Reading Report from Hugo House, Even More Readings, and Thoughts on Performance
Sorry I didn’t post this earlier – I didn’t get home from last night’s reading (four readers plus open mike – whew!) until 11:30, and then I ate dinner and collapsed. We didn’t get any pics last night (low lighting meant blurry photos and our video was shaky and blurry as well- sorry!) but it was a packed house at Hugo House’s Cheap Wine and Poetry night – about eighty people and extra spilling out into hallways and porch…definitely a reading series worth visiting! The crowd was friendly, slightly tipsy, and raucous. I met and got to chat with lots of great folks. And I sold some books, always a welcome thing.
This reading made me realize I really had been away for a couple of years – this reading series became so vibrant while I was in CA! The Richard Hugo House in Seattle has been undergoing a series of personnel changes, as well, so I’m getting to know new people. I didn’t recognize many people in the audience, either, so I was really grateful for my handful of friends who came. Sometimes I take for granted that I know all the poets in Seattle, but you know what? I don’t! It’s a big town full of folks I’ve never met!
I hadn’t met any of my fellow readers before, though one (Elizabeth Colen) was even a fellow Steel Toe Books author! The three other readers were all interesting, gifted female writers (hence, the “Ladies’ Night” theme event) each with a different style of performance – one quiet and shy reading straight out of her book, another a performance-oriented poet who had everything memorized and mesmerized the crowd in her fishnets. I think I’m somewhere in the middle, though I confessed to someone last night I think I would be a lot more comfortable at readings if I could just put a potted plant in front of my face as I read. I think the combination of vulnerability of reading your own work and the physical performance aspects of trying to be interesting/entertaining to an audience can be really challenging. I like reading but afterward I always feel like I’ve just gone twelve rounds with a boxing robot.
This reading made me think about the choices we make about how to present out poems – how performance can both enhance – and distract from – our poetry. Hearing a poem is so different from reading it on the page, and I try now to be aware of that, to slow down my naturally frenetic speech patterns, to try to make space for applause, a laugh, an offhand comment to connect with an audience. I also thought it was interesting that the other readers had been publishers, reading series hosts, editors, teachers and in other ways were connecting with their communities – something I think is really important! That probably explains the large crowd, come to think of it.
Now I have to get ready for Sunday’s reading at the new Northwest Bookfest in Kirkland, with friends Kelli Russell Agodon, Elizabeth Austen, and Susan Rich. It looks like it’s going to be a great time, I just have to get my energy back up! (Plus I have to catch up on writing work – a job application needs to be turned in, a poetry contest entry (or two) needs to be sent out, poems in general have been languishing from lack of attention! Promoting a new book tends to eat up all the extra time and energy in your life if you let it…I need to be sure to set aside as much writing time as promoting time…) Hope to see you Sunday or sometime soon!
Fiction by Poets, Best of the Net, and more Readings!
The news doesn’t stop! Just like me – go go go!
I’ll be reading this Thursday night at Hugo House in Seattle as part of the “Cheap Wine and Poetry” series, a Ladies Night with some great local writers (including another Steel Toe author…) 7 PM. Be there, baby!
Thanks to Redheaded Stepchild for nominating my poem, “A True Princess Bruises,” for Best of the Net! Awesome! It’s kind of a little spin on the Princess and the Pea fairy tale…and belongs in the fairy-tale-body-image manuscript I’ve been working on, along with my robot scientist’s daughter manuscript…that’s right – two more manuscripts! I keep myself busy, right?
And, my very first piece of fiction, “How Not To Be A Robot Scientist’s Daughter,” is up at Fiction Southeast, along with champions of fiction like Joyce Carol Oates, Aimee Bender and Robert Olen Butler and fellow poet-fictionist Oliver de la Paz!
Reading Report from Open Books
Me with John and Christine of Open Books before the reading…Super-awesome girls at the reading – aren’t they a sexy bunch? (Pictured: Carol Levin, Joannie Stangeland, Lana Ayers, Kathleen Flenniken, Annette Spaulding-Convy, Kelli Russell Agodon, Jeannine Hall Gailey in sequins)
Although I had to navigate a variety of almost-disasters – a windstorm knocked out power to a lot of Seattle, then knocked a gigantic-bed-sized patio umbrella from the top of our apartment building into our parking space three stories below – where we had fortunately not parked our car, by some strange luck – Obama’s visit to Seattle snarled traffic all over town (and he didn’t even stop by Open Books! The shame!) – traffic accidents shut down two of the major highways and bridges, including the bridges that allow us over the water to Seattle – and so, after an hour and ten minutes in traffic for the usually twenty minute drive to Open Books, we finally arrived. A lovely if modest crowd also braved the windstorm and crazed traffic, we started just slightly late, and Glenn even successfully videotaped the whole thing (we’ll post it on YouTube.) I even got some gorgeous flowers a friend had delivered to the store – what a sweetie! – and got to take another friend out for birthday gelato afterward when the sun came out. So, all’s well that ends well.
Open Books continues to be a delightful, friendly place to read. So glad it’s where my first Seattle reading was held! (And you can still stop in and get your copy of She Returns to the Floating World…) Now to crash into bed…
Update: The whole reading is now available on YouTube, so you can see it yourself!
Looking for some fun this weekend? Poetry-type fun?
If you’re looking for poetry-type action this weekend in Seattle, well, you’re in luck.
Open Books. 3 PM Sunday Sunday Sunday. Origami cranes! Japanese candy! Monster Trucks!
Well…maybe no monster trucks. But I will be doing my first Seattle reading of my new book, She Returns to the Floating World. I’m nervous. I’m picking poems, some of which I’m reading out loud for the first time.
Here’s one of them, inspired by Hayao Miyazaki’s Howl’s Moving Castle. Hope to see you there!
Love Story (with Fire Demon and Tengu)
Maybe in this version you are a bird, and I have become an old woman. Maybe you ate a falling star. It’s hard to love someone in a castle—they always feel distant. I will open a flower shop and learn to speak German, take to wearing ruffled dresses and straw hats. You’d like to pin me down, but you could tell my feet weren’t touching the ground. I called your name over and over, but you couldn’t hear me above the din of the bombers. It was like movies of wartime Japan. I looked up and there were planes bulging with smoke.
The blue sky kept getting darker –
sometimes, I thought,
with your shadow.
In the end, I have a dog in my arms and a scarecrow for a friend, but I never make it to Kansas. The field is wet and stormy, I kiss three men goodnight for their magic. The door to your childhood is opening for me. It allows me passage into a brick wall, my fists full of shiny black feathers, the shell of an egg, the howl of cold wind against a mountain. Don’t worry, your heart is in good hands. Let me keep it a little longer; its blue glow illuminates everything.
Attitude Adjustment – Contentment in Any Situation Edition
Just yesterday, I was so grumpy and whiny that I had to go back and delete my own blog post! Blah! Bad grumpy Jeannine was on the loose! Then…Magic Attitude adjustment. This morning I woke up…content. Not spring-out-of-bed energetic, but, vaguely…all right with everything going on. The lack of writing, I knew, was temporary. The rejections on the job front were all there for a reason, and after all, thanks to my still-gainfully-employed husband, I still have health insurance, enough to eat, a roof over my head. My health problems, while irritating, were not insurmountable – I can still enjoy the late fall sunshine, go watch the horses at the nearby horse farms, and my evil tonsillitis seems to finally be on the mend. I tossed all of the too-large clothes out of my closet yesterday, along with heels my physical therapist has deemed not great for my weak ankles for at least a year. Somehow, this seemed symbolic of the things I have to leave behind in order to embrace the things I have.
The sunshine and mild temperatures, the fall smells in the air (surely not falling leaves, here in mostly non-deciduous Seattle, but the recent rain on the pines) combined to bring back my…spirit? I decided not to sweat the small stuff. I took my wedding ring in to be repaired, and in the meantime, I bought a $5 rhinestone replacement at Claire’s so I didn’t keep touching my finger and missing it. My recent cancellation of my trip home to Cincinnati this fall, which had been bumming me out, instead made me think of all the good things I do have – a family great enough to actually miss, for instance, and the chance to relax a little more this fall as I mend and tend to my new book’s launch (like the new Northwest Bookfest where I am going to be reading with wonderful poets Kelli Agodon, Elizabeth Austen and Susan Rich, the new Geek Girl Con which will be awesome, and other new exciting ventures!) So see? I just have to learn to be content despite my circumstances. Rainier came out today, and was so beautiful shining over the flat green fields and trees of Woodinville. Also, a beautiful black horse with a white star on its nose walked right up to me in the field today, and nodded at me, and when I nodded back, it nodded again! (Horse magic!) I wished I had some sugar cubes or apples for it. Plus the ability to scale a fence and a large ditch.
And oh, running into this Onion article on the Poet Laureate first thing in the morning didn’t hurt my mood: if only poetry was the thing holding our troubled nation together!
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
