Verse Wrights features “The Conversation” and Teen Poetry Workshop Tomorrow

Many thanks to Verse Wrights for featuring my poem, “The Conversation,” on their web site today.

My tenure as Poet Laureate of Redmond is coming to an end soon, but I couldn’t be more excited about my last sponsored “geeks for poetry” workshop for teens tomorrow evening at the Old Redmond Schoolhouse, which will be run by YA author and poet Karen Finneyfrock. Read more about it here: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/4568648-free-teen-poetry-workshop-in-redmond or here.

This July has been oppressively hot and surprisingly muggy for the Seattle area. I miss our old-fashioned summers of 70-degree-low-humidity weather. Not that many places in the northwest, by the way, have air conditioning – including a lot of restaurants and my favorite garden store which was 110 degrees yesterday, yikes for its employees! Yesterday as we were driving over the Sammamish river we had a huge bald eagle swoop towards us, right over the car. My mother says the eagle is one of our totem animals, that it is a sign we are on the right path, that we must have courage or that spiritual help for difficult times is coming. Of course, I told her it is a sign we live in the Northwest – there are a lot of eagles out here. It was a nice thought nonetheless. We walked by a winery’s lake covered with yellow water lilies and populated with sleepy ducks. I have a hard time eating, writing, or thinking when it gets this hot and can’t wait for fall to come. This summer has been oppressive in other ways too, with worry, with sadness, with the whole “what does the next part of my life look like.” Sometimes it’s hard to see the path ahead. I guess that’s when we need our eagle totems!

Anne Petty – You Will Be Missed

Just heard that writer, editor and publisher Anne Petty of now-closed Kitsune Books, has passed away peacefully after a long fight with cancer. Anne epitomized everything I would like to be when I grow up – she was smart, spunky, funny and fierce. Not only was she an author, she was an enthusiastic critical writer and someone who worked tirelessly to promote others, especially her authors. I feel honored to have been one of them; Anne was the original editor and publisher of She Returns to the Floating World, through Kitsune Books. She was caring and forthright. She loved anime and fox-wife folk tales, Tolkien and Neil Gaiman, and she was excellent and perceptive reader.

Here is an interview with Anne I did back in 2011. Her spirit and humor will be clear to anyone who knew her:

https://webbish6.com/interview-with-publisher-and-author-anne-petty-2/

I think the world is poorer without her, and I know I will miss her.

My Rumpus Review of “Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape and Synthesizing Bad News at Summertime

Thanks to The Rumpus who just published my review of Marjorie Manwaring’s first book, Search for a Velvet-Lined Cape (isn’t that a great title?) You should go read the review and then the book. I get really excited by probably one out of every twenty books of poetry that I read, and this is one of them.

Summer summer summer with its relentless SUNSHINE these days and HEAT and we’re not used to that in Seattle we usually drift through summer in the seventies with no humidity and only the occasional sparkling blue clear day where everyone crowds together by the water, but now we’ve had over twenty days without rain and many days in the eighties and without air conditioning that can be pretty miserable. I walked around a beautiful field of flowers yesterday but the smog hung oppressively over Mount Rainier, so much so you could barely see the white snow on the mountain. I’m so not a sunbunny, as I learned living in San Diego and Napa, I’m quite literally allergic to the sun, so I’m looking forward to Fall, to September, the overcast and the cool rain again.

I’m also figuring out how to synthesize some bad news at a doctor’s appointment, you know how you go and have tests and they let you go again? Well this week, one of my last doctors was all “look at this” and “this shows positively this” (Yes, I’m being cagey as I wait for further testing the next couple of weeks) and I came home and felt scared and blue and made a playlist of songs like “Dark Days” by the Punch Brothers and “Will She Just Fall Down” by Til Tuesday, Fiona Apple, The Cure’s “To Wish Impossible Things” and “Young and Beautiful” by Lana Del Rey, a long playlist and listened to it all and let myself feel a little sad, which I don’t usually indulge in. I’m not terribly addicted to robust physicality but I don’t like the feeling of losing things little by little the feeling of normalcy the expectations I guess of things that lie ahead sort of sinister. I’m a poet after all, I don’t need everything to be perfect, I don’t need all of my body to be functioning correctly at the same time, I know already that I am a little mutant and monster and I guess it’s good to get some answers. See? I’m trying to look at the bright side even now. I wish medicine and tests weren’t so expensive these days. I wish I could just let go of expectations and worry and watch the grebe in the pond outside my house and the little families of hummingbirds in my back yard, the egg-sized baby bunnies in the clover of the house down the street, enjoy the jasmine that has come back to life in all this sun and heat.

I will try to be back to my upbeat usual self by the next post. I will hope for unexpected beautiful things. That is the world, it’s beautiful and terrible and we’re rarely prepared.

Mad Girl’s Love Song, Happier at Home, the Cultural Cold War and a new review of Unexplained Fevers

Ironic reading pairings? Try the bio of Sylvia Plath, Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life Before Ted, and self-helpish happiness study book by an upper-East side millionaire, Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life . I’m really enjoying this particular bio of Plath, and trying to kind of tease out the subtext, something about how to capture Plath’s infectious ambition without going up in flames. Happier at Home is kind of a weird, how-to-be-a-millionaire-happy-housewife throwback guide for women who have enough money and time that “how to arrange my photos” becomes their biggest problem (I have to admit I was hoping for something different, some sort of modern women’s guide to balancing housework and marriage and money and a creative career, perhaps). Thinking about the repressive atmosphere for women in the 1950s and how there’s sort of a throw-back repression thing going to today in American culture. But I think there’s something interesting in both books about how women can put so much energy and effort into a perfect, happiness-filled home, this idea that women are responsible for the hearth, this primitive urge to divert creative energy into that. I’ve been noticing myself latey that my writing energy can easily be distracted by decorating and tidying up and researching recipes…

The other odd pair of books I’m reading is on the CIA’s involvement in literary and visual art culture during the Cold War era – The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters and Cold War Culture. Last night, to further a theme, I was reading about a 1950’s era book, written by a woman, about a suburban housewife outside NYC who learns to survive a nuclear apocalypse, called “Shadow on the Hearth,” a fictional call-to-arms for American women. Fascinating! I also found out that many “great” artists, literary magazines, and critics were propped up by government funding in an attempt to somehow fight Communism through artistic means. Tim Green posted this link on my Facebook discussion of the subject if you’re interested in further reading: http://web.archive.org/web/20060616213245/http://cia.gov/csi/studies/95unclass/Warner.html. I’ve lately been interested in Cold War culture, what with growing up in America’s Secret City (Oak Ridge, Tennessee) in the seventies with “men in black” hanging around the house, that I’m fairly interested to see the way that the government has tried (and for all I know, is trying now) to control things like art and poetry. (And PS, that big literary or art star might be a government construct! Now everything makes sense!)

Thanks to Collin Kelley for this mini-review of Unexplained Fevers at his blog, here: http://collinkelley.blogspot.com/2013/07/read-this-poetry-by-erica-wright.html

A nice review can make the sting of rejections a little better. I’ll try to remember that when I’m complaining about writing my next review!

What are you looking for in a poetry publisher?

I get lots of mail from poets asking about how to get a book published. But a question poets often don’t think about is, what are you looking for in a poetry publisher? I think it is something we should give more thought to before we even start sending out our books. Sandy Longhorn has a great post here about the state of poetry publishing today, and voices some of the frustration at a system that requires writers to pay for the privilege of having an editor or publisher even glance at their work. I piped up a bit because in my own career, I’ve mostly worked with small poetry publishers who either have open submissions or…wait, that’s all I’ve worked with. I like supporting small publishers, but there are pluses and minuses to every decision we make about our books. We actually have a lot more control than we think.

Putting together your first book of poetry, you’ll look at the list of first book contests, which are the most numerous and often the most prestigious, and wonder…You’ll ask….should I part with the $25 contest fee for a lottery ticket to a very expensive, very low-paying lottery? Or should I do research around my city at literary fairs or conferences, find micro-or-small publishers who might be friendly to my aesthetic? Should I wait til AWP’s bookfair and take a look some of the books on offer, find one that offers the kind of design and content I like?

But after your first book, there are fewer contest options, so you’ll have to look around at other resources, like http://www.dacushome.com/Poetry%20Book%20Publishers.htm and http://thelinebreak.wordpress.com/2012/06/16/presses-with-open-readings-for-full-length-poetry-manuscripts/#comment-1345. You’ll probably want to take a look at the books a press produces BEFORE signing up to publish with them, so you’ll want to either check them out in person (easy at AWP, harder the rest of the year unless you’ve got a terrific all-poetry bookstore like Open Books around the corner) or order a copy of one of their books online.

What are the most important things do you think for your publisher to do? Is it great distribution? Is SPD or Ingram okay, or do I want Consortium? What about a dedicated marketing department or PR service? Or is my priority that I want to work closely with a friendly editor who loves and is enthusiastic about my work? Do I want to help promote a new publisher and do extra work to get the word out about both them and my new book? Do I care about the royalty statement, prize money, or profits? Have their books won prestigious prizes? Do I even care about prestige? Can they afford to buy any ads or do any promotion? What about review copies? Do I get input on my book’s cover art? Do they have a decent web site, use social media, are their books available on Amazon, who seems to be on the way to being the monolith of book publishing? Or do I want to try to do everything myself and self-publish?

I have a friend who will remain nameless, who sent out his book manuscript, which I got a chance to read and knew was excellent, for a long time. Lots of years. It was really good and I was anxious for him to get it out into the world, so I advised him to go look for a smaller publisher, and not to concentrate just on the big poetry book contests. Still, he persevered. Then he won the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize. So ha ha, joke’s on me. Remember not to take my advice if you’re about to win the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize.

I’m thinking hard myself about these questions for manuscripts #4 and #5. Please leave your own advice, questions or thoughts in the comments! If you ask questions, I promise I’ll try to come up with an answer, but it may not be the answer. That will be up to you.