When Things Fall Apart: A Few Sad Announcements

You may wonder what kind of sad/bad news I’ve been alluding to over the past month. This news has put me in a bit of a tailspin, I’ll admit. I didn’t want to make the announcement too soon, or talk about things that weren’t my business, but the fact is that, for reasons beyond anyone’s control, my wonderful press, Kistune Books, is closing at the end of the year and so my second book She Returns to the Floating Worldis going out of print in December and my third book of fairy tale poetry and art, Unexplained Fevers, which was going to come out in 2013, is now orphaned, cancelled, all the terrible words. (And Yes, I am actively looking for presses who might welcome sassy fairy tale collections with ready-to-go art and slamming blurbs AND a press that will put my second book She Returns to the Floating World back into print…If you are interested, e-mail me Jeannine dot Gailey at live dot com and I promise I will work like crazy to make your adoptions successful ones!)

Anyway, this is what a lot of poets are facing these days. Tiny presses who rely on one main publisher/editor are always in danger, for the reason that these people – for health, financial, or other life reasons – aren’t invulnerable, and so these presses disappear. Even university presses – as I discussed in a recent post – aren’t protected. Even if you land a big press, your editor might quit, they might decide to quit publishing poetry for financial reasons….yes, I get it, universe, poets and their books are vulnerable. We are. We can be on top of the world one second and desperately searching around for a hero(ine) to ride in on a white horse the next. It’s a riches-to-rags fairy tale, in which all the things you hoped for suddenly come crashing around you. And it’s happened to better poets than me for less noble reasons (remember, for instance, the Zoo Press fiasco?) before in the last few years.

So it’s been hard for me to be rah-rah and chin-up about poetry. Even writing this post is making me tear up. I don’t want to be one of those bloggers who pretends everything is always great; part of the journey of being a writer is the hard stuff, the stuff that knocks you back and makes you want to quit. And in the long run, things aren’t so bad – I still have great opportunities ahead (she says optimistically.) I do wish I could wave a magic fairy wand and make the problems behind Kitsune Book’s closure (a very sad situation on its own) go away. If only. But we can go only go forward and try to make the best of the situation.

Blistering Heat, Playing Hostess, Speculative Poetry and a Nice Write-up of our Geek Girl Con Panel

Sorry to be absent – it’s been a rare week of 90-degree summer days here in Seattle, so despite my sprained ankle, my husband and I have been showing my parents, who are visiting from the midwest, around to all the summertime fun available in the Seattle area. The Seattle area isn’t famous for its air conditioning or its poolside culture – almost no one has air conditioning, including most businesses – so it’s been a little bit challenging sun-dodging and searching for a cool breeze. Hilariously, because some engineer didn’t take into account that Seattle’s weather could possibly ever get this warm, they had to shut down a UW-area bridge every hour on the hour to hose it off to keep its joints from crumpling. Ah, yes, that was some civil engineering planning success there…”Hey, do you think it’ll ever get to 90 degrees here? Nope! Let’s build the bridge to only withstand temperatures to 85!” Yesterday, we took a trip North to escape the heat – ice cream and waterfront strolls in art-gallery-filled-and-tulip-famous La Conner; today we’re going to take them down to Golden Gardens park, and then maybe watch the Hunger Games.

Thanks to Chelsea Novak of Geist Magazine, who gave our panel at Geek Girl Con on Geek Girl Poetry a nice-write up at Paperdroids:
http://www.paperdroids.com/2012/08/18/geekgirlcon-2012/
““Monster Brides, Robots, Superheroines, and Anime Girls: Geek Girl Poets!” was devoted entirely to geek-themed poetry. Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of She Returns to the Floating World (Kitsune Books) and Becoming the Villainess (Steel Toe Books), and Lana H. Ayers, author of A New Red (Pecan Grove Press), read some of their own poems, as well as poems from other women about female characters in pop-culture. It was a funny, inspiring panel and a good way to start the second day of the conference.”

Speaking of geek-themed poetry, keep your eyes out for the new upcoming “Speculative” of The Pedestal Magazine – out August 21, I believe – and then the “Speculative” issue of Rattle, due out in December. Is spec poetry having a moment?

If I owe you a blurb or e-mail, I’m running a bit behind on my paperwork, so please feel free to remind me!

Geek Girl Con 2012 – Notes from, including run-ins with Last Unicorn artists and Buffy Writers and More…

So, I woke up at 5:30 AM this morning to make it on time to my panel this morning at Geek Girl Con, and my biggest worry that my panelist friend and I would be greeted by an empty room at the conference center because we were the very first panel slot on the Sunday after the late Saturday night parties…but lo, there were about twenty bright-eyed and etc audience folks waiting for me as I breathlessly arrived, fired up the PowerPoint, and launched into a paper on pop culture, zombie stripper body image problems, superheroes and monsters, and other “Geek Girl Poet” matters. Afterwards Lana Ayers (my co-panelist) and I wandered the vendor fair and looked at art, then signed books for a surprising number of buyers – there is hope, people, for a poetry-buying audience, but it’s not poets buying the poetry – it’s geeks! I have seen the future of poetry – and it might be appealing to this kind of audience.

Two great meetings – the artist behind several comic books and the beautiful graphic novel relaunch of The Last Unicorn, Renae De Liz (check out her great rendering of Wonder Woman and the Womanthology, a collection of women comic book artists’ work she put together – a gorgeous hardback books with proceeds going to charity – from female artists, ages 7 to ninety something. There’s something incredibly beautiful about an anthology so inclusive, so lovingly put together. The other really exciting encounter for me was chatting with Buffy (and Once Upon a Time) writer Jane Espenson, and explaining to her how last year at the same con I was interviewed by a news-person who mistook me for her because we had signings at the same time. (All writers look alike to the media, I joked. Which might be sort of true.)

Where to Find Me At Geek Girl Con Sunday

Geek Girl Con at the Seattle Conference Center (Across the Street from the Convention Center)

My presentation:

Monster Brides, Robots, Superheroines, and Anime Girls: Geek Girl Poets!
What do monster brides, robots, comic book superheroines, and anime girls have in common? Poetry! These geeky awesome Northwest poets celebrate the women of the pop culture fringes in their work. They will read some poetry, discuss the inspirations for their work, and point readers towards exploration of even more geeky girl poets!
Lana Ayers and Jeannine Hall Gailey (Tiffany Midge had to cancel)
Sunday Room 204 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM (Yes, it’s early. Bring coffee!)

University Bookstore Table Signing, in case you want to ask questions or talk or get a copy of one of my books signed – 1:45 PM – 2:30 PM

I’ll also be wondering around the vendor area after my presentation, probably buying comics and various geeky wonderful trinket-type things.

I’ll try to post about the Con tomorrow night…wish us luck!

Geek Girl Poets and Publishers Disappearing

Working on a presentation (with Lana Ayers) for Geek Girl Con on “Monster Brides, Zombies, and Superheroes: Girls Write Geek Poetry” (which will happen Sunday 10:30 AM at the Seattle Conference Center.) Am trying to decide which poems to include, handout versus no handouts, and I’m already looking forward to walking around the book/art fair afterwards and checking out local comic art, cool writers and artists, etc.

There has been a sad thing I’ve been noticing – University and small presses disappearing…People announcing on Facebook that a book will go out of print soon, or that their book has been cancelled. New Orleans University Press is being dissolved and the person who ran their press AND their MFA program is being let go (and it turns out he was an adjunct, just like me – easy to let go!) You can read more about it here. A lot of small presses haven’t been able to weather the fluctuations – with Borders closing, and small independent bookshops struggling, and an uncertain future for both e-books and print books…Anyway, it feels like a shrinking pool of both buyers and producers of poetry books.

Which leads me that bad news I’ve been hinting about. Along with being super busy planning Poet Laureate stuff, trying to get a non-existent art scene to exist in my city, teaching, freelance writing, reviewing, and trying to be a poet, I’ve been fighting against some bad news that left me floored and feeling sad in a way I wasn’t expecting.

I won’t be able to make any announcement for a while yet, but if you’d like a print copy of She Returns to the Floating World, you’d probably better order it now. You can order it from Amazon, from me, directly from Kitsune Books for a few more months. I think Open Books in Seattle has a few copies left as well. It seems the lifespan of my second book will be shorter than the first, just two years. More about what this means about my third book in another post…