I have the crazy idea that I’d like to hop down to San Francisco around the first week of September and do some readings for Becoming the Villainess there. I found super-cheap airfare and hotel – but I don’t have many connections to the San Fran area. Is there anyone who could help set me up with a reading in the area? Thanks in advance!

Today is Glenn’s birthday, which means cake! and presents! And possibly going to that pirate movie, finally! A banner day all around.

Three acceptances this week from online literary magazines: Perigee, The Boxcar Poetry Review, and Poetry Southeast. All of them got back to me in less than a month! This cheered me up considerably, especially after I heard that in a response to a withdrawn poem, Many Mountains Moving thought they had lost my submission (they couldn’t be sure?) – after 14 months! Not to complain, but, really! That kind of thing just sucks the life out of me and my desire to lick envelopes.

I have a reading this Saturday, if you’re in the Kent/Auburn/Tacoma Washington area (my understanding is that these Cornucopia Days festivals involve tasty snack opportunities. I’m just saying.)

POETS AT KENT CORNUCOPIA DAYS
2-4 p.m. Saturday, July 15

The Northwest Renaissance this year celebrates its 20th consecutive summer poetry reading and conversation event a month early and in a new venue. The reading will take place 2-4 p.m. THIS COMING SATURDAY, JULY 15, in the Fine Art Exhibit, upstairs in the Green River Community College facility at Kent Station, 417 Ramsay Way in downtown Kent during Cornucopia Days. NWR program director Marjorie Rommel said “We’re delighted to find ourselves so much in the thick of things as part of the city’s historic Cornucopia Days in downtown Kent.”

This year’s readers include well-known Bellingham poets Malcolm Kenyon and rising slam star Dustin Ryler; Linda Malnack, Des Moines; Auburn poet and performance artist Stephanie Skura; Sherry Reniker, who teaches at Highline Community College; Seattle poet Jeannine Hall Gailey, whose new book Becoming the Villainess is just out from Steel Toe Books; and popular Tacoma poet and poetry host Michael Magee. Colorful (and highly dramatic) Kent poet R.D. Shadowbyrd will emcee.

The event, free and open to all, is supported by the Kent Arts Commission. For more information, contact Marjorie Rommel, 253/939-0571, mrommel@qwest.net, or visit the Kent Cornucopia Days website, http://www.ci.kent.wa.us/arts/news/2006_cornucopiadays.asp.

Greetings from the land of the slowly recovering poet…
I’ve had bronchitis for two weeks and unfortunately this made my asthma act up so badly I had to go back on twice-a-day inhaled steroids. This is a bummer because they have yucky side-effects. It is also a bummer because the asthma attacks tend to happen mostly at night, and therefore I have been sleeping like nobody’s business. On Saturday, I went to bed at midnight, woke up at 4:30 AM with a bad attack, then slept til 4:30 in the afternoon. This was the day of my 12th Anniversary, which I was supposed to spend in romantic entanglement and various out-to-nice-restaurant-and-movie-type celebrations, but instead husband G brought me flowers and presents and dinner in bed. I’m so lame! Then I missed seeing poet friends on Bainbridge Island because Sunday all I wanted to do was sleep – again, this time til 2:30 in the afternoon. Today, I woke up at 9 AM to take my several dosages of various medicines, then slept til 11:30. I’m turning into such a sloth I am not getting anything done! Plus, even in my dreams, I’m apologizing to people for sleeping so much! So I’m hoping the bronchitis/acute asthma thing GOES away soon.
In the meantime, I’ve been haunted by a California quail that sits on a fence post outside my office window every morning for the last four days going “er-er-EEERRR” for about two hours. When I walk on my trail in the evenings, he follows me. Just one fat little male quail. Is this a message from the universe, and if so, what does it mean?
In other news, I’ve been reading interesting books – particularly Ink Dark Moon and Amy Uyetmatsu’s Stone Bow Prayer and Kimiko Hahn’s Ant and Mosquito. The organization of Uyetatsu’s book is extremely interesting – it is divided into sections based on the lunar calendar, and each section is focused in mood or subject related to the name of that month – for instance, section 2 is “Kisaragi – Month of Putting On More Clothes” which contains poems which discuss adolescence, modesty and the awareness of the male gaze. Brilliant, right? And Kimiko Hahn does these odd little riffs on Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book, in the same style of seemingly random prose observations that seem to really work.
I’m behind on my freelance assignments and reviewing, but until I get better, my mind is shrouded in that weird fever-fog – which may be good for reading and writing poetry (and reading blogs) but bad for those practical critical thinking kinds of exercises. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with kind wishes about the Writer’s Almanac thing et al and those who bought my book 🙂 Grosses bises, as my French class friends and I used to say to each other when we were trying to sound cool.

Well, some bookish news…

Here’s Garrison Keillor reading my poem “Female Comic Book Superheroes” on the Friday June 7th The Writer’s Almanac…

and I found a review of my book in Midwest Book Review’s July 2006 issue:

Becoming the Villainess
Jeannine Hall Gailey
Steel Toe Books
Western Kennedy University, 1 Big Red Way, Bowling Green, KY 42101-35760974326437 $12.00 www.steeltoebooks.com
Becoming the Villainess is the debut collection of free-verse poetry by journalist Jeannine Hall Gailey. Addressing the archetypes of myth, from modern pop culture to Ovid to Grimm’s fairy tales, Gailey weaves words expressing the hearts of shunned, reviled, justly and unjustly treated villainesses and female victims of fable. A dramatic, moving collection; each poem has a gripping personal story to tell. “Daphne, Older”: Peel back my skin: / reveal hard fibers, bite marks, // scars from wind and rain. / Life is pain – I won’t tell you // any different. Just that sometimes, / avoiding what you fear // isn’t the answer. See? All these years / my branches sang with birds // and my leaves drank sunlight- / I haven’t missed much. // My heartwood hardens slowly / over time – first, to the music, then, to the light.”

This review, among others, can be found at http://www.midwestbookreview.com/sbw/jul_06.htm under Poetry.

Hope you all had a good 4th of July weekend.
On Saturday I got a chance to read with Kelli Russell Agodon in Poulsbo, Washington, at a little coffee shop called the Poulsbohemian. It was so hot – I think I read less than ten minutes because I literally thought I might pass out from the heat – but we had fun and a friendly crowd, so it was worth it!
Most of the holiday I spent resting, trying to get over bronchitis (I know, I know, who gets bronchitis in July?) I did get a chance to stop by Open Books, the local poetry bookstore, and acquired a big book of Gary Snyder’s poetry and prose, Kathleen Ossip’s Search Engine, and Kimiko Hahn’s Ant and Mosquito (which includes contemporary takes on Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book) which I loved. And went to the Kirkland fireworks, which involved sitting by Lake Washington, watching three sets of fireworks – Kirkland, Lake Union, and another display that appeared to come from Bill Gates’ compound – and their lights glowing in the water. We did have some thunderstorms right before the fireworks, but Glenn and I managed to grill out while it was still sunny – grilled corn on the cob, grilled asparagus, and this year, we tried a spice-rubbed whole turkey breast – which was pretty good, and even better later as sandwiches. So much fruit this time of year you can’t eat it all – cherries, plums, doughnut peaches, figs. We made a gallon of watermelon-limeade which is the perfect respite from hot, muggy weather.
Also, the space shuttle launched – despite the fact that protective foam had fallen off of crucial areas – the same problem that caused the explosion of the space shuttle on re-entry all those years ago. And, North Korea launched several missiles, near Japan, Russia, and a long-range missile (that some think is capable of reaching the Western US, including Washington state and California) that exploded after a few minutes. This seems very disturbing and a return of the threat of nuclear war that I think most of us had assumed had been overshadowed by other threats. The phrase “Sabre rattling” appeared in the news frequently in conjunction to these test missiles.
PS – Check out Rachel Zucker’s blog at the poetry foundation web site.