New Poems in California Quarterly, Book Galleys/ARCs, Winery Book Club Report, and Setting Goals for…Poetry Books?

January Deer Visitors

New Poems in California Quarterly

First of all, a big thank you to California Quarterly for publishing two of my poems in their latest Winter 2022 issue, including “Cassandra as Climate Scientist” and “She Learns to Become Fire.”

Here’s a sneak peek at “Cassandra as Climate Scientist:”

Sylvia and Charlotte pose with my ARC

An Exciting Milestone: The Galley/ARC of Flare, Corona is Here!

Yes, as you can see, the cats are equally excited about the new galley/ARC of Flare, Corona, which means the real book isn’t that far out anymore. Eek!

That means I need to start planning events and other things around the book launch and AWP. I’m starting to list readings and events here on the site at the right side of the page. The list will be growing!

By the way, if you want your own galley/ARC for review or academic course adoption, you can contact BOA Editions! Please send your review copy request directly to Genevieve Hartman, Director of Development & Publicity, at hartman@boaeditions.org.

Glenn with Hell of a Book and kitten in lap

Winery Book Club Report – Hell of a Book

On a cold January night, it was a pleasure to cozy up with some wine, cheese, and Glenn’s madeleines to talk about Jason Mott’s terrific book Hell of a Book. We had a great discussion, ending in a lot of laughter, and our next book is the literary spy thriller The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott, and we’ll meet the day after Valentine’s Day at J. Bookwalter’s in Woodinville at 6 PM (in case you want to join us). A spy thriller is the perfect thing to read in the wintertime.

I’ve really enjoyed being part of the local community, learning more about books and wine at the same time (do I like non-oaky Chardonnay? Yes!) This will also be the location of my Woodinville book launch/birthday celebration in April, and I hope I can introduce some of my Seattle friends to a great local winery (with wines named after book things – Double Plot is the name of the Chardonnet I like, for instance).

Anyway, this has been a great way to help make friends in my neighborhood too, and find some people talk books with on a regular basis. I’m thankful to have a little social practice before AWP, too!

Another cats with book post

Setting Goals…For Your Poetry Book?

I was talking to my little brother this week and he asked me what my goals were for my upcoming book. I hemmed and hawed a little bit, because honestly, I hadn’t really thought a lot in those terms. Isn’t creating the book, finding a publisher, and helping the book get into the world enough of a goal? But of course, my little brother is very practical and ambitious and wants to know what I want to happen with Flare, Corona. I guess when I close my eyes and dream, I hope to connect with a bigger audience, hope to have some good reviews in good places (whatever we think those are right now), hope to, yes, have some book sales (part of that whole reaching a bigger audience thing). I hope that people with MS or difficult diagnoses will find some comfort or fellowship in these poems. I hope it wins a big book prize, too! Do we dare to hope for big media coverage—a radio or television appearance, or being picked by a big book club?

I actually posted this question on Facebook and heard lots of people’s views on whether or not we should even have goals for our poetry books, what they might be for each person, and how overwhelming it can be for poets (who often want to separate the art from the promotion part) to even think about what they are actually hoping to have happen. It can feel overly ambitious to even dream of some of these things. Some just want to focus on the work, which I totally understand, and totally reject even the idea of having goals for a book. But I think it helps me to imagine a future for my little book, that goes beyond just me and my friends and family. And my little brother’s right in some ways—if you have no goals, do you think you might act differently? Plan differently?

One goal I had for this year was to be more social, to have a 50th birthday celebration with friends, to enjoy more things and worry less. How to balance this with everything else? I want to press the brakes on the things that are no fun—MRIs, blood draws, doctor appointments. How do you inject more fun into a life that feels like for three years it’s been nothing but anxiety? It’s tough. Anyway, yes, poetry goals are hard to crystallize or analyze—and maybe that’s okay. Art for art’s sake is totally fine! But maybe it is worth thinking—hey, what do I want to accomplish with this particular piece of writing? What is in my control and out of my control? For writers, a lot of it is out of our hands—but not everything. Anyway, I will report back with more ideas about goals as I come up with them…

Healthier Kittens and Sicker Me, New Hair and Imagining 2023: Re-Entry Fears

Me with new hair and kitten Charlotte

The Second Week of the New Year: Healthier Kittens, Sicker Me, New Hair and Imagining 2023: Re-Entry Anxiety

So, if you read last week’s blog post, you know I was up most nights taking care of two kitties who both made Emergency Vet Hospital Visits, and then as soon as they were better, I got sick. Not covid or flu, but sick enough. I’m just now getting back to normal so yesterday I got my hair done (a little shorter and blonder?) and thought about 2023 (including making some event plants for my birthday and the book launch).

We did have a rare sunny day yesterday, during which we finally took down our outdoor holiday lights and walked around a little bit around the wineries. Our kitties seem totally recovered and are getting along a little better, thank goodness. And people have been asking for more kitten pictures, so here you go!

The face of anxiety? Me with tulips

Anxieties about Re-Entry: 2023 Edition, Including AWP and Turning 50

I had two goals in 2023, not resolutions, but loose ambitions, one was doing Tai Chi every day (fair to middling), and the other was trying to write a poem a day and do a submission a day (also fair to middling, given the cat drama and getting sick as a dog).

I haven’t been out and about much in the last few years, so here is a list of anxieties I’m experiencing about the upcoming year, AWP, and my 50th birthday and book launch:

• Covid (which I still haven’t gotten) and masking, Evushield’s lack of ability to protect from new variants.
• Clothing – I have been living in sparkly tops, yoga pants, and slippers for three years, and now the respectable clothes in my closet are outdated, too big or too small. I also have a real issue wearing uncomfortable clothing again (pinchy shoes, jeans, don’t even think about shapewear, etc.). And I haven’t shopped in a store for a long while.
• Socializing – How do we do it? I literally can’t remember how to do small talk. Is it harder with a mask? Yes. Is it time to take off the mask? Probably not just yet…
• Turning 50: I’ve decided to celebrate this milestone instead of dreading it, so I’m having a party on my actual birthday. Do I look 50? Am I dressing correctly for a 50-year-old? Also, can I still have pink hair? The rules are different now than they were when I was a kid. I do know that I see living this long as a real victory, for someone who has been told she was going to die by multiple doctors not so long ago. Hey, every year above ground is a good year.
• Launching a book (still) during a pandemic: so, how does one plan a book launch when there’s still sort of pandemic conditions and you worry you’ve forgotten everything about doing book promotion (are there still book festivals, for instance? If so, which are disability friendly? Can I do college class visits virtually? How much travel can I do as someone with MS and a junk immune system before the body crashes? So many questions…and the first phase of 2023’s publicity efforts for Flare, Corona will really start soon. (In the meantime, check out BOA’s new book page for my book, with blurbs and a sample poem!)

What about you? What are you feeling about 2023? Do you feel this weird re-entry anxiety, or is it just me? Some of you have already re-entered. How is it out there? How about promoting books right now? Anyway, use the comments to vent, suggest, etc.

First Week of the New Year, Cat and Weather Dramas, and Prepping for the New Book in a New Year

New Year’s Day photo, pre-cat-trauma

First Week of the New Year!

This is a photo Glenn took on New Year’s Day. He always tries to take a writer photo of me on New Year’s Day. Well, we definitely had enough sparkles to do it, and the hyacinths smelled amazing. I had moderately high goals for the first month of the new year—a daily Tai Chi practice, writing a poem a day, and submitting once a day.

Much of this was thrown into chaos, first by weather drama (power outages with wind and rainstorms and flooding, which was worse in California than here) and then by kitty drama. The new kitten started acting really strange on Thursday, shaking her head and growling. After $1000 of vet bills, we figured out she’d eaten litter and now she’s back to normal. Immediately after that, my sweet six-year-old cat Sylvia stopped eating, and it turned out she’d eaten new kitten food she was violently allergic to, and after two days at the Emergency Vet, she’s almost back to normal now. So now we are poorer and I was so stressed out—hey, when I go to the ER and get nausea meds, blood work and IV fluids, it’s actually cheaper than the cats! And it’s less stressful when it’s me! I just go to pieces when Glenn has health problems, and it turns out, the cats too. So I am genuinely exhausted emotionally. But still managed to write a few poems and send out a couple of submissions! (Tai chi, I’ll see you again this afternoon.)

So here are a few pictures of the baby kitten Charlotte home from the vet, and another pic of me on New Year’s day (more pics of little Sylvia to come next week):

Prepping for the New Book in a New Year

So, it’s January and that means it’s almost March and the Seattle AWP, and almost May and my book’s official launch! I am setting up readings and (ahem) birthday parties in May, AWP is almost all filled up with book signings and panels and of course I have to build in some time to do the bookfair.
So, what can I do at this point for the book? Given that I have a great team at BOA that does some of the publicity for me?

Well, for one, I can (and did) order the book cards I send out by hand every time I have a book come out. I think of it like a personal invite to read the book. I can send out an e-mail newsletter.  I can start thinking about booking local readings. (I already have! Stay tuned!) I bought an ad in Poets & Writers, and I even hired an outside PR person from the Pacific Northwest—Heather Brown, at Mind the Bird media, who a couple of friends had good experiences with—to help me throughout the launch of the book. Because even though I literally wrote a book on doing PR for your own book, it can be exhausting to do everything on your own, especially if you (or your husband, or family, or even pets) have health problems that suck up a lot of time and energy. I hope it’s worth it, but the best thing about it is that it’s a learning experience for me—what is the difference between doing everything yourself and having help? I interviewed a lot of PR people for the book, but it’s different actually working with people who do PR for a living on the regular. And of course, I have my PR person at BOA too. So it’s a big difference than the last five books. I’ll be interested to see how it affects sales and reviews. Maybe it won’t? Maybe it will? I hope so!

Things I could be doing: I could be writing articles to place in magazines, though I haven’t yet. I could be putting out some calls on social media to see if people want an ARC or e-galley of the book (which I have done once!) How can you be sure you’re doing enough for your book? The answer is, even with a team, you can never be sure. If you’re a workaholic and achievement oriented, it can be overwhelming. I’m hoping not to have that stress this time around. I hope that I’ll have info after this that will help me write an update to my PR for Poets book! Will Twitter still exist when I publish the next version of the book? Will all book promotion be done on a platform that doesn’t exist yet? Stay tuned!

Anyway, if you are like me and in the middle of getting ready to launch a book during a pandemic, please leave your comments, complaints, and helpful tips. It’s been some years since my last book, and it’s a totally different world!

Happy New Year! Holiday Lights, Setting Intentions and Dates, Ad in Poets & Writers, Kitten Charlotte, Brother Visits and Kelly Davio’s The Unreal Woman

Dewi Plass’s New Year art with stoats and snow leopards

Happy New Year! Holiday Lights, Setting Intentions, and More

Happy New Year everyone! Tonight we’re celebrating with my brother and sister-in-law. This week we tried to get out and about a bit, despite the rain, and see the holiday lights at the Bellevue Botanical Garden. I received the “Inspiration” issue of Poets & Writers and it has my little book ad in it.

The kitten Charlotte is getting used to her new human and kitty companions, and even posed with my friend Kelly Davio’s new book. I’ll post that along with a mini-review later on in the post.

What are your New Year traditions? Do you make resolutions? Goals? Set intentions? Make a vision board with cut-outs? Do you think about the year past, things you’ve accomplished, things you missed out on? Do you think about what you’re looking forward to in 2023? I can tell you I am already planning my book launch/50th birthday party in April, looking forward to seeing friends at AWP, and hopefully doing some virtual visits with friends and campuses in other states. I think it will be the most social year for me since the pandemic started, and that will be good for my mental health (we’ll see about the physical.) I’m hopeful for a kinder, gentler year, a happier, friendlier populace, even though that might be a stretch.

Holiday Lights

One of my traditions – that had been thwarted by bomb cyclones, ice storms, record-breaking cold, snow storms, and heavy rain since Thanksgiving – is going to see the holiday lights around town. So we finally found a brief (and I mean, thirty minutes brief) break in the rain to go to the Bellevue Botanical Gardens to see their terrific Garden d’Lights display, which is all animal and plant figures, and takes volunteers months to set up. It was cold, and a little more crowded than is ideal, but it was still fun and made me feel like we got to enjoy the holidays during our break a little bit. Here are some shots of undersea creatures, a field of sunflowers with the city of Bellevue in the background, and a dragon.

Kitten Charlotte in Solstice tree

New Literary Kittens and Kelly Davio’s Unreal Woman

Kitten Charlotte is definitely starting to feel more comfortable with us; Sylvia is starting to feel (slightly) more comfortable with the new kitten. But she’s already making her debut as a literary kitten!

Here she poses with Kelly Davio’s new poetry book from Broken Sleep Press, The Book of the Unreal Woman. It’s a sharp, funny portrait of disability and chronic illness, a rebuke to the ad logo of the “real woman,” poems which feature an action hero facing surgeons instead of supervillains, praise songs to disinfectants. This book shimmers with energy, with anger, with the desire to keep living despite odds against her. Kitten Charlotte, our newest literary kitten review, loved it and quoted that it was “delicious.” Get your copy! They ship direct to the US! 

Ad in Poets & Writer and a Small New Year’s Eve Party

Very excited to have a small ad in the “Inspiration” issue of Poets & Writers – usually my favorite issue of the year, as I could always use more inspiration in gray January.

I also signed up to write a poem a day in January with some friends, which hopefully will be good for my creative brain. Tonight we have cherry upside down cake, salmon to grill, champagne, frozen grapes and balloons and New Year’s crowns for our little celebration tonight with my little brother and his wife – since the pandemic, we haven’t done much to celebrate New Year’s, and I wanted to feel like it was really a holiday this year. (Along with the traditional watching of When Harry Met Sally.) We’re ready to celebrate the end of another pretty hard year, and hopefully the beginning of a slightly easier one. What about you? A sigh of relief at this year’s end?  Are you feeling anxious or anticipatory about 2023? Wishing all my readers a healthy, happy, and surprisingly delightful New Year!

Happy Holidays: Solstice and Christmas Traditions, Flare, Corona Full Cover Reveal, New Kittens, Winter Storms, and Planning for 2023 Already!

One of my fave Curly Girl Holiday Cards

Happy Holidays! Winter Storms and More

Happy Solstice, Hannukah, Christmas, and Yule time to all! How are you all doing? I’ve been waiting out a winter storm for three days in my house, with the latest being an ice storm that makes my metal ramp too treacherous to traverse safely. I hope to report on more holiday lights next week, when I’ll be able to safely leave the house!

Snow and cold we’ve about had enough of for the whole winter—we had a coldest day in ten years on the first day of Winter! I know the rest of the country will be facing this soon. For all those traveling—be safe. Stay safe and warm you all! Keep yourself warm with hot chocolate and tinsel, as suggested by the card at left.
In the meantime, here are a few holidayish scenes – snow in Woodinville, Woodinville holiday lights, and Molbak’s Nutcracker-inspired scene.

Photo by Anastasiya Dobrovolskaya

Solstice, Christmas, and Other Holiday Traditions

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about where the traditions for this time of year come from. Many we practice are far older than Christmas—exchanging gifts, having a feast, and setting intentions for the new year were practiced in many cultures as part of the solstice. Bringing in greenery, lighting candles. For practical reasons, we gathered together and shared what we had – probably to keep us earlier humans from starving or dying from cold or sadness! It’s different this year, with illnesses packing the hospitals, showing us maybe we shouldn’t do be doing big family and friend get-togethers just yet. But maybe we can incorporate some older traditions to bring us joy instead.

I listened to a beautiful carol which I found out was a Christina Rossetti poem, “In the Bleak Midwinter” that brought this idea home. On the Solstice, we had duck and potatoes and carrots (very winter appropriate), Glenn and I lit candles, thought about what we wanted to leave behind and embrace in the new year, and listened to the old prom themes we could remember late into the night. It was really nice! So anyway, in America there’s a weird idea someone is trying to steal Christmas, when in actuality, Christmas borrowed a lot of its stuff from other older religious and cultural traditions—and early Americans, like the Pilgrims, considered celebrating Christmas sinful! It’s also worth noting historians think Jesus was actually born in April! (My birthday month! Just a coincidence. Celebrating Easter and Christmas together would be a lot, I suppose.) And it does seem like we need to celebrate this time of year, to ward off SAD (as we call it now), to practice kindness (always in short supply but especially needed this time of year), and to try to find joy in the things we can.

Speaking of which, I have a few things to celebrate in this post!

Full Cover Reveal of Flare, Corona! Hot Pink!

I’m proud to reveal the full cover design of Flare, Corona, which should be coming out in just a few months! Look at that back cover, with the hot pinks and the fractal neurons! I love it. And I’m really loving my blurbs and blurb-ers. It seems things are moving fast already in the book direction—people are already writing about dates for readings! Eek! How is my calendar going to be full through May! Starting at AWP, this is the most social events I will have had in over three years! I hope I remember how to dress, socialize, speak correctly, and navigate crowds with my cane!

P.S. You can pre-order your own copy of Flare, Corona from BOA Editions here..

Me with Christmas kitten Charlotte

New Kitten!

You didn’t think I would forget this part of our year-end celebrating, did you? We are welcoming home Charlotte (her mother was named Jane Austen—this name is from Charlotte Bronte, as well as Elizabeth’s best friend in Pride and Prejudice and also my dear Aunt Charlotte who passed away a few years ago, who was a very fancy (and kind) lady. Charlotte is a little too small to breed so she joins our latest in a series of very cute ragdoll cats who were in some way not exactly perfect in the cat/human eye, perhaps, but perfect for us. (Remember Sylvia was re-homed for behavioral problems, such as fighting with dogs and breaking plates? We had no dogs and no plates in kitten-reach, so easy choice.) I love animals and, in my opinion, the more the better. Did you know I studied Zoology at the Cincinnati Zoo, thinking that might be a good career for me? Then I found out they made $26,000 a year, and a female zoo worker at the Cincinnati Zoo had her arm bitten off by a polar bear. So that’s why I don’t work with red pandas and otters for a living. What do you think? It could have been a better career for me! Anyway, we are celebrating our holiday with our new baby, and so far she’s gotten along okay with Sylvia, so now we have a pair of literary kittens again!

Another photo by Anastasiya, this time with a new year symbol: baby fox!

Planning for 2023

So, what are you throwing out from 2022 and embracing for 2023? Personally, I am hoping for better health, more energy, more friends, and less fear, less insecurity, and maybe some other good things too, specifically around the new book. Hey, I can dream!

Have you started making plans yet, as I find myself doing? Can I book a birthday party/book launch the same day? How many readings can I realistically do in a three-month period? Am I looking forward to seeing other writers again but also am nervous?

As I look back on the past year, at first I felt as if I didn’t get as much accomplished as I wanted to—as I could say of all the pandemic years—and was weighted down with too many doctor’s appointments and not enough fun stuff. But productivity is only one way—and a narrow one—to measure a year. I made new friends at a beautiful new farm in Woodinville – where I spent a lot of time wondering through lavender fields – and started a book club at a winery—where I hope to make more local friends. I got to go to La Conner for the Tulip Festival AND the Poetry Festival, and caught up with old friends, and did my first live reading at Hugo House since the pandemic with wonderful poets. I did podcasts for Writer’s Digest and Rattle. And of course, I worked this year with BOA Editions for the first time, on copyedits, covers, blurbs, and putting together all kinds of information. So in some ways I accomplished important things. So I guess I’m hoping for more time in flower fields, more time with friends, and more time away from doctor’s offices.

Wishing you a Happy Holiday, whatever tradition you celebrate, and a Merry Christmas to those who celebrate what turns out to be a pretty strangely ancient tradition. And if you don’t stop by the blog next week, have a happy and healthy New Year!