A weird day. It was my little brother’s 31st birthday – Happy Birthday Mike!
One of my father’s older sisters had a heart attack.
My college roommate (hi, Dr. Tara!) wrote me out of the blue, along with one of my co-workers from Virginia! (Did I mention how many of the friends of my youth are doctors? Like, a dozen. I am seriously the black sheep of my set. Poet. How many lives are poets saving? Of course, poets like Dr. C Dale Young and Dr. Peter Pereira are excluded.)
And a little poetry news in the midst of all this – one of the poems from my book, “Persephone and the Prince Meet Over Drinks,” will be anthologized in the 2007 edition of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Pretty exciting.
And, Steve Mueske’s Poetry 365 will feature the poem “My Little Brother, in Parts” this week. Thanks Steve!

But enough about me – go congratulate Suzanne!

Ladies, He’s taken…but his press is looking for Ms. Right…

Steve Mueske’s Three Candles Press is looking to read manuscripts by female poets!

Thanks so much to all well-wishers and congratulators. It is all much appreciated, especially in my anxiety-ridden current post-MFA state.

More lunatic ravings of a recent MFA Graduate:
One goal of the MFA is to teach writers the ability to be self-critical. True or false?

The ability to be self-critical seems like an absolute necessity to a writer. I don’t know exactly how to teach it or how I learned it, but I suspect it has to do with my mother, fresh from her BA in Journalism, covering my second grade book reports with red ink, which made me cry, because as a kid, you just want your mom to say, “It’s terrific, sweetie,” not have her try to make you a really good writer when you’re like, eight years old. On the plus side, I swiftly became a straight-A English student under the influence of my mother’s red ink. I think it’s the same when you grow up and write things (poetry, fiction, blogs, whatever) and you want someone to tell you “it’s so terrific,” but really you are still learning and need to be trying to push yourself to be better all your life, because there’s no single second when you’re going to be the world’s most perfect-ever writer, and even if there were such a second, you wouldn’t know it and no one would tell you. I mean, I think T.S. Eliot peaked at thirty, and went downhill (a lot of other people argue otherwise) and do you think Eliot writing Prufrock etc was thinking, “This is the best thing I’m ever going to write?” I mean, that would make you really crazy, right?

So, in my experience, the MFA was a way to learn not to be more self-critical but more self-exploratory (not in a sexual way, you dirty readers! Shame on you!) To seek out what makes me “me” and put that into poems. To put more of my world into poems. To try to write more adventurous poems, new kinds of poems, about new things. To never be satisfied, but at the same time, to have more fun with my writing.

On another note, going out to dinner with G to celebrate the first day on a new position at his company, and then, tonight, a new episode of Heroes! With more T-Rex than any previous episode!

Unrelated Notes: Warning, Written While Groggy

Anne McCaffrey was inducted into the Seattle Science Fiction Museum Hall of Fame today. While she gets lots of accolades for her series Dragonflight, but her best work, in my opinion, was her Dragonsinger trilogy for young adults.

I think I’m still recovering from my graduation residency. I’ve been sleeping a ton and I still feel groggy, tired. Also I’ve been anemic (with low ferritin as well) this past month or so, which does nothing for energy levels (PS I have a chronic bleeding disorder, so this isn’t really shocking. Just annoying. Usually eating the right things brings me back into balance in a week or so. I’m addressing this issue this minute with french toast and scrambled eggs. With vitamin C! Eggs have iron, right?) Good thing I’m not a marathon runner in my spare time! Anyway, I’m putting off any overdue partying (you know who you are! Sorry!) for a few more days.

If you are still interested in reviewing Becoming the Villainess and just haven’t gotten a chance, Galatea Resurrects has a copy available for review. I’m writing my first review for them as we speak.

In other poetry news, good friend Jennifer Thorton (Box-of-Birds) lent me the slam-bang magazine of scientific and nature-oriented poetry, Isotope. It’s pretty cool. I like discovering new magazines.

So, if anybody has post-MFA advice for me, (you know, what to do in the first six months, how to keep building steam, etc…) lay it down in the comments field.

The Golden Globes…of Poetry?
Thanks to Mary Agner for sending me this link to the lit mag Siren. They have a page on the Best New Poets and Books of 2006. (A great name for a lit mag, too!) Among the best new poets listed, bloggers Jenni Russell, Teresa Ballard, Kate Greenstreet, and Oliver de la Paz appear…and Dorianne Laux (thanks Dorianne!) listed Becoming the Villainess as one of the best books of 2006!! Well, I would say Facts About the Moon is up on my list of best books of 2006 too!
That’s a nice thing to come home to, after graduating and having one of those two-hour panic attacks about “what the heck I’m going to do next with this darn MFA?” on the ride home last night…
And this morning, I woke up to Seattle covered with snow. It’s a freakin’ Christmas card out here!

Today is graduation. My husband G and my friend Lana are up to celebrate it with me. Seemingly appropriately, the sun in shining, and although I’m exhausted – the bad beds, bad food and grueling hours can be taxing – I feel happy that it’s finished. I’ve enjoyed the readings, the talks, even teaching the class and having the thesis review were pretty fun. Highlights – Sandra Alcosser’s and Dorianne Laux’s readings, sitting by fiction faculty Claire Davis while she drew sketches of the backs of the heads of other faculty, talking to Valerie Miner and Peter Sears, listening to the new students’ readings – really good. We have a new cadre of girl-power writers – mostly prose writers – but maybe some of them will convert to poetry. Oh, and standing on my balcony and watching a comet over the ocean’s horizon. And running through the snowy sand the morning it snowed. I forget how magical snow can be, and how I’m really more of a cold-weather than warm weather person. Marvin Bell kept saying how I should get a Phd. LOL. Maybe I need a short break from school first.
I haven’t written much since I’ve been here, and trying to keep up on my freelance work in the middle of the ten-day crush of events has been tough. But hopefully I’ll write some new poems when I get home. That’s usually how it is for me – I’m more of a contemplative writer, I need those hours-long stretches of free time, apparently. We had a good panel on publishing yesterday, I got to talk to Christine from Lost Horse (who’s advice on starting my own publishing conern was “It’s like having a baby – if you think too much you won’t do it. I say, jump in!”) and Michael from Copper Canyon. I’m even more excited to start my own magazine and book publishing thing after this. I think I’m going to try an internet quarterly with a print version yearly, and then maybe one or two books a year. Still going back and forth on the POD thing.
Also, nagging at the back of head is the notion I still need to buy tickets to Atlanta for AWP (check out this awesome reading!) I’m trying to talk Tom from Steel Toe into having Mary Biddinger and I do a book signing together at the Steel Toe Books table. I think that would be much more fun than standing there by myself. Also, I have to represent Pacific at the table on Saturday. So, it seems important that I actually get there. Which, from Seattle, is proving to be complicated. Very few direct or inexpensive flights. Oh, curse you, overly complicated and expensive air travel! If only I was like my friend Alaskan ER doctor Kathy McCue, I’d be able to just hop in my own plane and fly myself there.