Happy Thanksgiving Week – Is it really almost December?

OK, I know everyone probably says this every year, but Oh my God how did it get to be almost December? Have I been asleep in some sort of time machine? Is everyone else ready for the holidays now? Because I am not. Yesterday there was flooding around town, some downed tree branches, but nothing big enough to use as a Christmas tree.

Thanksgiving will mean Osso Bucco and crustless cranberry meringue pies this year. We’re adjusting to my new dietary restrictions and plus, meals made in a Dutch oven rule for going out to the movies on Thanksgiving! (James Bond perhaps? Why isn’t The Hobbit out yet?)

I actually felt really good about the last Redmond Poet Laureate event, Kathleen Flenniken’s reading (for a summary and pictures here: http://redmondpoetry.blogspot.com/2012/11/kathleen-flennikens-redmond-reading-and.html) and loved meeting people interested in poetry. I mean, maybe I feel like I’m starting to have a little bit of a community out here in the tech-center-outskirts of Seattle. Yes, I might even say I feel optimistic. I’m looking forward to Kelli and Annette’s talk on December 6th on E-publishing and social media for poets at Redmond Library (7 PM.) Did I mention how great our library system is? Well, I feel thankful for that too.

I’m starting to get a little nervous/stressed/excited about getting all the book stuff for Unexplained Fevers ready by the end of December for a spring launch with New Binary Press – like, getting a new author photo, working with the artist to get cover art, starting to (eek!) think about setting up readings for the new book next year. Maybe a book trailer? (I do not currently have the skills to make a book trailer, so if you ever see one, it’s because someone helped me out. Maybe more than one person.) I may work with a PR service for the book this time around (YouDoPR is a very affordable PR service that is creating services for poets!) This is all new territory for me. Does having a book coming out seem lie it requires a lot more skills than it used to? But I am so thankful to have a publisher and a publishing date for this book.

So Happy Thanksgiving, you guys, however you celebrate, I hope you are warm and safe and loved. I’m going to decorate for Christmas early this year. We don’t have much money to spend – paying mortgages and car repairs and such has really curtailed our usual spending festivities – but we can start the celebration whenever we want.

Washington State Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken visits Redmond!

Today I have the chance as Poet Laureate of Redmond to host the Poet Laureate of the whole state of Washington, Kathleen Flenniken, as she reads at Redmond Library from her new book, Plume, at 3 PM. Afterwards I’ll host a short Q&A, and we’ll serve refreshments, and Kathleen will sign books! I’m really looking forward to hearing Kathleen read poems from Plume again – this is one of my favorite books of 2012 – I liked it so much I bought one for myself and one for my father!

It’s a stormy day out, perfect for curling up with a good book at the library, so come by if you can! (Refreshments include sea-salt-and-cocoa-dusted almonds and peppermint-chocolate cookies…)

Unexplained Fevers Goes to Ireland – Book Announcement for 2013!!

Unexplained Fevers plucks the familiar fairy tale heroines and drops them into alternate landscapes. Unlocking them from the old stories is a way to “rescue the other half of [their] souls.” And so Sleeping Beauty arrives at the emergency room, Red Riding Hood reaches the car dealership, and Rapunzel goes wandering in the desert – their journeys, re-imagined in this inventive collection of poems, produce other dangers, betrayals and nightmares, but also bring forth great surprise and wonder.
– Rigoberto González, author of Black Blossoms

Unexplained Fevers begins with that most familiar of phrases, “Once upon a time,” but the world we find inside these covers is deeply defamiliarized. Trapped by physical ills, cultural expectations, and the constraints of marriage, these heroines interrogate the world and propel themselves through it with cunning and sass. We follow, for example, Jack and Jill though a prose poem where they “somehow turned thirty without thunderous applause,” after having sworn they “would follow each other anywhere, but anywhere turned out to be a lot like Ohio.” At the center of these poems – urgent, mysterious, evocative – we find the great topic of all fairy tales, transformation. Read Unexplained Fevers, and be transformed.
– Beth Ann Fennelly, author of Unmentionables

Anticipation, New Mexico Poems, E-publishing, and a Tuesday Announcement!

I’ve been busy with things that involve anticipation.

I’ll have an announcement about my third book on Tuesday!

Helping my mom prepare for a big job interview (Good luck Mom!) and signing contracts (!) and thinking about planning events for Redmond all the way through next spring. And November and December are so busy! Also we’re trying to squeeze in all our doctor and dentist appointments before December 31 as our company health care plan is getting much more expensive and paperwork-heavy next year (I hate to say it, but mainly due to the government’s new health care changes. They hurt me more than they help me, but I know I’m probably in the minority that way.) Still, these things require planning. And I’m already worried about next year’s taxes! This is going to be our most complicated tax year ever, I think. So, onward…

I’d like to direct your attention to the innovative project “200 Poems for New Mexico” – and one of the poems is one of mine, “America Dreams of Roswell.”

And Rachel Dacus has an interested post about the lack of e-book publishing  here. I would like here to make a pitch for those local to Seattle to come out and hear my friends Annette Spaulding-Convy and Kelli Russell Agodon talk about this very topic, e-book publishing for poets at the Redmond Library at 7 PM on December 6th, as part of the “Geeks for Poetry” initiative that I started as Redmond’s Poet Laureate. We’ll talk all about e-books, twitter, social media in general. It’ll be grand times! These guys know what they’re talking about, as they have already produced a fantastic e-book of women’s poetry called Fire on Her Tongue. You know, my new publisher is also interested in doing e-books! I think we poets need to embrace new ways to read poetry and get it out to as big an audience as possible.

I’m off to Annette’s reading for her first book, In Broken Latin at Open Books at 3 PM this afternoon. It’s a wonderful book. Check out this blurb. I wrote it, so you know I believe it!

“Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin is a collection that leads us with intelligence, wit, and compassion through a woman’s life in a nunnery and her slow disenchantment with the church. There’s a spark of hidden sensuality and humor hidden beneath the habit, as displayed in one of my favorite poems of the collection, ‘There Were No Rules about Underwear,’ where a fireman breaks into a nun’s room as she sleeps nude, saying he ‘needs to feel your walls to see if they’re hot.’ The poems here contemplate the gruesome origins of desserts created for saints, the daily rituals of women in the convent, performing a fascinating balancing act of playful irreverence and deep thoughtfulness about spiritual exploration.”

A new review on The Rumpus, and some upcoming readings you shouldn’t miss (but they’re not mine)

I’ve got a new (non-poetry) book review up at The Rumpus, of Jeffrey Skinner’s The 6.5 Habits of Moderately Effective Poets. I hope you enjoy it; I tried to have some fun, and the book itself doesn’t take itself too seriously, either.

Here are a couple of local events you all shouldn’t miss. They aren’t even my events, that’s how serious I am.

One is the debut reading at Open Books of Annette Spaulding-Convy and her new book on November 11, In Broken Latin. Here’s the link for more info: http://www.openpoetrybooks.com/calendar/archives/000546.html but just let it be known that you are in for some great poetry, AND it’s saucy nun poetry, which I don’t think really we have enough of. It’ll put you in a good mood no matter how worried you are about the election!

The other is the November 17 reading, at Redmond Library, of Washington state’s Poet Laureate Kathleen Flenniken, from Plume. And after I will ask her questions in a nice little Q&A session and you can meet her and buy books and get them signed and ask her questions about Hanford. There will be refreshments. Come out! Did I mention this is the kickoff reading for my ambitious plan as Poet Laureate to get everyone to read one book of poetry a quarter, called “Redmond Reads Poetry?” Well, it is!

The last note is: one more month til my second book, She Returns to the Floating World, is about to go out of print from Kitsune Books, as they are closing at the end of the year. So if you want to buy it in either print or e-book form, get on it! I hear it’s a pretty good book!

And, I may have good news to announce soon about my third book, Unexplained Fevers, which was orphaned after Kitsune Books decided to close. It may be that I’ve found a new publisher. Who might it be? Stay tuned to find out…