As a young teenager, one of the only things I liked about living in Ohio were the beautiful November sunsets. The baleful orange glow on the horizon…
Yesterday there was a beautiful sunset, but the baleful orange glow on the horizon wasn’t from a big ball of flame in the sky, but a wildfire on Camp Pendleton, a Marine base a few miles from our house. It put out a plume of smoke that could be seen from fifty miles away at least. Welcome to California! It is a land of natural disasters.
On the plus side, the watermelons are $1.50 a piece at the local market and avocadoes $2 for a sack full. With the economy the way it is, well, at least we’ll be able to afford to eat!
I’ve been a little discouraged about my two book manuscripts lately. I feel like the checks just keep going out and nothing comes back in. Not good economics. I’ve also has a string of rejections lately, then a punctuation mark of two acceptances in two days. Sometimes I feel like the poetry world takes so much (volunteer work, subscribing, writing reviews, checks to contests and open submissions, rejection slips) and gives back…well, not so much.
The Santa Ana winds are approaching.
In actual poetry-related news…
Got a chance to sneak into downtown San Diego (for the first time since we moved here) to go to City College’s San Diego book festival. Li Young Lee was there, though I didn’t see him read, and I got to catch up briefly with Ilya Kaminsky, a terrific poet who now works as a professor at SDSU instead of as a lawyer. I met Lorna Dee Cervantes, from the blog world, which was pretty neat (I have a couple of her books on my shelf.) And I got to hear Carolyn Forche read. She’s a pretty accomplished reader. She read, to my delight, a lot of her older poems, including “The Colonel” and some new poems, including two about Ilya! I guess it’s not just my former workshop group on Bainbridge Island that he charmed…Carolyn Forche too! LOL. She talked about how her first teaching job was here in San Deigo (!!) and that she learned poetry from her mother’s college poetry textbook (me too!) So that was pretty cool. She looked great and was wearing patent strappy sandals. Glenn and I also made a side trip to a wonderful bakery in Hillcrest called Bread et Cie, which I recommend.
So, we have not yet gone to the zoo, any of the missions, Coronado…but we managed to drag our partially brain-dead selves to a poetry event! Who says our priorities are out of order?
PS Still many boxes downstairs. Also – a bunch of grading tomorrow. Grading gives me hives.
Thought I’d throw out a quick post in the middle of learning a byzantine grading system, similarly byzantine teaching software, unloading boxes, futilely trying to find the most ordinary household items…
Last night we went out and walked on the beach right at dusk. We saw three snowy egrets fly overhead, while the thin moon shone down through clouds. It’s been achingly hot here – who would have thunk southern Cali in October would be running in the high eighties every day? Meanwhile, I have no clothing for a warm climate, and I had to order a pair of reading glasses, because, ahem, at my 35 years, it turns out I, um, need bifocals, which I refuse to wear, so the reading glasses (which are regular reading glasses + my mighty astigmatic prescription, so of course they are expensive) are my concession. So I’ve had to put a kibbosh on reading anything closer than arms length, which leaves out books and magazines. Good thing I have all those student poems and discussions to grade! LOL.
Teaching online is a bit of a challenge for me, because it reveals that I rely on personal interaction more than I thought, especially in workshop. Workshops just flow much more smoothly in person where you can bounce ideas around more easily and just communicate much faster than you can online. Plus, I joke around a lot, which it turns out, you can’t do that much online. I have to learn a new set of skills to get points across kindly but firmly (every word is open to misinterpretation by sensitive souls!) And I still have to finish up that essay on Rachel Zucker and Beth Ann Fennelly which has become difficult because of the aforementioned trouble reading books. I can’t wait for my new glasses to get here.
Meanwhile, the American financial system is in collapse, the election is drawing near, leaving the new president to deal with a war and a 700 billion dollar bill for a very expensive bailout. Good luck with that, poor guy! I’m trying not to watch too much news, but I did sneak in some of the debate last night, gosh darn it! (That’s a little Palin humor there. She must have said “gosh darn” about sixteen times in the transcript I read.)
Anyway, not quite settled yet, but getting there, slowly…
Well, after one blown tire on the moving truck, one missed flight to Cali, a bunch of (possibly) valuable boxes, shelves, lamps, etc., left behind at our rental because our truck was too small, and various other minor emergencies, including many hours of listening to crying kitties, we are in California. Thanks for all your good wishes and thoughts.
I was feeling a little stressed and weepy yesterday after our walk-through seeing how very small our little one-bed-one-bath apartment that we’ve committed a year to was, although I still love San Diego and love the neighborhood we’ll be living in. I wondered if I was going to die of claustrophobia. Then I went to dinner and had “tiny plate” food and they played that OC theme song about California. It made me laugh.
On the plane I sat next to a woman who works for the Navy and on the side volunteers with homeless and troubled teens. She works with hovercrafts, which I thought sounded very futuristic. My father was stationed at Camp Pendleton in Oceanside when he was a young marine, and he took his very first college class (he ended up getting a Phd in Engineering) a couple of miles from our new apartment. It’s like I have nostalgia for my Dad’s early adulthood out here. I think I know what he loved out here – the people walking around in bathing suits at the end of September, the flowers everywhere (even had a little hummingbird come up to my window yesterday) and the interesting landscapes. On the downside, my hair looks terrible in the high, high humidity. Hope the high humidity goes away soon or I’ll need a pixie cut or a lot of hats.
Tomorrow is the first day of my new class at National University. I’m still a little apprehensive since this is my first time teaching an online graduate poetry class. My brain is absolute mush from the stress of the move. Hope I’ll be able to string a couple of coherent sentences together!
- At September 25, 2008
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In California, moving pains
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Note to self: Moving sucks. Especially all by yourself. Quit moving so much. Also, why oh why don’t you ever learn your lesson and start packing earlier?
Back to your regularly scheduled programming.
California, here we come…
PS Thanks for your kind words on the previous post. I’m nervous!
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.
