Skagit Poetry Festival and a Trip to La Conner, A Visit with my Brother and Bathing Hummingbirds, and Socializing Again While Trying to Dodge the Smoke

Glenn and I at Roozengaarde with dahlias

Skagit Poetry Festival and a Trip to La Conner

The Skagit Poetry Festival was this weekend and it was really fun to sort of dip my toe back into social literary events again. I got to see a lot of old friends, picked up some books, stopped by some of my favorite places – Roozengaarde Flower Farm and Museum of Northwest Art in La Conner, WA. And we had terrible air in Woodinville, so fleeing to La Conner for better air was a good bet. I’m looking forward to tonight’s reading and will have more pictures next week, I swear.

It was wonderful and therapeutic to be outside without worrying about asthma or burning eyes, especially with all the flowers. It was also wonderful and therapeutic to be around writers and book again, in a somewhat-almost normal setting. Some friends I hadn’t seen in over a year at least. And just being around poets gives you a feeling of…not being so alone in being a poet.

Me with Flower/pumpkin stand at Roozengaarde

I’ve got some more pics that show the flowers against the smoky sky and smoky hills, so even though the air was better, the wildfire smoke hung all around, threatening. La Conner is not a long drive but I don’t visit often enough, and often I just make it up for the tulip festival. But the birds, the flowers, and the general friendliness to art and culture reminded me I should try to make it up more often. Sleepy cows and crowds of red-winged blackbirds didn’t make it into the pictures, and the occasional eagle overhead.

I just love being in a more rural area, and like I said, it was nearly euphoric to be able to walk outside without worrying about wearing an N95 mask (outside! not right! stupid smoke!)  and really the town had pumpkins everywhere, blooming flowers – really unusual for this late in October.

Hunter’s Moon

Brother Visits and Bathing Hummingbirds

A shot of the Hunter’s moon yesterday night. Might be even better tonight!

Before the festival, I had a chance to visit with my little brother and his wife, who came out to Woodinville on a still smoky day and we visited the Woodinville/Redmond JB Grower’s Pumpkin Farm. They went home with five pumpkins!

We had a great time despite the air quality, and it was really nice to visit with them. Another thing I don’t get to do often enough these days: see my family!

Also, I got a wonderful shot of an Anna’s hummingbird taking a bath in our bird fountain. Magical! The birds were in a frenzy all week at the fountain and the feeders. I have more bird pics for next week.

Next blog post I’ll have more info on the new book, Flare, Corona, more pics from Skagit, and hopefully other literary fun news. Wishing you a lovely and smoke-free remainder of October.

Welcome to October: Upcoming Book Launch Planning, Upcoming Book Club, Poetry Festivals, and Podcasts

Welcome to October! And Literary Events!

Can you believe it’s October already? It’s 80 and smoky outside today, breaking records here in Seattle, and we’re supposed to go to a pumpkin farm this afternoon but it still feels like August.

This shot was from a visit to the JB Grower’s Pumpkin Farm, where I got to walk a little way into the sunflower walk (they have acres of corn maze and sunflower walk, as well as their pumpkin patch) and came home feeling fall feels, despite the heat.

It also hit me just this week that my book is real and coming out in six months. The cover for Flare, Corona was chosen this week (reveal soon!), and I started thinking about mailing lists, updated business cards, and scheduling readings. Oh yes, and Seattle AWP next March. My PR for Poets book recommends starting six months ahead of time laying the groundwork for the book launch, and that suddenly hit me.

Also, this month is full of literary activity: the book club I host is meeting on Oct 19th, the Skagit Poetry Festival is happening next weekend, and I’m working on an interview and a spooky poetry podcast. Plus, I’ve got poet dates—getting back into social life is gradual for me—because, let’s face it, in Seattle most of us start hibernating in November and don’t come out until March.

Anyway, here are a few more pics from the pumpkin farm visit to show you it really is pumpkin season even if it doesn’t feel like it today…

Woodinville Hot Air Balloon

Woodinville Book Club and Molbak’s

We did our usual annual visit to Molbak’s for their glass pumpkin patch, and they already had holiday decorations up, including a starry cityscape we posed for pictures with.

In other Woodinville news, our Read Between the Lines Book Club book club is meeting soon at J. Bookwalter Winery. We’re reading the appropriately spooky book Where the Crazy Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda, which is a comic feminist retelling of a bunch of traditional Japanese ghost tales. We will have wine AND candy, which is a terrific combo for a book club, right?

And here are a few pictures from our Molbak’s visit:

Expect pictures next week from Skagit, and here’s some info on the podcast I’ll be appearing on to talk “spooky poetry” with Tim Green at the Rattlecast on Sunday, October 30th. I love talking about horror and speculative poetry and hope to talk about some of my favorite writers and an anthology or two to recommend.

It’s Decorative Gourd Season! Autumn Equinox and Fall Feels, Pumpkin Farms, and Decisions About Cover Art

At the entrance to JB Grower’s Pumpkin Farm

It’s Decorative Gourd Season! Autumn Equinox, Pumpkin Farms and Fall Feels

I promise I am going to talk about real serious writer book stuff in a minute, but for this first part, can I say…whee, it’s decorative gourd season and I am celebrating fall by visiting pumpkin farms and burning candles like there’s no tomorrow.

We visited one pumpkin farm on the autumn equinox and another the next day. We had beautiful, unsmoky weather and I decided we should take advantage of it before it all turns into the inevitable winter rain. (Someone joked that Seattle has three seasons: rain, summer, and smoke. Sort of true for the last few years!) Besides getting to talk to local farmers, which I love, it gave me and Glenn a chance to get out of the house, into fresh air, get some mild exercise (I’m still using a cane, there’s only so much pumpkin farm tramping I can do), but it also sort of helps your body know: hey, we are changing seasons, pay attention to the leaves, to what is blooming and what is dying, what grows out of the ground, the colors of the sky. Haven’t poets been writing poems about that stuff for years? Fall is my second favorite season after spring (although Seattle springs are mostly damp and brief), and I’m sure many of you feel the same.

Anyway, this first gallery is from McMurtrey’s farm, which is really mainly a Christmas tree farm that we used to go to way before we moved out here to get our trees, but they do a bunch of seasonal stuff for kids and have a beautiful patch of dahlias and sunflowers and pumpkins. Small but photogenic.

The second gallery is from JB Grower’s Pumpkin Farm and Puzzle Patch, on NE 124th (south of their lavender farm and on the other side of the Sammamish River), which is acres of corn maze, acres of what they call a sunflower walk—it has a pattern you can see from the air, which is kind of cool—and just a huge working farm for pumpkins as well. They have a little gift shop for snacks and gourds and amazing pumpkin candles made by a local candlemaker, and it’s adorable—and enormous (tons of parking too). Great for kids who have a lot of energy to burn off, but also fun for farm nerds like me who fondly recall their childhood farm life in Tennessee, for instance. I’ve gotten to know the farm manager at JB Grower’s, who is also a writer and avid reader, and it kind of makes me wish I’d gone into agricultural science instead of pre-med. I could be running a farm right now! LOL. Seriously though, all this farm interaction has made me really glad I stayed in Woodinville and didn’t flee to even more remote ex-urbs during the pandemic, which we seriously considered.

Anyway, I hope these photos help share all the “fall feels” and show how much I appreciate the place I live and the people I live around.

From JB Grower’s Pumpkin patch, with sunflowers

Decisions About Cover Art

Well, I told you there would be serious writer talk and here it is: I am in the middle of working with BOA Editions on deciding what the cover art for Flare, Corona is going to be. Their designer came up with a bunch of options and now I have to narrow them down and eventually pick one.

If you follow this blog, you know I’m sort of a visual art nerd and have friends who are artists and go to galleries a lot, so usually I walk into a book deal having already picked my cover art and artist, but it wasn’t like that this time around. I had the idea of using a solar eclipse shot with a corona, but that seemed very literal (although eclipses do show up throughout the book) for a book about experiencing a cancer diagnosis, an MS diagnosis, and then, bam, the coronavirus years. (Hey, it’s still me, so it’s got some funny sci-fi and speculative stuff in between, don’t worry.)

Sunflowers and Dahlias @ McMurtrey’s

So, I wasn’t really sure at all about what I wanted or needed to communicate about the book with the cover art, which I consider super important—after all, it, not your words, is the first thing the reader experiences with the book. You’re lucky if they glance inside or even at the blurbs on the back—if they don’t like the cover. So, a lot of pressure, right? Anyway, BOA has been terrific about it, and whatever we end up with will be “right” for the book, right? I’ve even contributed photographs for other people’s cover art, so this should have been a breeze, but it wasn’t, and I think part of it is I didn’t go in with a clear idea of what the cover needed to be.

Anyway, soon I’ll be able to share cover art and blurbs and all that good stuff with you! But I wanted to talk about the process—this is my sixth book, not my first, so I wanted to share how these decisions get made. Sometimes the publisher, not the writer, has a clear idea of what they want for the cover, but that hasn’t been the case for me yet. I’ve worked with wonderful artists (some of whom are now good friends) on the cover art along the way, and I am very grateful for that. My only wish is that I myself was a better visual artist, so I could just—boom—design my own brilliant covers exactly representing what’s in each book. Sadly, my only visual artistry skill is photography, and I’m still learning even on that skill set. Anyway, it’ll be nerve-wracking until it’s done.

And I’m doing a podcast for Halloween on spooky poetry, so stay tuned here for more news about that coming up!

Woodinville Book Club Meets and Talks Art and Fraud, Last Visit to the Flower Garden on a Chilly Evening, More About Submission September

Me with a good book and a glass of wine, pre-book club at J. Bookwalter

Woodinville Book Club Meets and Talks Art and Fraud

The first meeting of the “Read Between the Wines” Book Club was this Wednesday to talk about Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me. It was a great group – I got to meet a couple of poet friends from social media that I’ve never met in person, two of the winery people showed up to talk with our group about art (turns out one of them had an art degree!) and fraud, what makes art “art,” women’s reputations as artists (and writers), and Fake Like Me‘s literary predecessor, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We got a quick picture with at least some of the group as a hot air balloon rose overhead. Book club magic!

Next meet up will be appropriately spooky, Japanese ghost stories retold with a comic and feminist contemporary twist in Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda. We are meeting at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville at 6 PM on October 19! I am really looking forward to talking books and getting to know more readers, writers, and artists in the community.

Me holding dahlias, with sunflowers

Last Visit to the Flower Farm on a Chilly Evening

I had been a bit under the weather after the book club (sometimes MS can clobber you if you do too much), so Glenn decided to cheer me up after a few days of bed rest with a special after-closure visit (with permission – thanks guys!) to my happy place, JB Family Growers Lavender Farm and Flower Farm in Woodinville. This time it was cold enough to need a sweater—just last week it was 90, remember? And it was dark by 7 PM! It’s turning to fall rapidly. But a lot of the flowers were still in full bloom and beautiful; we got to see some beautiful dark red sunflowers we had never seen in bloom in any previous visit, and while Glenn was taking a picture, a hawk swooped out of the sunflowers and almost grazed him as it chased some swallows! And we found some dahlias that matched my sweater.

Steller’s jay in my flower box

More About September Submission Season

One of the good things about doing a “submission season” with your friends—our group tries to do a submission a day on a certain month, this year September, is that is motivates you to look at journals you might not have heard of, or considered before, or considered outside your reach. When you really look at where you submit over time, it’s probably the same places over and over again, and maybe there’s an editor at another magazine you’ve never sent to that will absolutely love your work. It’s also a good excuse to get to the bookstore in person and look at literary magazines available in your area—you might be surprised what you can find. It also forces you to take a look at the poems you’ve been writing—is this one ready to send out? Why has this poem you like been sitting around, not submitted anywhere yet? And also to update your records—in my case, an Excel spreadsheet—to see how many poems and submissions you have out. Sometimes I catch duplicate poems or even duplicate submissions— hey, I’m as human as the next person, and probably slightly worse at keeping records. So, I encourage you all to take a look at your poetry and see where you could send your work and try some place new this month. And take advantage of any nice days to get out and see the last of the flowers, or the beginnings of fall, put on a jacket, walk around, drink a hot cider. I am definitely going to try to take advantage of this as we transition into the rainy season…

What Makes You Happy (September Edition) and Submission Season Returns (with Wildfire Smoke)

Two poets and their husbands in a field of zinnias, Woodinville (Rose, Kelli, Glenn, and me)

What Makes You Happy (September Edition)

September can be a bittersweet month here in the Northwest. Perfect clear, cool blue skies are sometimes followed with (like today) an orange sky thick with wildfire smoke. You take time to get together with friends at a flower farm, even though you are worried about friends and family with biopsies waiting, new covid infections, and of course, you might also be worried about the state of the world.

I read an interesting article and interview about a book by a former Google data scientist (the Master’s degree my husband is getting from Pepperdine is in data science) that discussed what really makes people happy. I was shocked, and also not shocked, by some of the facts. Spending time with people you love, your significant other, friends—that makes you happy. Also on the list: gardening, fishing, listening to music. A lot of that stuff is free.

Glenn and I at Matthew’s Winery garden

However, also interesting to note, the happiest income starts at $75K a year and perfects itself at, by this data scientist’s estimate, 8 million dollars, a sum that is pretty far from most of our stretch goals for income. The things that make you least happy also won’t surprise you: work, especially with people you don’t like, commuting, social media. The most happy we’ll be is doing something we love with people we love, most often by a large body of water on a sunny warm day. Makes sense!

So, one of the things I’ve started prioritizing above, yes, even my writing work and things like dental and medical work (which take up a surprising amount of the life of any sick person, and definitely cost a lot AND don’t make you happy) is: spending time with people I love doing things I love. This week I took Glenn around Woodinville one cool sunny day to Molbak’s to check out the fall gardening stuff (and brought home flowers to plant) and a winery to see how its pandemic garden was doing (terrific!). A great way to spend an afternoon getting into the fall spirit.

I also had a good poet friend, Kelli Russell Agodon, and her husband Rose, over this week to celebrate her book being a finalist for the Washington State Book Award, and after champagne and cupcakes and a cheese and fruit plate, took the whole group over to my local lavender and flower farm, which closes tomorrow for the year. Sunflowers were still up, as were zinnias and dahlias. Mt Rainier was shining, and charms of goldfinches, red finches, and red-winged blackbirds soared over our heads as we stood among flowers and listened to the hum of the very happy bees. All of us stood in wonder at the mountain, the sun, the flowers and birds, just awestruck by the beauty of it. That flower farm was definitely one of my “happy places,” and I realized it isn’t just me—everyone I took to visit it was charmed by the return to nature, the smell of lavender in the air, the simple act of walking among sunflower fields. I will be so excited when it returns next year, with even bigger lavender plants!

Full Moon with orange wildfire smoke haze

Submission Season Returns (with Wildfire Smoke)

Alas, every day could not be as perfect as that one – the next day after our visit a strange orange haze settled over us, the full moon shining spookily overhead. Some of my poet friends in WA and OR were evacuated today as wildfires sort of ringed the Seattle and Portland areas. It was also almost 90 today, on top of dangerous particulate levels (above 150) so—I was consigned to the indoors, with Glenn going to get the mail and do errands in a KN95 mask—sure, for covid, but also, for evil smoke.

On the positive side of being cooped up for two days, I got to watch the new Ring of Power series (beautiful production), the new Thor movie (silly at the beginning with a lot of laughs and screaming goats, sentimental and sad at the end?) and get a bunch of submissions in as the literary magazine submission season starts up again for the school year. So many places are closed for the summer, and I’ve been less motivated lately than I should have been, so it was good for a bunch of us to give ourselves the goal of doing a submission a day during September.

Scrub jay in Flower Box

One of the other benefits of getting together with writer friends (besides the overall happiness thing re: above) is that you can discuss your worries (in my case, author photos, promotion, cover art) and it really helps your anxiety. So not only do friends help with the happiness levels, but they can help you feel more normal and less stressed about things like your upcoming book. And you can discuss grants, which literary magazines are open for subs, and congratulate each other for your wins and console each other over your losses.

When Martha came over last week, she left me a few literary magazines to look through, and Kelli brought me Denise Duhamel’s new book, which I’m looking forward to reading, along with Jenn Givhan’s newest, Belly to the Brutal. So, I do have a bunch of good reading material while I’m cooped up, along with looking forward to the upcoming new Woodinville book club at J. Bookwalter’s starting Wednesday with a discussion of Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me. I’ll have to give my report on that event next week! Hopefully I’ll be a good book club host, and this will help build more literary community in Woodinville and on the Eastside in general.

Mt Rainier with flower field in Woodinville

I’ll leave you with this last picture of Mt Rainier with a field of zinnias, dahlias, and sunflowers to remind you (and myself) how beautiful the Pacific Northwest can be (especially when we’re not having wildfires.)

*All flower fields pictured (except for the Matthew’s winery garden shot and my back deck) are from the J.B. Family Grower’s Lavender and Flower Farm in Woodinville, closing this Sunday for the season. They will be opening a sunflower and corn maze with their pumpkin farm in a few weeks in another location in Woodinville, so we can look forward to seeing that.