I’ve been busy preparing for my class for next week’s Port Townsend Writer’s Conference. It’s on haiku and haibun, so I’m getting exercises together, finding examples and definitions, etc. I’m really loving Sam Hamill’s translation of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior. Basho is all poetry-biz gossip and allusion to classic Japanese literature in his haibun – surprising, right? – and Sam’s language captures his tone very well, I think.
I did have a fun break on the 4th – husband G and I got to have brunch with one of my favorite inspirations, poet Denise Duhamel and her husband Nick Carbo, who were in Seattle for like half a day, and then go to local poetry bookstore Open Books, where we met up with fellow Pacific U MFA alum Jennifer Whetham. Denise is just as animated and sweet as her poems might indicate. Then G and I watched some fireworks, just like old times.
In the next week, we have our fourteenth (!!) anniversary, G’s 37th birthday, and of course, the aforementioned PT Writer’s Conference. Too much stuff going on at once!
In good news, we saw a mother sea otter with two babies yesterday, and a multitude of seals. We keep showing up at the beach at 9 PM, and the aquatic mammals keep putting on a show! Better than those expensive aquariums by far 🙂 And I think Port Townsend’s deer are multiplying…
I’ve finally written some new poems in a series I’ve been thinking about for a while now, tentatively called “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter.” Not sure if they’re supposed to be part of one of the books I’m working on, or their own thing. Either way, after a bit of a dry writing spell, yay!
Happy 4th! and interesting bits…
Looking for performance art in Florida based on Becoming the Villainess? Look no further!
http://www.alleycatplayers.org/Site/Current_Show.html
Like to read some poems from the current (and excellent) issue of Willow Springs – my poem among them?
http://www.ewu.edu/willowsprings/current.html
Like some insider information about the book contest process (including, apparently, no small binder clips?)
http://wordcage.blogspot.com/2008/06/on-other-side-of-envelope-part-i.html
What about a breakdown of small presses that accept poetry? (Warning: a little depressing) Trust Seth to run those numbers…I particularly like the little LOTR reference at the top of the post…
http://sethabramson.blogspot.com/2008/07/2008-state-of-small-presses.html
My interview with Pattiann Rogers for Poets & Writers Magazine is now online!
Here’s the link – and hope you enjoy!
http://www.pw.org/content/interview_poet_pattiann_rogers
(Leaving nice comments is always appreciated, too!)
Also, this weather anomoly appeared in the sky while I was teaching at Centrum – it’s the result of ice crystals in cirrus clouds:
I’m done with my stint as a faculty-artist-who-teaches-high-school-students-etc at Centrum. The sun is shining and after a chilly week, it is 80 degrees.
The class was full of amazingly intelligent, sophisticated girls, already as subversive in their writing at 16 as I can ever hope to be. When they got up to read their work on the last day of the class, and the room of parents and students and little siblings applauded them, I was so so proud. You can only do so much in a classroom setting. You encourage them to read. You encourage them to write. You give them exercises that (hopefully) help them think in new ways about poetry, character sketches, mythology, comic book characters, persona. You talk about rejection, revision. You sit with their work and talk about expectation, cliche, tone, surprise. You read them poems, in class we read out loud together chapters from Kelly Link’s “Stranger Things Happen” or a chapter from “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.” You talk about your favorite writers, why you love them. You mention life as an artist isn’t as glamorous as they probably think.You talk about sitting in front of a blank screen all day.
But what they bring to class – their unique skills, humor, imagination – are the real gifts. Anyway, it was all very rewarding and fun, if exhausting. They really were little teenage comic book superheroines.
For some reason all week I kept seeing seals and otters at the Fort Warden beach. One day I got within five feet of an otter napping in the sun underneath an old log before I saw him. They swim and look at you, swim and look away, dive underwater and come back up to peek at you again. They do not seem afraid. It makes me think of the selkies. I think, if I came back as an animal, it might be as a seal.
Now I am ready to sleep and get back to my friends, my family, writing, blogs…
A quick note from the high-school creative writing class trenches
Before the students came in for a quick 20-minute class tonight, I set up the room, putting an array of my own books on each table: Japanese folk tales on one, Greek and Roman mythology on another, “The Armless Maiden” and “The Poet’s Grimm” and “Mirror, Mirror” on another, and the last one filled with comic books (Fray, Buffy, Witchblade, one called “Fables,” X-Men, Neil Gaimon’s Sandman “The Dream Hunters” with his fox-wife-type story, etc.)
When they came into the classroom, there was an audible “Whhoooshing” sound as they ooh-ed and ah-ed over the books. I tell you, is there anything better than people who love books? They even asked for extra time at the end to sit and read. Good times. These high school kids know Persephone, the Selkie wife, Miyazaki. It feels like a magical common language.
Also, the new Fall 2008 Willow Springs is out, and my poem “Risking Our Lives” is in there (from my third fairy-tale manuscript) along with poems by Tony Hoagland, Michele Glazer, Elizabeth Austen (among many others!) and an interview with Tess Gallagher…
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.
