Help Me Decide on my Next Author Photo?

Well, it’s that time again…author photo time! I know it seems like I am carting-before-the-horse since I haven’t announced my next book yet…but I promise I will announce news as soon as I can! Until then, help me pick my next author photo by voting in the comments! (All photos by Tom Collicott. Thanks Tom!)

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A Video of my Reading, Border Crossing, September Heat

In case you’d like to see me read from all three of my books plus a bonus new poem that will be featured in the 2014 Poet’s Market…here’s a video of my part in the Jack Straw reading at the UW’s University Bookstore. (Thanks to my husband for taking the video, and to Chelsea Werner-Jatzke for the kind introduction.)

If you like these poems, you can buy my books here, here, and here. Or order a signed copy directly from me (and possibly get some swag!) here. Yes, it’s almost fall, though it may not feel like it – time to buy some poetry books! I have my new favorites, including Forty–One Jane Doe’s from Carrie Olivia Adams and Special Powers and Abilities by Raymond McDaniel, waiting to be reviewed.

And here’s a link to the Fall 2013 issue of Border Crossing, which features one of my poems, “Phosphorus Girl:”

http://www.lssu.edu/bc/SelectedexcerptsfromVolume3.php

It’s been crazy hot here in Seattle – we broke a record yesterday at 93 degrees, and remember most stuff (including most homes and businesses) isn’t air-conditioned out here. And it’s muggy. The days are getting shorter, though – we drove home through darkness at 8 PM, it feels like just a second ago 8 PM wasn’t even sunset. I’m in the midst of planning things – mostly hopeful things – looking forward to the temperatures dropping and the leaves turning, the rituals of September – buying bright notebooks, baking again, and something I haven’t done enough of in the last year – spending time with friends, catching up on what we did all summer. This week, drink some frozen watermelon lemonade and grill out one last time in the late heat, pick up a book, buy some highlighters, pick some sunflowers, kiss someone on the lips. It’s the last long days of waning summer…

A Jack Straw Reading at University Bookstore, A Poem Feature, and Pondering Publishers…

All righty, enough sad posts for this week. Thanks to Bridle Path Press who is featuring two of my Robot Scientist Daughter poems this week here. They’re only up for a few more days so hurry and catch them!

I’m reading at the UW University Bookstore downtown tonight at 7 PM as part of the Jack Straw Writers reading series with terrific poets Daemond Arrindell and Larry Crist. Show up if you can – it’ll be a good show!

Pondering Publishers…

So, my next book will be my fourth, and I wish I had a ton of wisdom to share now about how to go about choosing a publisher for your poetry book. It seems like, yes, there’s the contest system, there’s open submissions (which sometimes still charge fees,) and there are presses that take submissions any time. It seems the larger poetry presses are reading less, but small poetry presses are proliferating, thank goodness, so maybe that makes up for it. At last week’s twitter #poetparty, I asked poets about what they looked for in a press. Not only am I thinking about how to decide where to publish my own next book, but I’m thinking in terms of starting a small press myself someday soon. Here are some of the top answers:

Input or say in the cover art. That was really a high priority for a lot of poets, and with good reason – a lot of people pick up a book of poetry (or not) because of the cover.
Distribution didn’t seem as important to most poets at the twitter poetparty as it does to me. I think now that distribution – even if the three main ways books are sold by poets is either at readings, on Amazon, or directly through the press’s web site – is an important consideration when you sign up with a press. You want your book to get out into the world.
A good working relationship with the editor. Yes, that does seem important. I often send to presses because I like the editor’s voice.
Royalty rates, author copies, longevity of press, and how the press markets their books were also considerations. I like to see that the press is active on social media, has an e-mail newsletter where they promote their books, and that it has a decent, easy-to-navigate web site. Does the press do e-books? Have their books won major prizes recently (see below…)
Something that wasn’t brought up but strikes me as important as someone who has done this three times…how willing is the press to send out review copies? How many prizes will they send your book to, and are they willing to send copies/pay fees? For poetry books, getting attention is tough, and getting any kind of prize recognition and reviews really helps get the word out.

What else do you think are the most important things to think about when a poet signs up with a press? Yes, you can also say “the press accepted my manuscript” as an important consideration, but I think that we need to think beyond “they like my work” to what the press is going to do for the book once it’s published (or not.) There was also a discussion of POD versus traditional print run, self-publishing versus traditional publishing, and options in-between. The publishing world is changing, and the poetry publishing world in particular is kind of morphing before our eyes, and it’s our job to keep up as well as we can.

A Review on the Rumpus and Degenerative Demyelinating Disease

First, the good news: a new review of Unexplained Fevers is up on The Rumpus. Thanks, Rumpus!

So, the bad news that I’ve been referring to in the last few months is this: I’ve seen two neurologists and gotten an MRI, and it appears that there is a consensus that I have some neural lesions in the brain, and what is right now being referred to as degenerative demyelinating disease. This means something – probably an autoimmune problem, maybe some problem with the way my body processes B12, maybe multiple sclerosis – is making my myelin sheaths deteriorate. Mostly, so far, this has impacted me in motor skill areas – if you’ve been around me in the last few years, you may have noticed a wheelchair, a cane, or just an inability to climb stairs – the symptoms kind of vary by day – and can be measured in things like weird reflexes, numb hands and feet, that sort of thing. The symptoms weren’t obvious…the numbness in hands and feet, dropping things, injuring myself falling a bunch of times, fatigue and new headaches. It took me a while to even get motivated to get myself evaluated (with anaphylaxis, yes, you get yourself right to a doctor, with numb feet and stumbling – it’s more, meh.) The good news is, both neurologists think they’ve caught it early, and one of the two neurologists thought maybe we could start a treatment plan right away. I’m actually feeling more optimistic now than I have in a few months, because being told that you have something wrong in your brain when you’ve relied on your brain for a long time to be the one part of you that works really well was a bit of a shock, but now it has worn off. I have friends with MS and other neurological disorders who have been super supportive and helpful, I’ve read up on the subject (really starting from zero on this one – I knew way more about my genetic bleeding disorder and allergies than I did about the neurological systems – must have been asleep during that part of my biology classes). I couldn’t talk about it for a long time even with my friends and family, and I wondered about “coming out” here about this here on the blog, because what if some publisher didn’t want to work with me because of it or what if it cost me a job, but then I thought, it’s a bit more empowering to let people know – hey, I can’t climb stairs because I have this kind of disease rather than just vaguely mumble about it forever, or refer darkly to “health problems” on the blog. (Oh, and if anyone has been paying attention to the blog up til now, you already know I’ve had some health issues. I mean, I named my last book “unexplained fevers” for a reason. It’s not like I was some kind of Olympic champion, racing up and down stairs with sacks of potatoes before this. Ha!) So now you know. If you’re a publisher or an employer, I promise I can still sell books (as well as I ever could – it’s poetry!) and work just the same, as long as you’re not asking me to do toe curls or stair races. I feel hopeful that the new treatment – it will take a bit of time to tell – will halt some of the further damage this kind of disease could cause, and I’m game for gambling on treatment rather than sitting on my hands.

This is not necessarily poetry related, and I don’t want to define myself by this or any of the other weirdo health stuff I have. I am maybe a mutant, but I have a lot of good things in my life too. I have a kind husband who has been doing most of the major housework around the house, the carrying and lifting and chopping (all not great ideas for me these days.) So I may not be a major tap dancer in years to come – that’s okay with me. I was always happier curled up with a book anyway.

You are not tethered to darkness – and other advice on how to survive hard times

So, the news hasn’t been so good lately. You scroll through the headlines and they are all hard to fathom, hard to hope through. You’ve had professional setbacks, you’ve gotten bad news about your health and realized your mortality, you realized your human network isn’t quite as supportive as you’d hoped, the weather is exactly the kind you don’t like. You’ve tethered yourself to darkness. You’ve given up hope. What to do next?

Well, realize first you don’t have to drag all your bad news around you, like a heavy cast iron piece on a rope, all the time. Leave the cast iron piece at home. Untie the rope. This last long weekend I decided to do all the things I hadn’t gotten to do over the summer because I’d been too busy or too sick or too overcommitted or whatever. We went to La Conner, a lovely town known for its tulips and snow geese, and breezed around the river, poking into little shops and galleries. We went to Tacoma’s Point Defiance Zoo, where everything was in bloom, the cool wind off the water was fresh and clean despite the 80 degree heat, and we saw a tiny toddler tiger tumbling with its handler and a clouded leopard cub leaping into the arms of a zoo guide and a serval cub on a leash which was a strange sight indeed. We saw a litter of half-grown meerkats and watched the seals rise and fall from the water. Yesterday we went to downtown Seattle for art – an opening at Roq La Rue, the strange and wondrous little gallery of subversive pop art, to look at a carousel horse severed in half with miniature cities build inside each half, a painting of octopus mermaids and a little girl breaking the shell of an egg with the most interested look in her eyes. At Seattle Art Museum, we snuck in under the wire of the closing of the Japanese fashion exhibit, where one of my favorite Japanese artists, Aya Takano, had put her art all over Issey Miyake’s raincoat and boots. These were all things that were suddenly, clearly more important to do than anything else – more important than doctor appointments, or doing the laundry, or paying bills. If you feel like you are tethered to darkness, you have to remember what tethers you to light.

Last night I dreamed I was a writer who abandoned the earth in the last days to go live on the moon. My dream astronaut/scientist boyfriend and I (clutching a book I had written called “a new beginning,” which was also my boyfriend’s name in Chinese.) I was going there with my boyfriend just to die, because we had given up on earth’s terrible problems, its radiation and plagues and war. Instead we are rescued by moon colonists who tell us in their new world stories are valuable. The devil is named “the destroyer of stories,” and mythology has become as imperative as science to the newborn human culture’s survival.

This morning I wrote three letters: one to my grandmother, one to a friend to whom I owed a birthday card and some chocolate, and a third, poems and a check to a contest. It felt good to do something concrete to put light into the world.

So, what am I talking about? How do you survive hard times? You don’t give up. You don’t forget the importance of story to your culture, to your own humanity. You remember the breeze off the water, the bright assault of blooming things and endangered tiger cubs. You send out messages of hope. You look at art that makes you dream about living on a terra-formed moon.