In Which it Doesn’t Quite Feel like Summer Yet…

While the rest of the country has been in the throes of a heat wave, we here in the Seattle area have been shivering into our wool coats and fuzzy boots with day after day of cold drizzle. Yesterday evening around 7 PM the sun broke out and it reached almost 70 degrees for the first time in ages. Summer? It barely feels like spring has arrived yet…

I confess I haven’t been spending enough time writing, but lots of time on administrative work for jobs and such. I turned in the grades for my National class; last weekend we had friends over to celebrate the new house, which was really fun (most popular foods: blanched asparagus with white bean hummus and chips with grilled watermelon salsa – the health conscious poets! and most popular drink, pomegranate champagne cocktail;) yesterday I attended my first ever city council meeting, and tonight I’ll go to my first HOA meeting. All over the place, appointments that I’ve put off for yearly doctor and dentist things. I feel too busy to read, even sit still for long, and when I do either something needs to be written up (still in the middle of finishing a book review and my class notes for the Port Townsend Writers Conference) or I need to respond to e-mails or…well, you know the feeling.

I am looking forward to a little more down time, a little more of a creative spark, a little time to wonder and ponder and pay attention to the insistent bird calls, the way the roses have snuck up on us with their blooms.

In Which a Writer Pieces Together Her Life

I realize from talking lately to friends that so many of us, as writers, live fragmented lives…we have writing lives, and work lives, and family lives, and maybe a couple of other lives as well. It’s really hard to keep giving to each different life, keeping them all going. It might well lead to fragmented selves. I’ve been at the task of piecing together a work life and a writing life that leads to some kind of reasonable balance, trying to get organized and focus on my long-term goals. While taking stock of the years from age 19-current, you know that the single stable factor was across all the years, more than the type of job, longer than my marriage has lasted, besides poetry? Volunteering. Mostly with teens and children, at schools, churches, children’s hospitals, writing workshops. I realized that this probably means that what I want to do is have a positive impact on the world, more than making money, more than any specific career goal. It’s something I hadn’t realized about myself. I mean, I need to pay off those student loans eventually, right?

I went through my giant three boxes of literary magazines and realized that some writers I thought I was just now discovering: Karyna McGlynn, for instance, whose book “I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl” I reviewed for The Rumpus and loved, or Karen Carissimo, the wonderful perfumer, whose poetry I have literally had in my possession for over ten years in different literary magazines…these writers aren’t new discoveries, I’ve been reading them for years! I thought about how long it takes writers to make an impact. I was thinking I’m going to be on my third book next year and how it still feels like a struggle to even make a little bit of noise in the howling hollow of the poetry book world. The other thing these boxes made me realized is how many of these magazines had a sentimental value: my friend Natasha Moni’s first issue of Crab Creek Review as editor; an issue of a defunct magazine a bunch of my Seattle and blog friends are in; my fellow Pacific U alum friend Felicity Shoulders’ first story in Asimov’s. The first issue of A Public Space, which included a ton of contemporary Japanese lit stuff that helped me research my second book. A six-year-old issue of Paris Review that has an amazing AS Byatt story about contemporary mermaids. Heck, I still have my seventh-grade poetry textbook, with my loopy cursive handwriting notes on the poems.

So it would seem that though I think of myself as a poet who is pretty hard-headed, practical, business-y, (at least for a poet) I’m actually full of sentiment and care-taking impulses. Sometimes our physical possessions indicate something about our real selves, and unpacking forces us to realize this.

The Girl and the Fox, the MFA and tea parties, chronic illness and academia, and other assorted bits

As some of you might now, I have a thing for the connections between women and foxes, and they show up frequently in my poems. But even if you haven’t written a whole bunch of poems about fox-girls, you should drop everything and immediately watch this gorgeous short film with no dialogue called “The Girl and the Fox.” It also reminded me of the new novel, The Snow Child, about a feral girl in Alaska whose only companion is her fox. I love all alternative re-tellings of fairy tales, and I liked the way this one combined the gritty realities of homesteading in Alaska in the twenties with the Russian fairy tale, “The Snow Child,” which I’ve always loved. Thought a little slow at times, I really enjoyed this for the most part, and her delicate balance between aforementioned realistic grittiness and magical realism was pretty interesting!

Two articles were really interesting to me recently. One was from The Millions, called “From Teaching to Tea Parties,” discussed the difficulty of making a living as a writer and teacher with an MFA. The expectations of many of my students at National is that they will get their MFA and automatically get a teaching job that will support them. But the reality is much different. I often hesitate to tell my students how hard the path is for most writers, even writers with books and teaching experience who really hustle. Most of us are cobbling together a living from multiple jobs, most, sadly, less glamorous than high tea and vintage fashion.

The other article tackles the difficult problem of having chronic illness in academia, how it might interfere with the job path and create awkward situations with work. Of course, that would be true in any work or social situation, but I thought it was interesting to examine it through the lens of teaching:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/academe/2012/MJ/Feat/good.htm

Sorry to hear about Ray Bradbury’s passing, who was one of my favorite childhood writers; his Illustrated Man still influences the way I think about tone in successful short narratives, and I admit to some compulsive memorization of literature due in part to reading Fahrenheit 425 at an impressionable age. But celebrating new Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey, who, yes, already won the Pulitzer, you know, no big deal, and what is she, 45? It’s a lot to live up to! Her book that really won my affection was Belloq’s Ophelia, which contains some really beautiful persona poetry and interesting character/historical storytelling work. Now I will have to check out her new book as well.

I’ve turned in my final grades and am finally able to turn my attention back to my own reading, writing, and submitting, which unfortunately, between the class and the move and other distractions, had gone by the wayside for a while. I wrote a new poem, sent out some work, and am finally turning my attention to the new townhouse’s smaller pleasures: planting in the tiny little outside back plot, putting miniature roses in the window box. Still dealing with the grand space issue in townhouses (where in the heck do you store things? Where can we put towels? Why does the bathroom have no place to put anything? Thank goodness for the handy husband who keeps installing shelving in every possible space…) but all the downstairs bookshelves (all five of them) are now filled – filled! – with books. That’s just the necessary, needed-to-get-to-them-right-away books. The rest of the books are still hiding away. And I think we’ve got all the cardboard boxes out of the downstairs living area, if not from the upstairs OR the garage yet. Thought it’s June and I see blah-blah news about hottest spring on record, we have had nothing but chilly rain here in the Northwest for as long as I can remember. I think we’re going to get some sunshine soon…send some of that warm sunshine our way, rest of country! I didn’t move back to Seattle to get depressed by record rain and cold!

Atticus Review Feature, and I’ve Been Tumblr’d!

Thanks to the Atticus Review, who today is featuring an interview with me and several fresh brand new poems! (Including one inspired by Secret Circle, and another inspired by Algebra!) Check it out!

Tumblr! What is it? I’m still not quite sure. However, I know that right now, poems from my first book have been Tumblr-ing around the internet, and I wasn’t sure if this was important or alarming or what til my friend Ivy Alvarez, dynamite, plugged-in poet that she is, twittered me this morning with this message: “Wow, your poem was blogged on Hello, Tailor! Gurl, that’s major! 🙂 http://hellotailor.tumblr.com/post/24411614478/vega-ofthe-lyre-the-villainess-by-jeannine-hall”
Thanks to Ivy for alerting me to this, and for telling me some more about tumblr. Are you guys using this tool? Has it been good for poetry? Please comment and tell me your thoughts!
I will say this? Since my Tumblr flurry (poems up include, from the first book, “Femme Fatale,” “The Villainess,” “Becoming the Villainess,” and a couple of others…) my Amazon ranks for both books have gone inexplicably under 100K. Which is always good!

My second (and upcoming third) book’s publisher, Kitsune Books, is having Open Submissions right now. You should check them out and think about sending your manuscript. But remember, they like longer poetry books!

Unexpected Collaborations…Perfume, Songs, Jewelry, and Jobs

So, I found out I still can’t make my announcement yet. Beginning of next month. Sigh. But I can tell you I really enjoyed meeting with our mayor! He had even read some of my poetry. How cool is that? It makes me feel more civic-minded, that’s for sure…

I was thinking about the unexpected collaborations that sometimes we wonder into, like my work with painter Deborah Scott on my upcoming book, Unexplained Fevers. I didn’t plan for that collaboration to happen; she just happened to ask to meet for coffee one day last year, and we got to talking and here our plan is now, actually happening! Poets and artists, working together.

So when I was up at the Skagit Valley Poetry Festival, I ran into someone working at one of the cute retail shops there that I had chatted with a few times before – she has an advanced degree in Medieval Literature, so we have a lot in common – and she told me about some jewelry she was designing that was sold in the local museum gift shop. She showed me some of her designs, and, as she and I had talked before and she knew a little bit about my writing, offered to do a custom “book pendant” – a tiny book, with usable paper pages, with layers of stamped-and-etched metal as the “binding.” Here’s one of her designs for my “She Returns to the Floating World” book, named after one of my poems:

Isn’t that amazing? Her name is Melinda Erickson, and her work can be found in galleries and gift shops, including the La Connor’s Museum of Northwest Art. And here’s a link to her blog.

Another happy accident has been working with poet and perfumer Karen Carissimo, who contacted me because of a mutual poet friend down in San Francisco. I have a bit of a passion for perfume, as those of you who’ve been following my ramblings for some time might know; my first job out of school with my pre-med degree was managing a small perfumerie in Cincinnati that specialized in hard-to-find European perfumes, so now I have a terrible addiction to difficult-to-find perfumes like Cartier’s Panthere or Caron’s Blond Tabac. Besides being a wonderful writer herself, she’s talented at creating custom perfumes, and through correspondence she’s working on a perfume for me, with notes that belong to my second book – the bright top note of cherry blossom, the coolness of bamboo and peony. Really an amazing honor!

And of course the experience, which also happened recently in some kind of lucky coincidence, of working with Seattle musician Joy Mills, who created a song out of my poem “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle.” I just loved it. You can see/hear our collaboration here on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5-Zw9yJ3WY&feature=relmfu

So I was thinking about the opportunities the universe might provide us with, things we might not even think to ask about but that we’ve always wanted…my upcoming announcement has to do with this too, something I hadn’t thought to ask the universe for but something I’ve wanted since I moved to the Northwest thirteen years ago.