Three Things I’ve Learned From Being a Jack Straw Writer

Today I roused myself out of bed with a sore throat, cough, and runny nose (I know, a glamorous picture!) to go to Seattle’s U District for voice coaching at Jack Straw, a great part of the experience of being a 2013 Jack Straw Writer. Along with the end of my tenure as Redmond’s Poet Laureate, I’m also coming to the end of my time as a Jack Straw Writer (by the way, applications are due soon, check it out! Even if you’re in Portland or environs! It’s worth the drive.)

In case you’re wondering, Jack Straw is this cool Seattle non-profit whose secret mission is to help artists of all types perform more effectively – coaching us for radio interviews and readings is just part of their work. And I thought I would share some of the best lessons I learned from my time.

1. Even if you think you’re a pretty good reader, there’s always something to learn. Live readings in a crowd – totally different than reading for radio, for instance – you can’t communicate via hand motion or face expression, so you really have to put more into your voice inflections, careful to enunciate or inject humor into a pause. And there’s nothing as humbling as listening to your own work recorded in your own voice in a professional studio to make you think about what you can improve.

2. Being in a group of writers who have nothing in common but wanting to support each other can be pretty powerful. I think this is part of the Jack Straw Writer magic, that you get together with writers of various ages, genres, levels of experience, schools of writing – writers you might never have met other than being “Jack Straw writers” together, and try to help and encourage each other. I certainly learned a lot from the other writers and their work. To be honest, I would probably have benefited more from this aspect if I’d been less busy with Poet Laureate stuff, but even the limited number of times I was able to hang out with my group, there was I think a spirit of generosity and goodwill that sometimes you can forget exists in the somewhat competitive and snarky world of writers (witness the latest ‘kill list’ unpleasantness or, you know, hang out at the bar at AWP).

3. Part of the job of any artist is to be able to take their work public. Dancers, visual artists, writers – we’re not always great about talking to an audience about our inspirations, our reasons and motives and visions of creation. We all have, of course, motives that might be hidden even from ourselves – but it’s part of our job to be able to communicate reasonably well the reasons we create, our goals for the creation, and maybe something that inspires the audience too, if we can. Part of this is performance – putting our work in front of different audiences and learning how to become comfortable with say, radio interview questions. Part of it is learning to articulate our real reasons for creating, which might be more difficult and probably, let’s face it, maybe more interesting to an audience that the creations themselves. If you’re serious about your art, you should put some time and effort into communicating with others about it.

A bonus? Today I got to get a sneak peek at fellow Jack Straw Writer Judith Skillman’s book, Broken Lines: The Art and Craft of Poetry, with chapters on handy things like writer’s block, putting together a poetry manuscript, collaborating with other artists, and maintaining motivation. There aren’t enough practical guides like this out there for poets, so I encourage you to get your own copy here! Broken Lines – The Art & Craft of Poetry

Scary Stories: Horror Narrative (about publicity) and Fears (of Failure)

It’s almost Halloween, and that means it’s time for some scary stories!

If you picked up this latest issue of Poets & Writers, the one with the sunny visage of Ms. Elizabeth Gilbert on the cover, you may run across an article that is kind of a horror story: a young writer spends $10,000, her entire advance, on the publicity services of two independent book publicists who basically take her money and do nothing. She does not name these two publicists, which might have been a public service, unfortunately. (There is also a somewhat flimsy rebuttal by a publicist, who doesn’t actually address the issue of dishonest publicists, but makes a case that “our job is hard.” Which, no doubt, it is. But it doesn’t justify charging someone $5K and never contacting them again!)

Now some people might have limited sympathy for the writer who spent her money thus. After all, she explains that she did vet them but spending that kind of money on publicity services seems at best very optimistic…I felt really racy/crazy spending $99 on the “Premium” package at YouDoPR for my last book and felt I got a much better deal than this woman in the article did! (Also, that “Everyday Book Marketing” book by Midge Raymond has plenty of good tips for much less than 10K.) Of course, I’m a poet and we get limited publicity no matter how much money we might throw at the problem, because so few media outlets are interested in poetry in the first place. But it was interesting to think about how many writers might unwittingly be throwing money after this kind of problem (a commenter on Facebook pointed out a Goodreads banner ad runs $5K!!!) I mean, I don’t know how many small press writers are making upwards of 10K on their royalties in the first place to kind of have this money to play with, but yikes!

My other story has to do with fears. Specifically, my fears of failure (among other fears.) A few posts ago, I mentioned I have been “looking for a sign” – in vain, I must admit – in the days after that post, I received three regular rejections and a grant “no.” So is that my sign that I should quit, that I should give up writing?

Those of you who remember this post (What to do when life rains on your parade) will know that I have been dealing with some straight up frightening health news – specifically, about developing neural lesions, which threaten things like motor skills, memory, and the like. It’s been a dark time for me, not just physically but mentally and emotionally, worrying that dropping a pumpkin on my foot at the grocery store is a sign of worsening neural problems, or that being unable to place a face with a name (which happened a couple of times at Geek Girl Con) is a sign my ability to place faces with names at all might be disappearing.

What specifically am I hoping for, these days, as a forty-year old with a few poetry books to my name, and not much else? I have always been one of those annoying types who fears failure – what if I never become a success at what I want to do, I worried when I was 22 (although then, I was not quite as sure what I wanted to do – like Barbie, I thought I could be anything – President! Astronaut! Figure Skater!) Now, I may be looking at a compressed time frame – with the time and ability I have left, what can I realistically hope for? I want to be realistic. Maybe poetry is not a good game for realists. What can I expect with my next book? Obviously I have more realistic, less ambitious goals than I did when I was younger. But I can still hope for good things to come out of the blue. Maybe my “sign” just hasn’t come yet.

Hobble Creek Review, Geek Girl Aftermath, and Thoughts on Launching A Book

First of all, let me thank Collin Kelly and Justin Evans, because this latest, pop-culture-focused issue of Hobble Creek Review – in which my poem “Teen Girl Vampires” appears – is a great one. There’s a lot of sharp humor in the issue, and it’s just plain enjoyable.

I’m suffering from a little post Geek-Girl-Con fallout – a bad cough that keeps waking me up at night (the string of cold, foggy days here hasn’t been helping) and a serious need to catch up on sleep before I can catch up on work. I genuinely still get thrilled meeting people excited about Star Wars and Buffy and video games and such. Then yesterday I saw Sarah Michelle Gellar – several years younger than I am – on the cover of “More Magazine” – which used to be reserved for the over-40 set – and realized hey, if she’s on the cover of More, I really am getting older! I can’t party like a 22-year-old anymore! But, on the other hand, if people are looking to Buffy as a model of graceful aging, I guess that’s kind of cool.

I was talking to a friend of mine, who has a book coming out next year, and we were talking about book tours, and I was telling her a little bit about how launching a book is really a never-ending endeavor – I remember for my first book, I really pushed traveling all over to readings, and even the second year, I was still visiting universities across the country (and I told her the book sold better in its second year than its first – probably not uncommon for poetry books, when reviews trickle in after eight months and word of mouth is usually slow burning rather than wildfire-like.) When you’re launching a not-your-first book, you start looking at strategy – like, I might want to visit Florida, because a surprising amount of copies of my books are down there, and I might want to visit old-hometowns, like Cincinnati or Knoxville, because I’m more likely to have a friendly crowd in those areas. I definitely want to send review copies of my book to places that reviewed one of my first three books. Those kinds of things. It doesn’t feel as scary, because you know what you’re getting into, but these days, we have to be savvy about promoting across more kinds of platforms – reddit and tumblr are still new to me, for instance, and think about things like paper versus e-publishing rights when we look at our contracts. It’s really a different kind of thing than it was back in spring of 2006, when poet blogs were still sort of a new phenomenon, Borders was still going strong, and there was really no such thing as reading a book on your mobile phone. What do you guys think is the most important thing for an author publishing a book to think about these days? Put your thoughts in the comments!

Where You Can Find Me Today (Saturday) at Geek Girl Con!

So, this is where to find me at Geek Girl Con this Saturday:

10:30-10:50 Media Signing, next to the UW Bookstore table. I will be very tired, because this is before my “awake” time, but happy to see you nonetheless. (Then, I will go home and nap before…)

Some pics from our morning adventures:

Two Geek Girl Poets (Kelly Davio and Jeannine Hall Gailey)

Jeannine with Amber Benson (Tara from Buffy and YA/comic author)

Three Panelists

Me with Boba Fett

8 PM: Rm 301 for Girl Geek Poetry: Geeks for Poetry, Poetry for Geeks. We’ll talk about the female writers and Barbie, Poison Ivy, River Tam, and scientific phenomenon, and also where and how to publish your own geeky poetry. Panelists include poet, editor and reviewer Kelly Davio and Hello the Future’s Nicole Dieker (um, the program – er, strategy guide – is deeply wrong about the names of the panelists. But these are the actual ones who will be there with me, so trust me on this.)

Geek Girl Con is a wonderful Seattle phenomenon, now in its third year, and I am very happy to be a part of it. Where else in the world can you go and be part of a huge throng of girls (not strippers paid to dress up!) in the costumes of Xena, Katniss, Buffy, and talk about video game strategy, programming, bioethics, fandoms of all sorts, and things like, yes, superhero poetry?

New Review of Unexplained Fevers at Escape Into Life and Geek Girl Con

Thanks to Kathleen Kirk who wrote a really thoughtful review of Unexplained Fevers at Escape into Life here. As always with reviews, I know it takes time and energy away from your own writing, so I really appreciate it! I love the title of the review: “Diagnostic Mysteries!” Sounds like a House episode!

I’m finishing up a presentation on “Geek Girl Poetry” for Geek Girl Con this Saturday (8 PM) – with a media signing with my panelists Kelly Davio and Nicole Dieker at 10 AM, bright and shiny! (I hear Amber Benson, who played Tara in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Jane Espenson, one of my fave Hollywood writers, may be around the media signing area in the morning as well, so keep your eyes open.) Going to Geek Girl Con is always fascinating, and I tend to always run into an artist or writer I admire there. I’m hoping I sell some books at the early signing (since it’s actually before our event, which has never happened before…) but the whole experience there is usually really fun. We’re supposed to have dry, sunny weather all weekend, too – almost never happens this late in October, so that’s a bonus.

I’ve been working on a little fiction story and let me say, working on fiction really makes me appreciate how much more work fiction writers have to do to create a decent story compared to a decent poem – just about the time you feel like you’ve got your plot and characters, you have to go back and smooth out transitions, check the language, think about dialogue – it’s a lot! This could be because I haven’t tried writing fiction very often, and so my skills are rusty. It turns out my fiction stories are a lot like my persona poems – same themes, same kinds of voices – just sustained longer, and I have to take them somewhere, like carrying them around in a backpack through a journey. They have to learn and grow, and such, I’ve heard. It turns out all of my characters have mutations and strange illnesses, too, and usually their origins can be traced back to pop culture or fairy tales. Oh my gosh – now I have to worry about trying to publish in two genres? Ha! Well, I won’t worry about that until I’m done with this story, anyway.

October has been was busier than I intended, and now it looks like November is crowding up as well – the final big Jack Straw reading at the Seattle Library on Nov 2nd, then a Bushwick musician/poet pairing on November 9, and I guess I’m giving a craft talk at Ballard Library on November 14! I thought I was supposed to have some time off after the Poet Laureate gig was over!