Snow Woes, Who Gets to Be a Disabled Writer, and Having Trouble Getting It Together? Me too.

Valentine Tulips delivered late in the snow

Snow Woes

So our week was generally discombobulated because of our giant (for Seattle) snow event – about 8-10 inches of snow. Vaccine appointments got cancelled, shipments didn’t arrive or arrived late. Mail and packages arrived late, including the tulips Glenn ordered for Valentine’s Day arriving three days late, a little the worse for wear, but still pretty.

It’s disconcerting and disappointing that our vaccine operations – already in WA state going way too slow compared to other states – were derailed by weather. As someone with multiple health vulnerabilities, I have a vested interest in vaccine operations going better than they have been, here. Please, if you care about the lives of your disabled and chronically ill friends, please write to Jay Inslee and tell him to open up vaccinations to us now. Other states have already opened to people with medical conditions AND teachers, like Ohio. Why aren’t we doing things as well as Ohio or New York state? It’s so frustrating to watch.

three deer visitors in the snow

But nothing like what happened in the South, especially in Texas, this week. Many of my friends (and a few relatives) were out of power for days in single-digit temperatures and had no clean or running water. Does this seem so impossible in a modern age, that an entire state could suffer so much from a cold snap? Weird anomalies – like Texas being on its own power grid (except for El Paso, which is on its own grid connected to other states) unconnected to other states because of a decision dating back to 1939 not be part of the federal power grid, and then further that Texas deregulated power and so all the power companies are for-profit entities, and then further than things happened like the nuclear power – that Texas relies pretty heavily on – was run by people who didn’t anticipate things going wrong at a nuclear plant in the cold, which, as luck would have it, they did. (Not bad enough to kill people, but bad enough to shut down a nuclear plant for a while.) So the cold and snow wreaked a lot of havoc and caused a lot of deaths there, due to some some decisions made not by the people there today but politicians of the past  and their poor (and dangerous) choices. This was not aided by their Senator taking off to Cancun in the middle of the emergency.

Steller’s Jay

Having Trouble Getting It Together? Me too.

This week I didn’t feel great – a sinus infection thing that caused a bit of a fever – so I lost some time and didn’t feel productive, which I always beat myself up over. I’m stressed out about the lack of access to vaccines in the state and county I live in, I’m stressed out that I still have relatives dying of covid while the country continues its (too slow) vaccine rollout, I’m stressed about not being able to do anything safely, still, a year after I started quarantining due to covid and my health issues including a primary immune deficiency and lung damage from previous pneumonia, which could prove deadly in the face of this virus. People talk about hitting a wall – but it’s more like getting punched in the face repeatedly, by the news, by tragedies, by uncertainty. I mean, I feel like I’m in a losing boxing match I never signed up for. But I was reminded by one of my doctors that everyone is angry, anxious, stressed, getting poor sleep, overwhelmed, and not as productive, or nice, or living “their best life.” We are trying to survive a year of plague that has taken, at this point, almost 500,00o American lives, and many more throughout the globe. Let me say that again: we are trying to survive. That means we are focused on our most basic needs, and this has been thrown into bright relief by the tragedies in Texas brought on by a cold front. When you are focused on your most basic need – to survive – you have to relax about the fact that your self-actualization – at the top of the hierarchy of needs – will have to wait a bit.

Who Gets to Call Themselves a Disabled Writer?

I’m going to tell you a funny story about being disabled, because it sort of encapsulates the way we respond to society’s messages about disability and ability. I was in a wheelchair for the majority of the time between, say, 2007 and 2018. I mean, I could not walk, I could not do stairs. I didn’t have my MS diagnosis back then, so I was going for a variety of therapies – physical therapy, among others. But I never asked my doctor for a handicapped placard for my car. That’s years of being in a wheelchair without every asking for the basic thing that would have made my life much easier doing everyday things, like going to the doctor or the grocery store. And why was that? Because I was loathe to call myself “handicapped.” I did not think of myself as disabled, though anyone looking at me would surely have thought I was. When I was finally hospitalized with overwhelming symptoms of MS – inability to talk, walk, vomiting every day from vertigo, and almost no hand or foot control – I went to the my doctor and asked for a placard. A temporary one, I said. A few months later, I came to the realization that MS was not a temporary problem. My years of falling, accidents, “clumsiness,” had not been random – they had been part of my MS symptoms. Still, I never mentioned MS or my disability in any of my writing. Why not? Maybe because I still didn’t consider myself “disabled enough” to use the name, disabled. Or maybe I didn’t want to accept it would be part of my identity, like walking with a cane or wheelchair, for the rest of my life. I have started to write poems about the subject only in the last couple of years, and I feel very tender about these poems and essays still.

Sandra Beasley, a friend of mine who has several severe food allergies like my own, wrote this essay about claiming her identity as a disabled writer. It’s worth a read. And it made me think of my own nervousness, two AWP’s ago, when I was on a panel and was part of a reading for disabled writers. Was I disabled enough?  Could I speak to this group with any authority? Anyway, what does it mean to add “disabled” to your bio, or your descriptions of yourself on social media? If you look at my pictures, you wouldn’t necessarily see any disability, unless you looked closely, or looked at how I cropped out a wheelchair or cane. I notice small things (like my left side never fully recovered from the 2018 MS flare, and I still limp a little on that side, and my eye on that side isn’t quite the same as the one on the right side. Another small thing is I have more trouble reading my poems correctly out loud than I used to. A poetry editor recently asked me to record a video for their site, and asked for a re-recording because I had made minor errors in the words. But I knew that in a re-recording, I was likely to make the same, or worse, errors, because MS makes it difficult for me to read, focus on a camera, and stand at the same time. Did the editor know how bad she made me feel for this neurological anomaly? Probably not. It’s the same with Zoom readings and meetings – I have to shut off my camera sometimes when my brain gets overwhelmed trying to sort noise and imagery and trying to respond properly that that information. It could be perceived as a bad attitude – but really it’s my disability that’s controlling things. During quarantine, I have not asked as much of my body – not trying to walk unfamiliar routes, or dealing with people who don’t know I have MS, or driving to downtown readings that require stairs or doctor’s appointments that take hours of physical endurance to go to. But I still get tired doing things the average person wouldn’t. I have a telltale sign when I’ve done too much that my husband notices – my hands and legs start to tremble fairly aggressively, and this usually means worse symptoms will happen. “Time to rest,” he’ll say, and though I might resist his advice, he’s right. Anyway, I’m telling you all this because it’s hard to be vulnerable and admit your physical, neurological, and mental disabilities. Everyone who has them has a hard time claiming them in a positive way. Do we call ourselves a “disabled person” or a “person with disabilities.” This is an actual thing we have to think about. Disability activists, by the way, are all always tired. They are already pushing themselves to put out the message that access for all is important, that including disabled people in political and artistic venues is important, that their lives still matter even if their legs or brains or ears or eyes don’t work exactly the same way a “normal” person’s do. So be kind when they ask your arts group or association or conference or residency for accommodations – they have already done so much work and they are tired. Disabled people are not trying to make you feel bad or scared or guilty or deal with your feelings about your own mortality/health/human frailty, they are just trying to live their lives in a world that’s fraught with consequences for even mentioning you might be outside the norm.

The Power of Claiming My Identity as a Disabled Writer

Happy Valentine’s Day (during a Pandemic and a Snowstorm!), Tentatively Thinking About the Future, and Adventures in Japanese and Plath

Happy Valentine’s Day from us!

Happy Valentine’s Day 2021 (with Pandemic and Snowstorm!)

So, what are your plans for Valentine’s Day? Is it watching eight inches of snow fall on your doorstep, essentially trapping you at home which you were trapped in anyway because of the pandemic? Yes, that is our plan!

I was pretty sick at the beginning of the week, and then the impeachment with its disappointing ending, so you could say it wasn’t a very romantic beginning to the week. But I’m recovering, we’ll watch some romantic movies tomorrow and Glenn will make a fancy steak dinner (and he made pink heart-shape marshmallows for me!) and we’ll do our best to cheer ourselves up. I’m hopeful that the vaccines will be available for people here soon after a lot of shortages (and government mismanagement) in WA state. My parents in Ohio already have gotten the vaccine, so they will be safe – at least from covid, which is cheering. I’m hoping WA decides to prioritize the disabled, immune-compromised and chronically ill, but there’s no sense of that yet.

The results of the impeachment were not what I hoped, I’m hoping that with the impeachment over, we just don’t have to hear much about former President 45 ever again. It’s so nice to have a competent, low-key, polite President not taking up space in my brain all the time.

The snowstorm is beautiful, even if it keeps away our packages and grocery delivery, and watching the flakes fall is so mesmerizing. We get a big snow – eight inches and still going – so rarely, that it seems almost celebratory.

Valentine’s Kiss

Tentatively Thinking About the Future

So, as we watch old movies, and watch the snow come down, I’m tentatively thinking about the future. Have you started doing that yet? I’m thinking about my birthday, April 30, and daring to hope I will have the vaccine by then so I can safely go to, for instance, the bookstore or the dentist. Things I’ve been putting off – like going to the gardening store I love, or schedule an appointment to go into Open Books again to browse poetry. I hope to have a celebration, even if it’s just a small one.

And I’m scheduling some medical appointments I’ve been putting off. I’m getting my MRI of my liver  – which I haven’t had for a year – next week, and hoping for good news (or no news) there, and soon I’ll be getting my brain MRI for my MS. Health care does feel a little safer now that health care workers, at least, have been vaccinated, even if I haven’t.

And looking at book publishers and imagining which I would like to have publish one of my book manuscripts. There are great established publishers I love – like Copper Canyon, or BOA, or Graywolf – and some great newer ones, like Acre Books or Yes Yes Books. I’ve even started thinking about book covers…I’m hoping that the acceptance of one of the books isn’t too far off now. Is this unfounded optimism? I don’t know. I’m even working on a third manuscript – which seems like the height of nuttiness, but I think I’ve written another book after the second one, all about the pandemic. I’ve also reached out to a couple of poets that I’ve been online friends with for a long time to talk about publication, and it turns out, it’s a great idea to talk on the phone to people instead of just social media. It reminds me of the eighties, when you’d write letters to your friends and sometimes call them, but it was probably too expensive to do often. I’m realizing I have a poetry friends I’ve known for years all over the US, and talking to them reminds me we are all in this together – whether you’re in upstate New York, rural Virginia, or like me, in a far-out suburb of Seattle. Everyone has struggles and doubts, and talking about them seems to make them lessen, and encouraging friends make everything a little better.

Adventures in Japanese (and Plath)

Sylvia cuddled up with Aoka Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are

With Glenn in data science school at night, I’ve been teaching myself Japanese on Duolingo every night (really helpful – I’ve been trying to teach myself Japanese for more fifteen years, and never gotten very far) and reading a terrific Japanese book, Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are, funny, feminist re-takes on some really melancholy Japanese ghost/folk tales. (High recommend for people who like Haruki Murakami, for instance, or Kelly Link.) Also still reading the new, very detailed, Plath biography, Red Comet, which has some terrific samples of her unpublished fiction (found that fascinating) and photos and art work by Plath I’d never seen before.

I had researched the Japanese language, Japanese poetry, and Japanese folk tales for several years to write She Returns to the Floating World, but I still have so much to learn. I would love to actually visit Japan one day, if I ever get healthy enough. When I studied French, going to France really helped me learn to use French in a practical way that I would never have learned remotely, and the constant feedback on accents and vocabulary were invaluable. Right now we can’t travel, but we can dream of it in the future, still. It’s nice, during the pandemic and the winter when we can’t get out as much, to have a project to work on. Next I might try to teach myself the computer language Python, which Glenn is learning for his grad school. It seems pretty accessible. We’ll see!

Valentine Picture with Pink typewriter and Tulips

Anyway, happy Valentine’s Day, or Galentine’s Day, however you choose to celebrate. I recommend, whatever you do, watch something that makes you happy, drink some hot chocolate, and be kind to yourself. And maybe get out a new (or old and well loved) book of poetry to read out loud to yourself or with your loved ones. Some people call Valentine’s Day the Poet’s Holiday, but I’m not sure about that. Nevertheless, if people go looking to poetry in search of romance, or solace, or even apocalypse meanderings, that’s not a bad thing.

Envisioning Better Things

Corvid, not covid

Envisioning Better Things – A Practice of Hope, During a Plague Year

So, things have been rough this week. It’s been dreary, rainy, and too cold to go outside much. America hit the 450,000 mark in people that have been lost to covid, as variants with higher contagion rates and seemingly slightly more dangerous consequences are spreading around the world.

Washington State has still got a shortage of vaccines, and they don’t seem to prioritizing the chronically ill or the disabled. I’ve been struggling with anxiety about that and at the same time, trying to get better from a sinus thing and a stomach thing (not covid, just the result of my normally crappy immune system.)

Meanwhile, a literary magazine I’ve respected and longed to get into for twenty years, about ten months after my work appeared in it for the first time, decided to publish a former professor-pedophile who abused students and kept a gigantic collection of child rape films. This triggered a lot of sadness and anger from a lot of abuse survivors, including me (I was raped when I was six years old). The literary magazine then published a non-apology. The whole thing left me feeling sick and disappointed in the poetryworld. Meanwhile, I’m sending my manuscripts out into the world, hoping for a good press to pick them up. Have we decided what a “good press” means to us?  What are we even hoping for?

Pink Tulips

So, What Next?

Most pandemics in history have not lasted forever, even with a lack of soap, vaccines, or N95 masks. So we know that this will not last forever, no matter what we do. The vaccines may help squash the numbers of the dead, and help propel the economy back to health, if they can actually be gotten out fast enough to do any good.

Washington State’s lack of prioritization of the chronically ill and disabled may mean a wait for me of some months, but in the meantime, they’re probably going to approve the third vaccine for the US – the Johnson and Johnson vaccine, which might be slightly safer for people like me with a history of anaphylactic reactions to shots. The earliest we can hope to get the shots from them is April, I’ve read. But every person that gets the vaccine now helps slow the steady growth of the virus, slow the ability to mutate safely within each person, and makes the entire planet a little safer.

So, I have reason to think things will get better, gradually, for us in terms of what feels for people like me like an endless quarantine, and for us all in general. Things will get better. Pandemics do not last forever. However, this pandemic has changed the world in ways that might not be reversible. Will we ever feel the same about screaming at a concert, or even singing in a choir?

Resting deer

And as Far as the PoetryWorld

PoetryWorld can feel like a strange and mysterious planet. Like a world of science fiction, with secret languages and disguises and scary monsters.  Sometimes this can be overwhelming. You can make friends with other poets, you can help support other younger poets, and you can try in your own way to support journals and presses by buying their books or subscribing or sending in your work. You can review the books of poetry you respect and admire, poets who might not get as much of the limelight as they deserve. But how do we work to make things better for, say, child rape victims, or any victims of sexual abuse in a Poetryworld that seems like it’s still (Still!) run by people either abusing or making apologies and excuses for abusers? Is there a way forward in that goal?  Can we just make the poetryworld a better place by staying in it, or staying apart from it? I do not have an answer for this. I wish I did. The truth is, you and I are part of the Poetryworld. We may not run things, but if we stick around and make our voices heard, eventually things might get better. Someone tell me so.

Learning from Women Writers, Under a Wolf Moon, Looking at Book Publishers During Submission Season, and Waiting (and Waiting) for the Vaccine

Cold Wolf Moon

Under a Cold Wolf Moon

Many people have been talking to me lately about feeling stressed, having insomnia, feeling anxious about getting the vaccine (welcome to the club on that one!) and general angst. Just consider that we are about to hit the one-year mark on the pandemic taking over our lives. That is a long time to live in fear, uncertainty, maybe losing jobs and family members, your hobbies and friends, your sense of normalcy. 2020 – and 2021, probably – have been traumatic years. It is normal to feel a little lost, a little frazzled, a little at the end of your rope. Also, this full moon of the past few days has always been a weird one for me – the day I was hospitalized and diagnosed with MS with a full Wolf Moon night, for instance.  The moon messes with people’s mood and sleep – a known thing. And it is hard to sustain hope during a worldwide pandemic. The plague years – 1918’s killer flu, the bubonic plague, the years tuberculosis swept Seattle – are bitter, hard years for everyone, almost like war years. We’ve lost 425,000 people in less than a year, and many more have long term damage, and we’re still not 100 percent sure how to treat it now, though we’re doing better than we were last February. And four vaccines within a year (only two have been approved in the US, but hopefully AstraZenaca and Johnson and Johnson will be approved soon) is pretty incredible, even if our rollout has been chaotic and too sporadic as of yet. Anyway, just like the photo – there’s light at the end of the tunnel, even if the light is obscured by clouds of uncertainty.

Downy Woodpecker Watching Flicker

Learning from Women Writers

My goal to keep learning about women writers and their lives continues, this week with the second season of Dickinson, the Apple series on Emily Dickinson, reading Red Comet, the latest biography of Sylvia Plath, and also research on Stella Gibbons, a curiously undercelebrated early-twentieth century English novelist and poet, who wrote Cold Comfort Farm, the satiric novel she’s best known for, but also 22 other books, including a couple of books of poetry and many short stories and the book I’m reading now, My American. Stella was, like me,  a journalist before she was a poet and fiction writer. Many of her books are out of print and unavailable in America, but she won a bunch of awards in her day, and held literary salons into the 1970s. When I read about the lives of successful women writers, I’m always curious about their similarities – for instance, women writers like Atwood, Gluck, and Plath (and me) were all the daughters of scientists – Gibbons’ father was a doctor (“a good doctor,” his daughter would say, “but a terrible father” – he was often violent at home but charitable at work). Otto Plath was one of the leading experts on bumblebees in his time – he began his PhD at Harvard at age 40 before he met Plath’s mother, so he was a very old father – but not, by all accounts, much fun to be around. (Coincidentally, Plath’s son, Nicholas, kind of followed in his grandfather’s footsteps – became a leading expert in the Northwest on salmon and orca patterns, before taking his own life in his early forties.)  Sylvia had a kind of extreme ambition and broke 50s modes by being a woman who wanted to work and have children at the same time (gasp), while Stella Gibbons poked fun at the literary community and often refused to follow convention of what women writers were supposed to be like. Being different – standing out – and rebelling against current modes.

Camellia flowers

Dickinson, the show, besides having a really fun contemporary music thing going on in the background, revels in pointing out Emily’s early ambitions and successes, before her near complete retreat into solitude later in life. In season 2, through her best friend/sometimes girlfriend/sister-in-law Susan, she meets the editor of her local newspaper, who may – or may not – publish her poetry. She complains that she feels unable to write, like “a daisy that needs the sun” of the editor’s approval to shine on her. Another character turns to her and says, “You are not the daisy. You are the sun. Be the sun.” I thought this was very profound, flipping on its head the way that writers often feel – desperately waiting for some publisher or editor to notice us – and instead insisting that the artist is the important source of what the editor or publishers do, the creative force on which they feed. Empowering writers who suffer from the cycle of constant rejection and even worse, inattention of the literary world, seems important for our mental health, and productivity. Remember, you are not the daisy, you are the sun.

Doe in the Rain

Looking at Book Publishers During Submission Season

This brings me to something I don’t think enough writers talk about during submission season – as many first book contests open up and open submissions periods open – which is, deciding which book publishers to send your book manuscript to. They are not all going to be perfect fits. This year’s judge may be looking for certain things which you can never be. They may not be interested in your subject matter, or your point of view, or the publisher just doesn’t publish the kind of thing you write – they’re extremely conservative and publish formal verse, and you’re experimental, or they’re interested in ecological issues, and you’re interested in exploring mythology. So how do we decide?

You would think I would know more about this as I am sending out my sixth and seventh books-in-progress. There are actually fewer opportunities for people like me than you would think – there are many more opportunities for people publishing a first or second book. This time around, a little older and perhaps wiser, I’m looking for a publisher that has good distribution and more than one person running the press, maybe some press with an actual person just dedicated to publicity and marketing. I’d like a press that I could stay with for more than one book, who might be interested in helping support my career down the road, who might consider, for instance, eventually doing a Selected Work or Collected Work. Are these crazy dreams? Maybe…

The process of sending out manuscripts is so expensive that I have to be pretty selective, especially if I want to send out multiple manuscripts. Sometimes it takes a long time to hear back from presses or contests, which is frustrating. The plague year hasn’t made things easier for those in the poetry publishing business, I’m sure, or for us as writers. It’s like targeted gambling, in a way, in that you choose which presses seem most likely to welcome your style, your content, your kind of work. So, that’s the work I have to do this month and next month…

Waiting for the Vaccine

Speaking of frustration, wait times, and gambling, waiting for the vaccine as a chronically-ill, immune-suppressed person who has not been allowed to get the vaccine yet by her state is pretty terrifying and frustrating. Why people with chronic illnesses (or teachers, for that matter) haven’t been prioritized is confusing to me. I see states who are doing a much better job than Washington State is in getting their shots into people’s arms. There’s not much I can do about this except stay Zen, stay aware of any changes in policy and places I might be able to get access a vaccine, and advocate for my vulnerable group with politicians like Jay Inslee. My father has had the shot, in Ohio, and my older brother and sister in law who are health care workers in Tennessee have gotten the shot, but that is it in my family. You would expect Seattle with all its money and hospitals to be doing a much better job. Sigh. Well, I’ll let you know when anything changes. I hope you also get your vaccine sooner rather than later.

More January Birds and Blooms, A Week Under the Weather, and Zooming with Poet Friends

Tulips in sun

More January Birds and Blooms

We have snow in the forecast in the next day or so, but I wanted to highlight these beautiful tulips in a brief moment of sunlight, and a few of my bird visitors, to cheer you up during this dark and dreary time of year. January can be a tough time, especially as we wait the interminable wait for the vaccine, as we wait for the days to get a little longer and warmer, we wait for things to start to bloom.

For those of us who are writers, we are also waiting for responses from publishers and literary magazine – I have a submission I’m still waiting on from February 2019, for instance – and looking at places to send out our work as the new year begins. Something about the new year makes us feel like there’s a clean slate for our work – even if you have, say, 60 submissions sitting out there. I’m trying to get my courage up to take a look at my two manuscripts-in-progress and see if they need tweaking, which let’s face it, they almost always do.

Northern Flicker in sunbeam

A Week Under the Weather

I’m sorry to report I’ve been very under the weather the last week. Had to go back into a medical lab for the first time since last March for a bunch of lab work. Besides being sick, I’m super anemic, so I’m gonna have to figure out how to up my iron or they’re threatening to send me in for IV iron. Boo.

But this means I’ve got lots of reading done. I tried to get outside in my yard whenever we had brief moments of very chilly sunshine (high today: 39!) But mostly I’ve been reading – one book on audiobook, one out-of-print book that’s only available-barely-in print.

I did attend a Hugo House event remotely on collaboration between poets and visual artists, which made me wonder: why aren’t more publishers doing this? I would love to collaborate with more artists with my books. I am sort of attracted to eccentric, vibrant, visual art – Rene Lynch, say, Yumiko Kayukawa, and Michaela Eaves. (Two of those artist have graciously allowed me to use their art on my book covers.) I know it is more expensive, but wouldn’t it make a poetry book more dynamic – and more valuable – to have art that help stretched the boundaries of how poetry could be understood? Also, be sure to check out Hugo House’s offerings, which are very cool, and online classes from the Kahini Programs  (I’m going to take a class there with Dorianne Laux next month, after being too sick for one this weekend.)

Steller’s jay, laughing (or scolding)

Zooming with Poet Friends

I also had the chance to Zoom with a few poet friends, which really raised my spirits – we talked about literary magazines and publishing opportunities, but also laughed a lot. Hey, laughter is good for the immune system. While I miss in person visits – and it’ll probably be a few more months, realistically, before we can see each other in person – it was nice to see friends virtually and catch up. There is something incredible bolstering about being with other writers, especially when you yourself are feeling discouraged about writing. You get to share stories about hilarious mishaps and crushing disappointments, as well as celebrate our little victories.  Just like the birds in my garden, we tend to find strength in numbers. I know no one wants more Zoom in their life, but for the right reason – a great lecture, a chance to see friends – it’s worth it.

My father got his first dose of vaccine in Ohio, but my mother still hasn’t, and here in Washington, it looks like it’ll be a while for chronically ill folks – longer than I was hoping, so in the meantime, I’ll try to get well from this stomach bug. Hoping you all stay safe and warm and get your vaccines soon!