Life After the MFA and my poem “Elemental” up at Rattle

I’m on the road with a bad internet connection today but wanted to post two quick things!
My poem “Elemental” is up at Rattle today and you can hear me read it there. (PS This poem is up for a Rhysling Award, so if you’re part of the SFPA, vote 🙂
http://www.rattle.com/poetry/2013/06/elemental-by-jeannine-hall-gailey/

And I’ll be doing a talk tomorrow at Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon on “Life After the MFA.” Wish me luck! And if you’re at the Pacific residency, come by and say hello!

Success as a Writer Part III: What You Have Control Over, and What You Can Do

I’ve been writing a lot lately about what defines success as a writer, as honestly and completely as I can, but I realized I might have left out a couple of really important things, chiefly, what can you, as a writer, do about it? In the end, it’s not really about fame or money or grants or fellowships or number of books sold, it’s about how you go about your daily life.
You can’t control critics, or mentors, or grant advising committees, or readers, sales numbers, or publishers…but you can control yourself and your own actions. So what are the activities that will make you, in your everyday life, a more successful (and probably happier) writer

1. Remember to keep writing. And try to write the best work you are capable of. Challenge yourself. And try some new things sometimes – whether it’s a new POV, a new subject, a new genre. The worst thing you can do is write a bunch of work, then end the “That’s it. I’ll just send out that work over and over, and waste a lot of energy worrying about it.” Or, after you, say publish a book, obsess about sales numbers and Amazon ranks and good/bad reviews. No, you start another book…or two. The best thing you can do for yourself and your career as a writer is “always be writing.” Even if you win the Pulitzer Prize, you won’t know if that’s the best work you were truly capable of. You have to keep writing.

2. Try to give something back, if it’s just listening to someone struggling with their first set of rejections, all the way to becoming a mentor to a younger writer. Teach something, because you’ll always be surprised at what you learn when you try to teach. Maybe help out with a local literary magazine, because you will gain crazy insights into the publishing world. Or work with high school kids or read to children at the library. Or start reviewing other people’s books, again, because you’ll gain a lot of insight about contemporary poetry – plus, you’ll realize you actually have strong opinions about different writers and styles that you might not ever have thought hard about if you weren’t reviewing a book for someone else.

3. Take a class in something you don’t know how to do yet. Try to paint, or program. If you’re not tremendously physical, try something outdoors that challenges you physically. It’s good to crash up against walls, to drive into mountains, to allow yourself to fail at new things. Go dancing. Listen to a new band your much younger/older friend recommends. If you’ve always killed your plants, try to garden. Cook. Research an obscure topic (I am currently researching CIA manipulation of the modern art scene in the 1950s. Why? Because I find it interesting!) I think all writers should have their hands in some weird other world all the time. If you become the world’s best classic-arcade-Galaga player, well, at least you’ll have something new to write about!

4. Build your own family, or, writers need to create their own small towns. The writing life, as I have written about it here, is challenging. Sometimes depressing. You’ll face a lot of negative messages. You need others of your own kind to connect with – and that can include not just writers, but musicians, visual artists, anyone who is out to create their own thing in this harsh world. Your spouse, best friend, and family may want to support you, but there’s a special thing that happens when like-minded creative types get together. You can gossip, learn about opportunities, give someone a boost when things get tough, let someone bring you brownies when you had a bad day. Here in the Northwest, the landscape is challenging and far-flung – some of my best writer friends live across mountains, or water…but we don’t let that stop us from getting together, even if it’s just online. You will someday need the support of others, so it’s best to start offering your support to others now. The good thing about being an adult is choosing your own company, your own ragtag band of misfits to go conquer the world with.

Twin Peaks, Waterfalls, and Getting Perspective: Happy Midsummer Night’s Eve and Supermoon!

Yes, sometimes we have to get away from it all to get some perspective. After feeling worn out and sick as a dog for two weeks, today I woke up with the sun shining and feeling well enough to get around a bit. So we decided on a day trip out to Snoqualmie Falls (the Salish Lodge there was used as the site for Twin Peaks) and to Ollalie State Park Falls, a somewhat smaller and less touristy nearby waterfall hike.

It was 79 degrees, a breeze was blowing the waterfall’s mist up in our faces, and there was a rainbow. It was the biggest we had seen the falls in sometime – we have had some rain and snowmelt, but whatever caused it was amazing! It was great to drive into the cool mountains in the heat of the day, to watch Glenn walk around a tree about ten times as wide and wall as he is, to watch deer and eagles and stop and buy local honey, to see the storefronts with the famous “Cherry Pie!” discussed in Twin Peaks and antique trains.
This all reminded me of the things I love about where I live – twenty minutes from an ocean, twenty minutes from the mountains, it’s just the traffic and life that get in the way of getting to either, most of the time! And also helped me get outside of my own head – not worrying about jobs, or money, or books, or anything other than – should we make corn chowder out of that fresh corn we just bought? Or – what kind of odd duck and ducklings are we looking at? Was that a flicker or a stellar jay? This was one of the things I missed most about Washington when I lived in California – the Northwest mountains and waterfalls with their cool pines remind me of growing up in the mountains of Tennessee. It seems like taking these little breaks – no more than a few hours, but still a break – helps me remember why I am a writer, why I love where I am, helps me feel a little easier about a body that can be unreliable and cranky. I cut some sweetpeas from my garden, where our first strawberries are getting ripe, and put them in a vase by my computer. This is what a midsummer night’s dream is all about – the enchantment of a glowing giant moon in the sky, the flowers nearby and water and feeling warm from the day’s sun, the birds still calling outside your window.

Why We Do Readings, Running to Stand Still, Book Tours Take a Toll and How Not To Build a Platform

I don’t know how many of you are old enough to, like me, remember one of U2’s Joshua Tree hits, “Running to Stand Still?”

“And so she woke up/ Woke up from where she was/ Lying still/ Saying I gotta do something/ About where we’re going…”

I have been feeling a lot like that lately, running to stand still. A lot of it has been the Redmond Poet Laureate work, as well as the readings for the new book, and my own internal pressure as a Type A person that I should always be doing something to better myself, to make my book sell, to make myself a better writer, to build my local writing community…to do something about where I’m going. And I’ve kind of hit a brick wall – those of you who follow the blog know I have some health challenges, and it seems that every time I start to get a little healthier these days, I do another event or reading and end up back in bed with 101 fever and varying levels of immune-y/sinus/cough/stomach/killerbeesinmyhead etc.

Thanks to friend and blogger Rachel Dacus, I found this entry on Anne R. Allen’s blog “7 Ways Authors Waste Time Trying to Create a Platform.” I laughed when I read the post, because I recognized a lot of the scrambling I’ve been trying to do for the last year, publicity-wise, and how a lot of it was probably just that…a waste of time. I liked her quote that “no one buys a book because someone on Twitter orders them to.” Ha! We writers these days put so much pressure on ourselves to be everything to everyone, and often with little impact on sales or the quality of anything worthwhile in the writing life. I mean, in the old days, we could rely on publishers and their PR teams to do some of the salesmanship and PR for a book – but now, it’s up solely to us. But weren’t we, you know, supposed to be writing or something with our time? I keep remembering that…oh yes, I used to be a writer before I started worrying so much about all the other parts of being a writer besides writing! (And obviously I don’t consider blogging a couple of times a week a waste – it seems more like something natural, reaching out to family and friends and a larger writing community and sharing.)

But this comes to something else that I don’t believe that (well, most of the time anyway) is a waste of time: Readings. Sometimes they hurt – you drive a couple of hours, you don’t get paid, a toddler screams through the entire reading, no one shows up to the reading, you go back home considering a life maybe in a nice nunnery somewhere, or possibly some alternate universe space piloting job or something. But a lot of times, like the reading last night at Hugo House, they go awry, but not terribly – a reader might not show up, but you meet people you might not have otherwise met, someone new connects with your work, or you’re able to give someone support or encouragement at just the right time – they might not go exactly as you planned, in fact, they almost never do – but they are really still one of the best ways to connect your work to an audience, to meet the audience, to hear other writers and share ideas. The chance for a high school girl to tell you she likes your way of looking at fairy tale things and also your earrings, or two people show up that have never been to a poetry reading before and were surprised at how much fun they had. I mean, there are some things that can happen at readings that can’t happen anywhere else. So even if you are held back by realities like – no money to tour, no time off from your job, fear of public speaking, or, like me, struggling with staying healthy – you should remember that even with Facebook and blogs and twitter, there are some things that have no substitute, and readings, from the sublime to the ridiculous or the somewhere in-between, are one of those things for writers. And that’s why you should do readings. But for God’s sake, writers, be kind to yourselves. Give yourselves some time to rest and recuperate and WRITE! If we stop running, I promise, the ground will not slip out from under us. A day or two off from the world (or Facebook, or twitter) is not going to be the end of your writing career. Remember the good things: the moment you write something new you really like, the smile on the face of someone at a reading when they’re listening to your work, when you found an editor or publisher who really got your work, the person who fell down and you could help them up. Those are the reasons we keep at this crazy life.

Now, I am going to take a Tylenol and sleep for about 48 hours. Someone wake me when it’s time for the next reading…

A New Review at Strange Horizons And the “Girls on Fire” reading tomorrow 7 PM at Hugo House

Thanks to Lesley Wheeler and Strange Horizons for this new review of Unexplained Fevers:

http://www.strangehorizons.com/reviews/2013/06/unexplained_fev-comments.shtml

Tomorrow is the “Girls on Fire” reading at Richard Hugo House in downtown Seattle. The description says “Poets Kelly Davio, Jeannine Hall Gailey, Rebecca Loudon, and Tiffany Midge read from new work inspired by fire, fever, apocalypses, and heat. The reading is free. The bar will be open, and books will be for sale.” Really, it is an ignitable group of poets! I hope to see you there!