Happy after-Christmas, everyone! Hope you all got your wishes from Santa!
Well, I asked Santa for two working ankles, but he must have thought I said two matching ankles, because I sprained my other ankle on Christmas Eve. Now I have one mildly sprained ankle and one severely sprained ankle with tendonosis, which means I’ve got a degenerated tendon. I always thought part of me was degenerate. And I threw my neck out using my crutches, so, generally, feeling a little physcially discombobulated. The person I saw at urgent care (an area that doubles as the local ER – mercifully, both empty on Christmas Eve) for my sprained ankle and neck basically told me there was a lack of good doctors (especially primary care doctors – he had to solicit from his patients to find one himself, and he said it took him awhile!) and physical therapists here in Napa Valley – a conclusion I had already come to through experience. It’s weird when medical resources must be accounted for when deciding on where to live. I should be better at it by now, anyway.
I missed my Midwestern-dwelling family, but was able to connect with almost everyone on the phone, and besides, what fun would a girl with no working ankles be on the holiday? LOL. A lot of the family – or their spouses – were sick, with stomach flus and colds. I’ve actually been homesick for Seattle, although one of my good friends reminded me, “Think about all the reasons you left Seattle.” But all I can remember is how much I loved it there. Sigh. Well, and the rain – I do remember that.
It’s rainy and chilly here in Napa today, and although our Christmas dinner (thanks to husband G) was mightily delicious I just can’t think about eating the leftovers yet! We had plans for ham-and-cheese omelets and ham-and-bean soup, but for breakfast I’m eating plain rice, no ham. Maybe some carrot-ginger juice later.
I have a wonderful set of books to read, lots of pretty shiny things to look at, thanks to my family, and am generally not as freaked out as I could be. But I’m hoping for better luck and health in 2010.
On the plus side, plenty of excuses for reading and watching DVDs…
Merry Holidays Everyone! My Christmas shopping is finished, the tree is up and decorated, and tomorrow I’m buying a tiny ham (well, tiny is relative – only four pounds!) for Christmas dinner. I am wishing you all a lot of writing time under the tree. Speaking of which…
Thanks Mary for your “three poems before the end of the year” challenge. I’ve now written four! I don’t think I would have done that without the challenge.
I also checkout out a boatload of books from the library. One was Gluck’s new book, A Village Life. I loved it. I thought, while it contained her usual themes “Autumn, Loss, Death, Etc…” (that’s an inside joke for you Gluck fans) it was more romantic and loose than her books have been in some time. The outer landscape of the village mimics the inner landscape of the writer. In particular, her poems about young love seemed touching and nostalgic. Some of the poems seem intensely personal – particularly ” Walking at Night” as she talks about her body being invisible in the summer night as she ages and “At the River” in which she talks about her father drinking wine “with his friend the Holy Ghost.” (Coincidentally, I was listening to Sarah McLachlan’s cover of the “The River” at the time) Liked it a lot.
Still thinking about whether or not I enjoyed The Magicians by Lev Grossman, kind of a Holden-Caulfield-goes-to-Hogwarts-and-then-Narnia novel. I think I would have enjoyed it more without the main character – A “Bright Lights Big City” style ennui-filled narrator. Are contemporary authors not allowed to write characters who are engaged with the world anymore? I had the same problem with The Corrections.
I also got a book of essays by Michael Chabon. And reading Allison Benis White’s Self Portrait with Crayon, which I like a lot so far.
I think there is a connection between reading for fun and writing. Can I get some funding for that study?
I liked Stephen Burt as a critic before this – in fact, I’ve assigned his essays to my class before – but after this terrific essay on poetry and superheroes:
http://poems.com/special_features/prose/essay_burt3.php
I am even more of a fan. He talks about how poets can connect to wider mythology through superheroes, and also how they can be used as a kind of subversive accessibility:
“Poems about superheroes, famous or obscure, announce their divorce from expectations about high culture, antiquity, “academic” difficulty.”
I was pretty excited that the essay mentioned two poems of mine as well.
I admit that when I was writing Becoming the Villainess, I was writing it for a specific audience – for an audience that perhaps wasn’t that friendly with poetry, but definitely knew something about comic books, video games, and maybe even Greek mythology. I wanted it to be something a college student could pick up and understand, relate to. I wanted it to be something that might make a non-poetry-lover like poetry again.
Anyway, check out the article, and you might be tempted to pick up Rae Armantrout’s new book, Versed, as well.
The holidays are speeding towards us! So much last-minute holiday shopping, packing up, and shipping to do…But I love the lights, and the tree, and making egg-nog french toast and pumpkin bread and other weird foods we only make at this time of the year.
I owe you some little mini-book reviews, which will be coming soon.
My review of Kim Addonizio’s Lucifer at the Starlite is up at the Rattle blog. They are one of the few places that want you to personalize your reviews a little bit, so it’s a different experience writing for them; you don’t have to be so stuffy.
Finally wrote a new poem! It’s all about the trope of mad scientists and their daughters in fifties sci-fi movies. Even when I try to stay away from pop culture in my poems, as I have for this latest manuscript, which is based on growing up in Oak Ridge – it sneaks back in!
And I applied for one job and sent in two book queries. Fairly productive for a gloomy December day! We’ve had a cold front that has freaked out the Californians – high of fifty during the day, freezes at night, how crazy! – and I’ve heard a lot of people say “This isn’t what I moved to California for!” I want to point out to them that it is still twenty to thirty degrees colder everywhere else. I admit to breaking out my special-used-to-be-reserved-for-snow-shearling boots, though, at the first sign of forty-degree-weather. I used to wear shorts when it hit fifty – now I’m all shivery. The West Coast had made this former midwesterner weak, I tell you!
I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks and it’s making me a little…scratchy. I’m not a poem-a-day person, but I like to at least write one every two weeks!
I got two rejections and an acceptance today. After weeks of nothing. Isn’t that always the way.
A poem of mine is out in the new issue of The Cincinnati Review. It’s one of my “element” series, called “Cesium Burns Blue.” It’s one of my husband’s favorite poems. The issue also has poems by Nance Van Winckel, Chase Twichell, and Sherman Alexie.
Speaking of Alexie, he went on The Colbert Report and talked about how the local media doesn’t care about books any more. I don’t know if you noticed, Sherman, but it’s not that they don’t care, it’s that local media doesn’t really exist any more. Little newspapers – and big ones – are drying up and blowing away. Local news and radio shows are getting swallowed up by big conglomerates.
And, tell me what you think, but the local radio shows and newspaper stories don’t really sell books – or not any more than say, a blog or a web site might.
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.
