A Week of Reintegration – Family Visits, Haircuts, and Roses – and Rejections

Goldfinch in Flight

A Week of Reintegration – Diving In

This goldfinch in flight represents my own approach to this week – diving back into reintegration this week. Our state, like many, dropped the requirement for vaccinated people to wear masks outside and even many situations indoors. I am cautiously embracing not wearing masks outdoors (yay!) but indoors I’m still wearing masks in public just to protect myself and to make other people feel comfortable, but I am having visits with friends and family who are vaccinated indoors without masks. Whew! That’s a lot of mask talk.

I got a haircut (wearing masks, but still), strolled around the waterfront at Kirkland looking at roses (with my mask off, so I could literally stop and smell the roses – such a pleasure I had forgotten), and a mini-family-reunion/late birthday celebration with my little brother and his wife. Getting a haircut seemed like such a luxury after the last year and a half – and I felt so much better (more myself?) with shorter, sassier hair. Seeing my little brother after such a stressful six months meant I felt similarly thankful. Walking around the Kirkland waterfront and being able to smell the air and the flowers – something I took for granted before last February – felt like a small step towards normalcy.

Pink clematis from my garden

Birds and Blooms This Week

It’s late May, which means the garden is changing. My own roses aren’t blooming (dang deer ate the tops of every rose, eve the ones in “deer proof” cages) but the peonies are about to go, the pink clematis, rhododendrons, and azaleas are blooming, and the birds are singing loudly every morning. I find myself sitting outside on the deck more and more each day, especially the cloudy days, and the birds are getting more comfortable with me.

Peekaboo woodpecker

And a Week of Rejections

Unlike this woodpecker, I was not able to hide from being hammered by rejections this week. Despite all the joyful things, I did feel a little discouraged be the sheer number (I think it was seven) of them. I know that rejection is part of the writer’s life, but it can feel like “Why do I even bother?” and also “This is an expensive form of gambling (since submissions cost from $3 for most lit mags, to $25 for most book contests).”

Sylvia Plath said: “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.”

I wish I had that good an attitude towards them. I often feel like they are a sign I should quit writing or that I should just to stop sending out. I have a few friends who get together a couple of times a year to do a submissions thing together. If it were not for them, I probably would not have sent anything out this week. The other thing is that on social media, it always seems like people are always celebrating new book contracts with great publishers or winning contracts or grants and it’s hard not to compare yourself and feel like a failure.

This is part of why I’ve been looking for a part-time work-from-home job – so I had something that was steady that might distract me from the merry-go-round of “yay, acceptance” and “boo, rejections” (and gave me a steady source of income.) Also talking to other writers going through the same thing helps. Part of why I’m writing this part of the blog post is to share that yes, this part of the writing life is hard, expensive, and sometimes feels like it’s not worth the effort. If you feel that way, I understand. The old lottery adage, “You can’t win if you don’t play” comes to mind.

Striped pink rose

I know that it seems so easy for some people – they get solicited by top-tier journals and publishers, they win a book contest on their first try or they have a drink at a bar with an editor who then publishes their book. But for most writers, rejection was a big part of their journey. I feel like this is still more true for women writers than men writers. I literally had a dream where someone told me “No one wants to hear from a woman over 38.” I hope that is not true.

It’s cloudy today, and I will try to get some writing done (much more fun and life-affirming for me than submitting.) I will notice the birds and flowers of May even through the gloom. And I am trying to see the world more optimistically, that we are almost (hopefully) at the end of the time of pandemic. I am feeling more and more ready every day to reintegrate into the world. I’ve been taking it slow, but taking little steps is key.

A Poem on Verse Daily – I Can’t Stop, Birds and Blooms, and Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion

A Poem Featured on Verse Daily Today

Thanks to Verse Daily for featuring my poem today, “I Can’t Stop,” from the latest issue of Sugar House Review. Check it out! A great post-birthday birthday present!

A sneak peek below. It seems to fit the anxious mood right now…

Bi-color lilacs

Birds and Blooms

We had mostly beautiful weather this week, and everything has started blooming, but I was down with a cold so I didn’t get out as much as I wanted to. However, I did manage to snap some pics of birds and blooms around my neighborhood. If you are feeling too closed-in, I recommend taking a stroll around some Woodinville wineries – even the small ones – some of them have surprisingly great landscaping and birdwatching. I mean, come for the wine, stay for the flowers!

Purple Iris

Reading Joan Didion, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath

So I spent some time this week reading Joan Didion’s new collection of as-yet uncollected essays from the 1960’s – 2000s, What I Mean – a great book to dip in and out of on the weekends. Standout essays include “Why I Write” and “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” as well as some of her asides about her early days working as a copywriter at Vogue.

Here is a picture of my kitten Sylvia cuddling Joan Didion.

I also finished Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, about the friendship and relationships between Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. There were two fun chapters – on how they met in a workshop with Robert Lowell, their meetups, and on their writing habits – and about four excruciating chapters on how both women suffered in their marriages, their poor treatment at the hands of psychiatrists, Anne’s abuse of her daughter, and their eventual suicides. I know it’s hard to get around those subjects in any kind of biography about either poet but it just – oof – made for tough going. It’s well-researched and the author makes useful notes and asides for context, but I was glad to have Joan Didion to go back to – she seemed so solidly upbeat in comparison!

I was also interested to find out for which book and when Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize – click the link for more detailed info from a Poetry Foundation blog post – and how she negotiated for equal pay for readings, appearances, and publications. When reading about successful female authors of the past for inspiration, I often wonder how they would fare now. How much more equitable is our current system – health system, and the poetry system? How can we make it even better? How can we find successful women writers who had more stable, less abusive relationships, better help and more success in life who can be role models? There’s always Margaret Atwood, who remains bracingly cheerful in the face of a long, happy marriage and a lot of late-in-life success, I guess…Suggestions welcome in the comments!

Happy Mother’s Day, A Week of Birds, and Thinking About Our Poetic Mothers and Influences (and Who Will Parent Our Books?)

Two red-winged blackbirds, one in flight

Happy Mother’s Day, and A Week of Birds

Happy Mother’s Day to all you mother in any way today. Even if, like me, you only mother books and cats. Take some time for yourself, go out and visit some flowers and birds – you deserve it!

This week has been a little reserved, cold, moody and rainy for May, a little downbeat after a sunny, late-blooming April. But it seems the birds have all appeared at once, and are not at all bothered by cold rainy days. I stood out in the rain to get these shots of red-winged blackbirds – there were three mating pairs that I counted, plus two sets of goslings and about nine ducklings on the lake. By the time I was done taking pictures, I was so cold I had to take a hot shower to warm up, but it was totally worth it. Around the feeders, hummingbirds and black-headed grosbeaks as well as goldfinches have been appearing. I tried to capture as many magical bird moments as I could because: 1. Birds are little dinosaurs. 2. Birds are like little poems unto themselves, right?

Mother Goose

Poetic Mothers

Since it’s Mother’s Day, I thought I would talk a little about poetic mothers – our influences. I’ve been reading The Writer’s Library with my mother (as part of our quarantine book club project which you can read about here on Salon) which includes terrific interviews about influential books by Nancy Pearl with great writing influences like Siri Hustvedt, Lorrie Moore, Jane Hirshfield, and Louise Erdrich. It’s wonderful to find that you have so much in common with writers you love and the books they love. Certain books come up over and over again in the book – Agatha Christie, The House of Mirth, childhood sci-fi binges – and the fiction writers talk a LOT about poetry, which was surprising. Anyway, a great read, and I bought it as an Audiobook as well, because listening to the writers is fantastic (for the most part, they voice their own interviews.)

Goslings entering the water

The other book I’ve been reading that made me think about poetic foremothers and influences is Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz, all about the friendship/frenemyship of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. It provides a lot of background and context for their relationship. Besides making me jealous that I having been meeting anyone at the Ritz for martinis, it made me think about the poets we read and pay attention to in our own lives, who we are secretly competing with (even if subconsciously,) who we read and let influence our own thoughts about poetry and poetics. I realize I am very lucky to be friends with so many wonderful poets, but I don’t really have a nemesis, per se. But maybe that’s okay. Do we need someone to compete with to reach our own potential? I think this is a very interesting question, because, especially as women are pressured NOT to be too competitive, at least in my generation.

But it does make me think about how writers need to encourage and push each other out of their comfort zones, and one way to make sure that happens is to make diverse friends from all kinds of backgrounds, some who are editors and publishers, who are full-time writers, who run their English departments, who are best-selling novelists (hey, it happens!), who have many different ways of writing and publishing, and many different voices. It reaffirms that we can all grow and learn and build our own unique paths. We don’t have to sound alike, or go to the same conferences, residencies, MFA programs, etc. There’s space for all of us.

Orange Azaleas

It also made me think of publishers and their role as “parents” of the book – not the author, who created it, but perhaps more like mentors or stepparents, who create the book’s look, help find it’s audience and marketing niches. I’ve been sort of picky about who I’m sending my manuscripts to, which slows down the publication road, but I’m hoping to find the right home – the right people who will help my books become the best versions of themselves. And I always hope – and so far I’ve been lucky – that my publishers will become friends as well.

Maybe I’ve pushed my mother’s day theme as far as it will go now. But I do hope you all find something good to do today for yourselves and your loved ones, spend some time outside with some lemonade and maybe a scone and read and write and have a magical moment with birds and flowers. It is springtime, and we have to appreciate its brief flare of beauty while we can.

Wisteria in bloom – your Mother’s Day Postcard

Birthday Celebrations with Spring Flowers and Friends, Kelli’s Book Birthday, Book Giveaway Winner Results, and More Re-Integration into Society

Me posing with cherry blossoms and sparkles for my birthday

Birthday Celebrations with Spring Flowers

Yesterday was my 48th birthday, which we celebrated with homemade black forest cake, a duck dinner, a trip around Woodinville to look at everything that was blooming (and found a brand new baby bunny always a sign of spring), and a trip to a bookstore.

It was a day that started cold, with wind and rain, and turned sunny and warmer. Glenn got me two rare books and some beautiful flowers -a book of Sylvia Plath’s art work and a signed first edition of Siri Hustvedt’s first book, which was an out-of-print book of poetry. I felt very loved on the day with messages from friends, phone calls from my brothers, and generally, while still feeling very much like another pandemic birthday, as good as it could be.

Today I’m going to have tea with my doctor poet friend, Natasha K. Moni, (my second visit with a vaccinated person inside my home! So crazy! Still not used to it!) and hopefully have a movie night with Glenn, maybe the new Tenet (heard it’s incomprehensible, but I like time travel films).

Book Giveaway Results and Winner!

Goldfinch

Congrats to Patricia Valdata, who was the winner (from random number generator) of last week’s book giveaway of the now out-of-print Unexplained Fevers. Thank you to everyone who participated!

I still have a few copies of Unexplained Fevers for sale, and Open Books has a copy or two as well, available at this special link:

https://open-books-a-poem-emporium.myshopify.com/products/gailey-jeannine-hall-unexplained-fevers

Wisteria in late April

More Re-Integration

I was realizing on my birthday – though the CDC has said we vaccinated folks no longer have to wear masks outdoors or inside with other vaccinated people – that, because of cases rising here, it really doesn’t feel any different yet. The rest of the country’s cases are down, but here and in Oregon, it still feels like the pandemic is raging.

We don’t feel like movies, restaurants, bars, and even museums are totally safe yet – and can’t go, in some cases, anyway, since we are moving back to phase 2 here. I have gone to grocery stores and bookstores, but I didn’t linger in either place. And then visits with my vaccinated friends – those are great, but hugging and sitting around the table – which wouldn’t have been a big deal before the pandemic, still feel radical and strange. So I’m moving slowly towards re-integration – I’ve gone to the dentist, got an MRI, the tulip festival, seen two sets of vaccinated friends – but not running headlong into throngs of crowds.

There is also some question about how effective the vaccine is long-term in people with autoimmune problems and immune deficiencies – which means I really can’t ignore news about variants, studies about antibodies, T-cells, and B-cells, just yet. I really, really want to stop waking up to read covid news (after my meditation app leads me through a breathing exercise, naturally) sometime soon. Remember everyone who gets the vaccine helps protect vulnerable people like me (and children! since they can’t get their vaccines yet), so go get your vaccine! I got J&J and Glenn got Pfizer, and really, neither of us had bad side effects. And it means you can visit people – without masks!

Natasha Moni and me – birthday celebrating!

Anyway, my birthday weekend visit with vaccinated doctor/poet Natasha Moni – only my second post-vaccine in person visit with anyone – was wonderful. We realized we hadn’t seen each other in a year and a half! So we celebrated my birthday (yesterday) and hers (in January). It is so weird to see people in person, to sit around a table eating and drinking just like it was the good old pre-covid day. And Glenn made a terrific spread – chocolate cake, a wonderful cheese tray, crudités with avocado dip, goat-cheese stuffed baby peppers – he even sat down with us – briefly, if you know Glenn – for some poetry and grad school talk.

We talked about favorite poets, jobs, medicine, talked about how medical improvements made during covid might apply to other diseases after the covid pandemic has died down – like MS, cancer, lupus, and other conditions that have taken far too long to get good, effective treatments for. We talked about the benefits and downsides of Zoom doctor visits and Zoom poetry readings. We talked about Joan Didion, Haruki Murakami, Sylvia Plath, and Siri Hustvedt. Anyway, if you don’t have Natasha Moni’s poetry book from Two Sylvias Press, The Cardiologist’s Daughter, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Kelli’s New Book Birthday

Speaking of books and birthdays, besides being my birthday, this was also the week of the book launch (otherwise known as book birthday) of Kelli Russell Agodon’s new book, Dialogues with Rising Tides (see left, with Sylvia, who gives the book two paws up) from Copper Canyon Press. Happy to have my own copy and I’m sending one to my mom for Mother’s Day!

Looking Forward

I hope you have a good year ahead of you. I hope a better one waits for me too. One thing the pandemic highlights is that there is at once never enough time and so much time. (Also the theme of Tenet!) Stop and snip a bit of lilac. Get out in the May sunshine. Kiss someone you love. I am making my birthday wish. You make one too. Wish for another poem.

National Poetry Month, Lilacs, Apple Blossoms and Melancholy, Earth Day, Zoom Poetry Inspirations, and a Book Giveaway

A bower of overhead cherry blossoms

Cherry Blossoms, Poetry Month and Melancholy

This week, the world seemed to spring into bloom – crabapple and apple blossoms, lilacs peeked out, and dogwood bloomed. Finally, it seems Seattle has decided it’s really spring, and brought back it’s chillier weather and rain to celebrate.

One night I went out at twilight and took pictures – and got a few shots of flowers under the moon, which I thought was really cool.

It’s still National Poetry Month for another week, and it’s also five days til my birthday. For some reason, I have felt less like celebrating and more melancholy than usual for spring, April, one of my favorite months. The pandemic year (and some months) perhaps has finally gotten to me? Or my MS is kicking up after last week’s excitement? I’ve also been really tired, going to bed earlier than usual. I got a job rejection that really hit me hard. It’s been harder to give myself the pep talks that usually keep me writing and sending out work. I can’t explain it.

The first goldfinch pair sighting

Birds and Blooms, Earth Day, and Pictures in Cherry Blossoms

It was Earth Day this week. Last Earth Day, I planted an apple tree and cherry tree in my yard, and over the last year, we’ve faithfully watered, fertilized them, and kept the deer from eating them, and this year, we were rewarded with a few leaves and a couple of blossoms on each.  This last year we planted a Strawberry Tree and another cherry (this time, a fruiting Rainier cherry) and we are watching them grow in containers on the back deck. The birds love them. All of the tulips are almost done blooming now – remember last weekend, they had just opened? It’s definitely been a week to celebrate that brief burst of bloom as much as possible, and attend to the garden, cutting back, planting, putting coffee grounds on the roses. Sometimes it’s time to plant, and sometimes it’s time to nurture what you’ve already planted. Maybe I should try this on myself!

I tried to attend to my own inspiration and sadness, and so I signed up for an early-morning Plath seminar (fantastic, and led to me buying several more Plath books) and went to a couple of Zoom poetry readings. (So many good ones are available right now – keep your eyes on Twitter and Facebook for announcements.) I subscribed to a few literary magazines (like most people, I can never afford as many as I want, but I try to mix it up this time of year.) I also tried to capture as much of the magic of our brief spring flowering as possible with my camera, including typewriters in surprising places. Even when I’m not writing, I can practice photography. I can rest, read, and pay attention to the small beauties around me.

A Book Giveaway

Anyway, wishing you a happy last few days of April. Hope you can enjoy some flowers and poetry.

And since the publisher of my third book, New Binary Press, has closed due to health problems, I’d like to give away one signed copy of Unexplained Fevers (now unavailable anywhere else – I still have a few copies) to someone (in the Continental US) that leaves a comment on this blog post. It can be a comment about anything – a book you loved, a flower that bloomed – but make sure to include your e-mail contact info so I can get ahold of you if you win! Good luck!