Strange Horizons and Snow in Seattle
I just saw that my poem, “Jin-Roh: Wolves in Human Armor,” was up at the highly respected journal of sci-fi/fantasy/speculative writing, Strange Horizons:
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2010/20101122/gailey-p.shtml
You can even comment in the forums on each poem, a kind of feedback loop we don’t usually see in literary magazines. Maybe it would be too scary! We poets can be a frightening group! The poem was inspired by a beautiful anime movie called Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade that is about a terrorism group and a frightening shadow police group, a re-telling of Perrault’s Red Riding Hood, and doomed love against a post-apocalyptic Japanese backdrop. See it if you get a chance.
I woke up early this morning to a snowstorm outside in the treetops outside of my window, and the snow kept coming down and kept coming down…and it’s still snowing! Seattle does not usually get a lot of snow, and certainly not this early in the season, but it is lovely in post-card kind of way. As long as I don’t have to drive in it. (Northwesterners don’t have experience driving on snow or ice, so there are always a ton of accidents…) A surreal aspect of this is that Glenn and I haven’t worn even as much as a coat in the two years we lived in California. Maybe Seattle wanted us to get in the Christmas spirit! We did turn on some Ella Fitzgerald Christmas carols and made a gluten-free dutch apple pancake (which was an okay experience, although Glenn said the recipe needed more eggs.)
Found out I’ll be writing an article for next year’s Poet’s Market on “How to Know When to Target a Smaller Press” on micro/small publishers of poetry. I’m excited! And my first day of classes for the winter quarter was today. An odd timing since this is a holiday week, but oh well! So, off to work I go!
Overscheduled but Happy on a Rainy Weekend
This morning I woke up early (at the crack of a very grey dawn) to Skype-meet with a class of students in New York state (hi Dustin’s class!) and frighten them with stories of learning to shoot a gun in Tennessee when I was seven and the sexual connotations of the joystick. When will I learn to be more appropriate? Then I sped down to physical therapy (where my PT person recommends socializing less to relax my jaw and help it heal – whoops!) and then raced home to change and meet my friend, rising star Sci-fi/Fantasy writer Felicity Shoulders, for coffee in downtown Seattle. I just got home from a rainy, traffic-y drive after stopping off at our poetry bookstore, Open Books, for a copy of “Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets,” which looks fantastic.
Then I got the welcome news that Redactions had nominated my poem, “She Justifies Running Away, from the newest issue 13, for a Pushcart Prize. You can read all of this year’s nominees from Redactions here: http://redactions.com/pushcart-poems.asp
Now I think I will have a hot bath and some cider while simultaneously catching up on some bad tv and reading magazines. Tomorrow I go into downtown again for the 3 PM Crab Creek reading at Elliot Bay Bookstore with contributors Erin Malone, Kevin Miller, Peter Pereira, Michael Schmeltzer, and Martha Silano. A lovely group, I think you’ll agree!
Beyond Ekphrastic: When Poets and Artists Collaborate
You know, we artistic types like to talk about supporting each other – musicians, visual artists, writers, theater folks – but often we get so embedded in our own little worlds that there’s very little true interaction. A lot of poets aren’t well-versed in contemporary art, and there are few artists who’ve read a lot of contemporary poetry, even though the artistic movements in both art and literature run vaguely parallel.
So I’ve considered myself lucky to get to know several local artists, including Amy Johnson, who does beautiful installation art (check out especially the images of thorns, black and resin-colored rose sculptures, etc.) They help educate me about interesting galleries and exhibits, the different medias and methods they use.
Amy and I sat down tonight and talked about truly collaborating on her next project, an installation inspired partially by Hans Christian Andersen tale The Snow Queen (about which I’ve already written a couple of poems.) We both were really excited by the possibilities of the story, the duality of the powerful villainess and one of the only “hero’s journey” tales in fairy-tale-dom where the female hero rescues her boyfriend-in-distress, the beautiful images of snow like bees, snow that takes on the shape of birds, and the dangers and beauties of accessories (the robber queen’s daughter’s knife, Gerda’s multiple fur muffs and magic boots.) So I’m writing a few poems that could be read out loud during the installation, perhaps mixed with a track of humming bee hives, for her project. I’m really excited to be trying something like this. And the best part? You’ll be able to go see the work in action in January in downtown Seattle. I’ll keep you posted!
Ink-Stained Amazons and Gluten-Free Souffles
It’s a wonderful thing to wake up on a cold, rainy, grey Seattle November day is a great guy bringing you delicious homeade goat-cheese and apple souffles. (Gluten-free, of course – e-mail me if you want the recipe.) Delicious and so autumnal. And the first attempt at souffle making!
And today I got to see a friend – Jennifer K. Stuller – read and talk on her book, The Ink-Stained Amazon. She’s a pop-culture feminist historian – kind of a non-fiction version of what I do with poetry – whom I got to know online and then got to meet at Wondercon this year in San Francisco. Particularly memorable was an awesome video on female heroes in pop culture over the last thirty years.
A fun thing about this reading was its location, a secret Seattle Geek hangout called The Wayward Coffeehouse in Greenwood owned and operated by the terrific Bronwen with decor that I would call “Whedon-chic” and a tall stack of sci-fi books on the shelves. Now I want to do a reading there! (Plus they had gluten-free cookies.) See? I had lived in Seattle ten years but never been to this awesome little coffee house (did I mention they screen movies – currently “Joe Versus the Volcano,” one of my all-time favorite movies – there too?) Seattle is a town full of neighborhood surprises that you might never find unless someone you know happens to tell you about them.
Right now I am warming up in front of a fire, I have my new Buffy comic, a couple of books of poetry, and I am feeling terrifically geeky in a town friendly to geeks.
Social Whirl in Seattle
- At November 08, 2010
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
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Here’s a pic with Oliver de la Paz,