity to go into our local radio station, KUOW, and record a couple of poems from The Robot Scientist’s Daughter for a segment that will air the KUOW show “The Record” at noon on March 11, the fourth anniversary of the disaster at Fukushima. The two poems I read were on Fukushima, including this one “A Morning of Sunflowers (for Fukushima)” I worked with the gracious current Washington State Poet Laureate Elizabeth Austen, who keeps poetry in the public eye by keeping it on the radio. I sat in “the green room” for a little bit with a professional athlete which was pretty exciting. They had a robot in the green room, too, which I took as a good sign.

Now, right before that, our brand-new (well, two-year old, so just over warranty) washing machine decided to crack one of its components and cease to work, so we were frantically gathering up laundry and such, right before we went downtown. This is the way life is: you get all excited to go record some poetry, then your large appliances turn against you. Hello to the laundromat once again, since they couldn’t get a repairman out til the middle of next week!

So, it’s the end of the first week of the book launch. I mailed out the last of the book postcards yesterday. This year I sent out about a hundred more than I did for the last book. I also sent out a book announcement e-mail and the best thing about that (besides selling books) was that it allowed old friends I hadn’t been in touch with to get back in touch, which is always a warm and fuzzy feeling. I’ve been very lucky in that I had three (!!) “official” book reviews in the first week the book came out, which is the first time that’s happened for one of my books, I think. (Here they are – reviews of The Robot Scientist’s Daughter at The Rumpus, at Poetry International, and at Escape Into Life.) I am very thankful to both the reviewers and the review outlets for this! Because I was telling a friend, I think I waited about six months for official reviews with the last three books.

So all in all, though it was a low-key book launch week (my readings for the book start on March 15 ) it was exciting, if not totally free from stress (the allergy testing’s 50 needle pokes left me bruised, sore, and tired for two days, and the washing machine breakdown thing made me think “Oh my God, I do NOT have enough towels for this to happen” and “Do I know how to hand-wash clothes in the bathtub?”) and I am very grateful to everyone who bought a book (thank you!!!) and everyone who queried about getting a review e-galley (thank you too!) Thank you to folks who’ve left reviews on Goodreads and Amazon. I am so happy some people are liking my little book!