Beautiful Weather, Anti-‘s last issue, The Rumpus Review, Summertime

My ankle was better enough to be able to hobble around well enough yesterday to get out and enjoy the perfectly beautiful summer weather – it does seem summer has arrived early here (it doesn’t usually happen til after July 4) – 72 degrees, a bright breeze, lots of wildlife scampering around. A perfect day to be on the water. Too bad we do not live on the water, but there’s lots of it in driving distance.

That’s Lake Washington in the background, and there’s that sneaky eagle again. Too bad we did not get pictures of our local osprey. a long-tailed chipmunk climbing a tree with a flicker and a flicker’s nest in it, and various small rabbits and ducks. Anyway, it’s hard to feel too anxious or upset with such a summertime wildlife/weather thing going on right outside your door.

In other news, Anti- magazine’s last issue went up today, along with my poem “Dorothy: If I Stayed in Kansas, I Knew my Future:”

http://anti-poetry.com/anti/gaileyje/

It’s a wonderful issue, so a big thank you to Steve Schroeder for putting it together, and all his hard work at his quirky, enjoyable online journal.

And the link has gone up to my review of Rachel Zucker’s The Pedestrians over at The Rumpus, too. So that’s live.

A big thank you to all of you who have been sending good thoughts and prayers to my mother-in-law – her latest blood work shows a lot of improvement, more than we could have hoped for, which is very cheering, and it seems my little brother in Thailand may be moving back to the States, somewhere close to here, hopefully, in the near future, so that’s two things worth celebrating! And less things giving me ulcers and nightmares! (Another end-of-the-world Buffy nightmare last night! Oh, you guys don’t get those?)

I’m pretty sure I should be outside again today as much as possible, with the birds chirping and sun shining and all. All deep thoughts will be put on hold til after I’ve spent at least sometime out in nature. (Besides playing in the dirt being good for us – a bacteria in dirt increases seratonin levels in humans – I read yesterday that, true to Nausicaa and her forest-love, that trees and plants put out a chemical that literally makes us happy, which makes the Japanese idea of Shinrin Yoku (forest bathing) seem like a lot of sense. Being in nature truly does literally trigger chemical responses that makes us happier. So wishing you all a happier, nature-filled weekend…

Best Horror of the Year, Mid-American Review, and Cheer up, it could be worse, the joke

First, some good news. In the last two days I’ve received two lovely contributor copies, one of Ellen Datlow’s Best Horror of the Year anthology, in which I have a poem, “Introduction to the Body in Fairy Tales.” This is a great, eclectic collection of speculative writing, even if you’re not the typical horror fan.

The other is the spring 2014 issue of Mid-American Review, in which my poem, “Every Human is a Black Box,” appears. This is especially exciting for me because I sent there for years, getting nice encouraging rejections, and it was one of the first literary magazines I read and sent to (one of the only ones available in Cincinnati bookstores back in the 90s.) Loved reading through the rest of the issue – Mid-American Review is consistently great.

You know how I was talking in my last post about family and anxiety? You know that old joke? “Someone told me, “Cheer up, it could be worse!” So I cheered up, and sure enough, it got worse!” Well, after all the worrying about my little brother in Thailand, the Santa Barbara shootings, etc, my very health-conscious mother-in-law went into sudden kidney failure a few days ago. We can’t figure out a cause except for a recent course of Celebrex and years of NSAID use, which, FYI for your older parents with arthritis, can sometimes cause kidney failure, especially in older folks whose kidneys don’t handle toxins quite as well as they do when you’re young. And kidneys aren’t the kind of organ that’s easily fixed. Asking continued prayers and good thoughts for Sally, a very sweet sort of mother-in-law, who is going in for more tests in a few days. She was in the hospital, now she’s out with apparently better blood work, but we are still worried. It’s especially hard on Glenn to be so far away from his mom (his brother is in Cincinnati, so that at least is comforting) right now, and we’re trying to help her understand the doctors and the lab work as much as we can over the phone.

I’ve also been laid up with a sprained ankle and mystery virus, which have caused me to read a lot but not feel very productive. I’m hoping to bounce back soon, otherwise I’m going to go crazy – we’ve had all this nice weather, all this stress, it all just begs for long walks and writing! Neither of which I’ve been able to do.

Stay tuned for links to a new poem in Anti-, as well as my first somewhat snark-ish review in The Rumpus. I feel very ambivalent about writing anything negative about another poet’s book, especially a female poet whose other books I really liked, but…well, you’ll see when the link to the new review goes up. (Added: the link to the review.)

Thailand, Author’s Notes, and Query Letters

I spent most of this last Memorial Day weekend, frankly, trying not to think about bad news. My little brother is in Bangkok while they declared Martial Law, promptly had a military coup, and now have suspended the constitution. The misogynist shooting in Santa Barbara prompted strong responses from me, but I tried not to engage with trolls on Facebook and Twitter about it, mostly (though a truly horrifying number of men think its totally appropriate to kill women for not giving them sex on demand – just see the #yesallwomen tag..) Plus I managed to sprain an ankle and run 101 fever for five days last week. So I was a little slowed down (possibly from the Skagit conference? I’ve got to watch overdoing…)

And then I spent hours researching my own past as well as all of nuclear history to write this author’s note for my next book, “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” I interviewed my Dad on stories I remembered from my childhood about his work and read papers and sections of books like Atomic Accidents and watched documentaries. Not much fun to watch what happens to butterflies who eat houseplants from Fukushima, for example, or ponder exactly which of your medical problems might spring from radioactive exposure in your youth – but both things seem important to the book. (Flannery O’Conner railed against the difficulty of writing an author’s note for Wise Blood and now I see why! They are very difficult! You want to include enough of a clue about your own reasons for writing the book, enough of the history and science of the subject matter to make it understandable, but you don’t want to talk down to the audience…it’s a tightrope walk!)

Anyway, after several nights of bad sleep, anxiety dreams about death and not much peace or productivity, I decided to try the “taking my mind off it” strategy of seeing a movie – in my case, “X-Men: Days of Future Past” which was fairly enjoyable except for the total lack of attention paid to the state of robotics in 1973, which I happen to know something about (see previous paragraph) plus I noticed entire sections ripped off of other movies/shows (particularly a sequence exactly like a similar sequence in The Matrix, Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s The Wish, and time-travel stuff that reminded me strongly of Charles Wallace in Swiftly Tilting Planet and Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonflight series.) Oh well. Besides my small disturbances, the movie was great fun and even had some hope/emotional resonance, I thought, which is pretty good for a comic book movie. (Also, I watched five trailers for comic book movies to come..not one of them featuring a female comic book superhero. Come on, Wonder Woman movie! Or Scarlet Witch! Or Black Widow? You dudes in Hollywood know Hunger Games wasn’t a one-time aberration in movies, right? That we actually want to see strong female leads in action movies? Oh well…)

To combat my non-productivity, I did manage to write two pages of the author’s note (which will need to be edited down later,) a few pages on my “medical memoir” project and…even more bravely…re-wrote a query which I may or may not send out to agents about the book. Any agents out there reading my blog really excited about a medical memoir project? 🙂 Get in touch!

Anyway, I hope your week was filled with peace, health productivity, and much less anxiety than I had this week. May your loved ones be safe, may you stay healthy, may your writing flourish! That’s my Memorial Weekend wish!

Skagit River Poetry Festival Report, Mark Doty on Routines

This year’s festival got off to an interesting start when the fundraising dinner they held on Thursday night began with me sitting next to Robert Hass, his poem and my poem from the anthology next to each other on beautiful broadsides at each place setting. Let me tell you, there’s no way to make you feel humble like sitting next to a former US Poet Laureate. But the good news is we had plenty to talk about, including Japanese translations, our favorite Japanese current literature (I was able to tell him about Monkey Business, the contemporary Japanese journal Roland Kelts works on, which he was really excited about and had never heard of) and one of my former UC professors that Robert told me he really admires. On the other side of me sat visual artist Fritha Strand, who live painted during the evening readings, quite a cool spectacle, and of course I love artists, so that was great too. (Kelli snapped this pic so you could see how happy I was to get my book signed by Robert Hass – literally I looked up for a second and flash!)

I loved meeting Blas Falconer, who was so accomplished and had a great warm, intuitive personality, and seeing Kwame Dawes and Mark Doty read again, talking religion and language with Emily Warn, and discussing women and monsters with lovely Canadian poet (who also happens to look like a Disney princess, but cooler) Rachel Rose.

The panels and readings went as well as they could (I think!) and I was surrounded by old friends at the festival too. (Pictured: Kelly Davio, Rachel Rose, Lana Ayers, Kelli Agodon, Susan Rich, Oliver de la Paz, the top of Robert Hass’ head, and sunset view from our B&B.)

Some of the highlights of the weekend for me included wildlife sightings: seeing three otters flipping around logs in the river, getting startled by a series of herons who look and sound like ghosts at night flying right up to us and landing as we walked along the river at night, lots of close-ups of white-headed sea eagles, deer and quail crossing the street. La Conner was just beautiful, showing off with sunny weather and iris fields and startling sunsets and mild evenings of river time.

Last night at the final reading of the Skagit River Poetry Festival, Mark Doty started a poem by talking about how “wildly creative people need their routines – where they get their morning coffee, where they get their haircut, where they take their daily walk – to produce creative work.” And as I’m settle back into my house and my routines, I realize how true that is, how no matter how much fun I have being extroverted and running from panel to reading to dinner while I’m at an event like this, it is always nice to come home to my little townhouse, my own little bed, my cats, the hours of alone time.

Skagit River Poetry Festival – Where I’ll Be

Off to the Skagit River Poetry Festival in La Conner, WA, on a beautiful sunny afternoon in the Pacific Northwest.

If you want to see me there, you can catch me at:
–Saturday – 1:30-3:00 Festival of Poets reading
–Saturday 3:30- 4:45 Phyllis L. Ennes Poets reading
and I’ll be otherwise hanging around causing mischief! (Doing a high school student panel on grief and healing Friday morning that I hope will be helpful too, so wish me luck on that! And staying healthy for three whole days!)

The tulips won’t be up anymore, but we might get a peek at some iris fields…Hope to see some of you there!