Happy St. Patrick’s Day and some congrats to a few bloggers…
Eduardo C. Corral’s wonderful poem, “To a Jornalero Cleaning Out My Neighbor’s Garage,” is up on Poetry Daily today.
Say congrats to Charles Jensen and Brent Goodman who were both nominated for the Lambda Literary Awards.
So, to borrow the words of a song, “Let’s Hear It For the Boys!”
Seriously, all three of these guys are great writers, and I’m happy to see them getting accolades.
As for me, I’ll try to wear some green and avoid malicious leprechauns.
In celebration of Tim Burton’s new Alice movie:
Alice in Darkness
Forget tears. Chasing
white animals with timepieces
in this drug-trip landscape
can only lead to more of same.
Hedgehogs, playing cards, paintbrushes:
full of undisclosed danger.
Didn’t your mother tell you
not to kiss strangers?
That Cheshire smile shouldn’t fool you.
Pull your skirt down.
Your nails are growing so fast
you’re hardly human.
Alice, fight your version of Bedlam
as long as you can.
Sleep the sweet dream away
from that gooey looking glass, or mushrooms,
or the fear of your own body.
Forget what the night tastes like.
Stop wondering through the shadows,
holding your neck out
for the slice of the axe.
Verdict: Liked. Definitely a movie you’d enjoy more on the big screen. Surprisingly, I also liked the SyFy channel’s more modest version of Alice as well – both were versions of the story where a more empowered grown-up Alice re-enters Wonderland to become a hero. Burton’s was a more straight-forward Joseph Campbell “Hero(ine)’s Journey” while the SyFy version dealt more with political intrigue.
Just read After the Workshop by John McNally, a novel about a writer twelve years out of Iowa’s MFA program struggling to finish his book and support himself as a freelancer and “media escort” – someone who drives around visiting writers. The writer is very funny – I laughed out loud at a couple of things- although the story is very, in some ways, “macho” – there’s a lot of drinking and all the female characters women are portrayed as sex objects and nothing else. Once again, it’d be nice to see a book about writers with women as any of the main characters.
I watched “Up in the Air” last night, a surprisingly downbeat movie worth watching. There was a part that made me wince – the part where the hard-charging younger woman and 30-something business woman were exchanging their expectations for their romantic lives, and of course the younger woman’s are much more grandiose and optimistic. She says: “When I was 16 I thought by 23 I’d be married, maybe have a kid and a corner office.” The older woman says something like “Life can underwhelm you that way.”
[OK, even more cringe-inducing was the line where the young woman says: “I appreciate everything you (feminists) did for us and all…but I still feel like nothing I accomplish will matter if I don’t find the right guy.” Eek! I never felt that way. Do people really feel this way!?!?]
I was thinking about the differences between my expectations at 21 and my expectations now at 36. I had the supposedly “great” job and an actually great guy by my mid-twenties, but life threw some twisty obstacles in my path (re: health problems) that kepts me from storming the corner office, as it were. So there were some detours: instead of trying to become a director by 30, I took time off writing, went to an MFA program, published a book of poetry. Are my expectations less than they were? They’re different, for sure. My hopes and dreams: to publish more books, to make new friends and get time to hang out and visit my current ones, to be healthy enough to be able to go out and enjoy art museums and parks and once in a while a take a romantic trip with Glenn the way we used to. A little better financial situation would be great (grants, freelance, awesome paying job, etc.) but I don’t think of myself as a failure because I make a bit less (ok, a lot less) than I used to. Just a reminder that values change, and life can underwhelm you/thwart your younger-self dreams, but you will probably still figure out a way to do the things most important to you.
On the nets:
In the “Why didn’t I think of that” category, a female writer nets seven figures for YA book trilogy retelling Helen of Troy and Persephone’s stories…Dang! If only I’d written Becoming the Villainess in prose…and made it more of a love story…and more cheerful…
Amazing interview with one of my favorite poets, Dana Levin. She always manages to sound so much smarter in interviews than I do. Sigh! (By the way, her book, Wedding Day, is a perennial favorite of mine.)
Kelli Russell Agodon details how to make a book trailer. Very helpful! Her follow up on the process is here.
Ron Silliman blogs about women in poetry.
Not poetry related, but very funny: Google apologizes for privacy breaches with eerily specific apology. My favorite part:
“The company has also encouraged feedback, explaining that users can type any concerns they may still have into any open browser window or, if they are members of Google Voice, “simply speak directly into [their] phones right now.”
Either way, the company said, “We’ll know.”
Interview with the Husky Herald in which I reveal secrets about poetry and give advice about putting together a manuscript! Thanks to Patricia El Koury – who was an amazing student I got to meet a few years ago – for doing a great job with the interview.
I love the name of the newspaper, because I keep picturing a basket of husky puppies. Is that wrong?
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.
