Flower Supermoons, the Art and Science of Birdwatching, and Mother’s Day with Social Distancing

Buried Typewriter with red azalea, secret Woodinville location

Have you Forgotten what Day it is? What Month? It’s Time for Flower Supermoons…

Time has no meaning, I read, in quarantine, but it is May, nonetheless, and tomorrow is Mother’s Day. Picture to the left represents my new quarantine-imagined job: giving up the writer’s life to take pictures of vintage typewriters in odd locations.

I like to observe the seasons, the cycles. They do not change, although they may be altered; snow in upstate New York, 85 here in Woodinville today.

A quick addendum to the post: a big thank-you to Seattle Review of Books for publishing my coronavirus poem, “This is the Darkest Timeline.”

Flower Supermoon in May

This week we had the last supermoon of 2020, the Flower Supermoon. Aptly named, as everything seems to be in bloom at once: azaleas, rhododendrons, lilacs, wisteria. I tend my garden, despite deer coming through and eating my apple blossoms and lily buds, I watch the strawberries start to flower and enjoy the lilac on the breeze.

I try to document the change of seasons, the flowers, the birds. With quarantine I’ve become a better documentarian of local birds; I notice species I could swear I’ve never seen before. I glimpse an osprey overhead with a fish, a red house finch lands briefly on my balcony while I water flowers. I see my first ever black-headed grosbeak. Paying attention to something, taking your time, staying quiet, that’s birdwatching, and gardening, paying attention to something outside yourself. It is surprisingly rewarding. This seems like a metaphor, doesn’t it? If we just stay quiet, and still, we can much better observe the world around us, in all its surprise and beauty. Woodpecker and hummingbird were there the whole time; we just don’t usually notice them.

Mom with Poetry and Ploughshares

Mother’s Day, with Social Distancing

It’s an odd celebration of Mother’s Day, with no brunches, no in-person visits. My father and I are both people considered especially “vulnerable” to covid-19, so we can’t go out carefree even to the park, without masks or worry, or the drug store for a card. I’m happy both my parents are doing as well as they are in Ohio, and we can share little celebrations and worries over the phone and through the mail. Here’s my mom with their copies of April’s issue of Poetry and the Spring issue of Ploughshares, which have my poems in them. Objectively, I think, she is pretty cute. Happy Mother’s Day, mom!

Wherever you are in the world, whether you are a mother or not, times are tough, and you deserve some flowers. Here are the flowers in my neighborhood this week.

I hope May treats you kindly. We will wake up soon, like the princess in an enchanted forest where everyone has been under a spell. We will try not to take everything for granted after this apocalypse: birds, flowers, loved ones, bookstores, drinking coffee with friends, laughing. We will probably fail.

It’s May and Lockdown Continues, Reading Stack During a Pandemic, Celebrating a Melancholy Birthday

Path of fallen cherry blossoms, on my birthday

Celebrating a Melancholy Birthday During Quarantine

So, on a quiet, blowy spring day on the last day of April, I turned 47 during a pandemic. I was going to throw a “Roaring 20s Writer Party” for my birthday, and I even had a flapper dress all ready, but then, you know, coronavirus. So instead we spent a more melancholy birthday close to home. Check out this bower of fallen cherry blossoms petals on the road of a closed winery. Melancholy in one photo, right?

Orange azaleas

Glenn did try to make my birthday as normal as possible – he baked a gluten-free black forest cake, we went and looked at goslings, climbed a hill to smell wisteria in bloom and took this shot of orange azaleas. To celebrate, he got me two sets of flowers, a box of produce, and steaks from Pike Place Market (here’s where you can get a Pike Place box – you’ll be supporting local vendors, and $5 goes to the Pike Place Market Safety Net Fund.) And I did wear my party dress briefly, anyway. I read poetry and relaxed with a great dinner and had lots of phone calls from family and friends. Not a terrible apocalypse birthday, after all.

Sylvia posing with my Open Books birthday package

Reading Poetry During the Pandemic

Have you been wondering what to read during the pandemic?

I just got the birthday package I ordered from Seattle’s Open Books (again, trying to keep our local businesses alive) with Victoria Chang’s Obit and Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem.

And, if you want to know what I’ve been reading, the Poetry Foundation web site asked contributors to April’s Poetry Month issue what we were reading.
Here’s the link to read the whole thing, and a clip of my list.

Poetry Foundation Reading List

Wisteria at a closed winery

May and Lockdown Continues

So, our governor has extended Washington State’s lockdown til May 31. Some things are opening: state parks and elective surgery, some construction. I have a lot of health problems and know I’m at high risk so I’m glad they’re being safe rather than sorry. Some states that opened too soon (Georgia, North Carolina) are already experiencing increased cases. I feel terrible for small business owners, for people who can’t run their businesses during the shutdown. Restaurants in particular will be hard hit. Glenn was working from home since February, and probably will until this fall; even Amazon has announced its tech employees can work from home til October. One in five people in Seattle have filed for unemployment. Meanwhile, things break: cell phones, stand mixers, my laptop. We learn to try to cut our own hair.

Hummingbird with its tongue out

I will admit I miss some things – book stores, coffee shops, seeing my little brother on the weekend or taking a trip to one of the beautiful areas around Washington State. Walking around without being terrified of other people; remember that? This month I usually visit Skagit Valley’s tulip festival, hike around the waterfall at Ollalie State Park, or take a trip to Port Townsend or Bainbridge Island. This month, of course, we’re staying close to home. This is one of the only months that we can get outside (too much rain the rest of the year, wildfires during midsummer) so I understand that people are restless.

Purple lilacs

So, we continue to get by with grocery deliveries and walks around our neighborhood (to avoid people, I mostly walk around abandoned office parks and closed wineries, tbh) and spring continues to bloom. This week, lilacs, azaleas, wisteria. Our lilies were eaten by rabbits (or deer maybe?) but we continue to plant things in the garden.

Tomorrow, which will be good, I’m having a Zoom poetry submission party. I haven’t been submitting as much as I’ve been writing, and I have no idea if anything I’m writing is any good. I’m still looking for a publisher for two of my book manuscripts.

All my ambitious goals haven’t really happened: trying watercolor painting again, learning Japanese for real, but I have been keeping up with reading, learning new skills (like Zoom and haircutting (men’s clippers are hard!) and getting used to physical therapy exercises done by myself with advice by iphone from my physical therapist and virtual doctor appointments (which, frankly, are better than the real thing, no waiting rooms and far fewer needles.) We did a Zoom birthday get-together for my older brother’s birthday, and I’m surprised by how much those wear me out, although it’s a good way to see siblings in multiple states (Tennessee, Ohio, WA.)

For my birthday wishes: I’m hoping our country can get more antibody tests out and a couple of good working treatment options so coronavirus can become less deadly. I’m hoping not to catch covid-19 myself and I do not want to die. I know things will not go back to “normal” for a while, maybe years, maybe masks will become “normal” and cruises will disappear, working and studying from home with become “normal,” and virtual book tours will replace “in-person” author appearances. Maybe our environment will heal a little bit during our downtime. Maybe people will start to realize how important it is to take care of other people, that we are willing to pay a little bit more in order to ensure people have food, health care, and education, that we are willing to clean a little more and wash our hands more to keep others safe. Maybe I’m being optimistic. I picture a world with more birdsong, less traffic, more kindness and appreciation for the people who make our lives possible, like farmers and health care workers and delivery people, a world that embraces science and technology to make life better for everyone. Okay, before this post gets too sentimental, let me wish you a happy, safe, and well May, wherever you are, that you can see some birds and smell some flowers, read some poetry, and be kind to each other. Apocalypses are much better with poetry, flowers, and kindness.

Birthdays During Quarantine, First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinch, Finding Hope In the Apocalypse

First Pink Dogwood Branch

Birthdays During Quarantine

Well, I’m turning another year older this week. And I feel lucky to be doing it – just a couple of years ago this week, I had been about to start chemo for what I had been told was terminal cancer. This was right before I was diagnosed with MS. So, I appreciate being here to celebrate another birthday, I do. It’s hard to celebrate any ordinary thing – like a birthday – while in quarantine, while our country loses over 50,000 people in just a couple of months to a virus that continues to confound doctors and scientists around the world. It’s been hard to celebrate the fact that I got into two of my dream journals, Poetry and Ploughshares, this month, places I have waited years to get into, while worrying about the future of the post office, small publishers, and small bookstores.

First goldfinch, with faux bird

First Pink Dogwood and Goldfinches

One thing I’m definitely doing to stay cheerful – or, well, at least sane – is spending time noticing the small beauties around my home, even on rainy days that don’t seem immediately cheerful. The birds that stop at the feeders, the new flowers as they open. This week, it was pink dogwood, one of my favorite flowers (and one that repeatedly shows up in my poems,) water iris, and goldfinches. Please enjoy this tour of Woodinville birds and blooms.

Finding Hope and Humor in the Apocalypse

I was talking to a friend yesterday about reading during the quarantine. We were talking about how much we hated The Road, and I commented that Cormac was projecting his own inner bleakness onto his apocalypse. I brought up Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Station Eleven by Emily St. John; one imagines a heroine who rescues the world with her creative force, and the other imagines a post-pandemic world welcoming a traveling tour of Shakespeare performers, a world of grief and terror, sure, but with room for art and artists.  These two books, I think, find the hope in the apocalypse. I like to think Field Guide to the End of the World was my attempt to imagine all the apocalypse scenarios, from Twilight Zone to 2012, with an eye towards the hope and humor of those scenarios. It is intensely difficult to keep your sense of humor and hope right now, I know. It’s scary. I’m having nightmares almost every night.

Tell me how you are coping. Do you have more reading suggestions?  ( I also recommended Rebecca Solnit’s Paradise Built in Hell, a hopeful version of disaster history in the United States.)

In the meantime, here is a video of me reading on YouTube of “Martha Stewart’s Guide to Apocalypse Living,” another poem from Field Guide to the End of the World. I hope it makes you smile. Take care of yourselves this week. Stay safe. Stay well.

Poems in the Spring Issue of Ploughshares, the Last Cherry Blossoms, and a Trip Down Memory Lane

Poems and Pink Tulips

A New Poem in the Spring Issue of Ploughshares During National Poetry Month

Amid all the grim news, I had a little package of happiness arrived in the form of my contributor copies of the Spring issue of Ploughshares, edited by one of my favorite poets, Tracy K. Smith. I am so happy to be sharing space with poets like Chen Chen and fellow blogger January Gill O’Neil.

Here is a picture of Sylvia lounging with her copies of Ploughshares and a sneak peek at my poem, “Irradiate,” from my manuscript-in-circulation, “Flare.” I feel very lucky to have appeared in two dream journals this month,

I just wish the rest of life wasn’t so chaotic. I hope you guys are able to celebrate National Poetry Month at least a little. (I’m going to order some more books and lit mags from my local poetry-only bookstore, Open Books. Whoops, I just did this – they take Paypal now! So dangerously easy! Three more poetry and poetics books coming my way!)

Social distancing with last late pink cherry blossoms

The Last Cherry Blossoms

It’s mid-April, and the last of the cherry blossoms, my favorite, the pink candy-tuft type, are blooming. Yesterday was gloomy and today we’ve having rain, which somehow feels appropriate to what is going on in the world. I’m trying to get outside when I can, but I have to avoid other people even more than most people with my health issues, so I’ve been haunting weird places – abandoned parking lots, mostly – to get my flower fix.

House Finch posing with faux bird cutout

A Trip Down Memory Lane

A weird thing that’s been going on in social media is trying to post senior year pictures in support, somehow, of current seniors who are missing their graduations and proms. I can’t imagine being in high school during this time, so difficult. So love to you, high school readers.

I kept hardly any pictures from my senior year, sadly, but I found a few pictures from 1990-1991 in Glenn’s photo album. I mainly saved pictures of my friends rather than myself. And I have a picture from my mom’s senior formal, which is awesome – she was a knockout.

So, kids, remember to save the photos you took before the lockdown happened, because twenty years from now, you may want those pictures. Get print versions, just in case.

So this trip down memory lane didn’t stop with pictures – I actually zoomed with five of my closest high school friends, some of which I haven’t talked to in 20 years (Facebook messages are not the same thing.) It was a little melancholy – one of my friends lives in NYC and is being hit hard as that whole city is, another is an ER doctor waiting for her state’s coronavirus onslaught to happen. But it was great to catch up with everyone.  The pandemic has certainly kept me in closer touch with many people – old friends, my siblings and extended family – than usual. Everyone now is looking to the end of lockdown, although I don’t really see how we can do that without more widespread testing, more N95 masks, and a regular treatment protocol that keeps patients – even young people without pre-existing conditions from dying (we’re getting closer, but not there yet.) It does seem like Washington State’s cases peaked about three weeks ago, but that’s not the case in many places, cases are still on the rise. I have dreams about going out to the grocery store, to the bookstore looking at magazines – mundane things, but then I realize in the dream this is not safe for me. I’m afraid that’s the reality for me, with several risk factors, I just have to stay inside longer and be more careful than the average person. I am looking to survive this birthday month and year.

Easter During a Pandemic; Life as a Writer During Lockdown, and Pink Supermoon with April Flowers

Pink Apple Blossoms

Happy Easter to Those Who Celebrate: Wishing Us All a Little Bit of Sunshine, Flowers, Chocolate

From Palm Sunday to Passover to today, Easter, we have had a bunch of holidays to celebrate without family, without places of worship. This morning, the weather is beautiful, but the parks are also closed to house-bound children and stir-crazy adults. I’ve been seeking out flowers in abandoned parking lots of shuttered banks, schools, and offices.

Me with pink hair and pink apple blossoms

We have reached that part of the quarantine (Glenn and I have been locked down since late February, a little earlier than everyone else) where we start coloring our hair and trying home haircuts (I did my own bangs and Glenn’s hair with pretty good results.) Here’s a picture of my new hair while trying to camouflage with a pink apple tree.

It’s hard to celebrate during a pandemic. We are reading death counts every day. Here in Washington, over 10,000 coronavirus cases and almost 500 deaths. Other areas of the country are harder hit. I have a friend in London, and there are 10,000 deaths in the UK. I try to concentrate on small things; my breath, the birds in my backyard, the slow unfolding of spring flowers. Glenn practices new recipes with the food we find in our cupboard (now we’re depending on deliveries, so we’re trying to make groceries go farther.) We have to decide if that pain in our tooth is an emergency. We try not to mourn the things we cannot do. We try to sleep without nightmares.

Striped Tulips

The Writer’s Life During Lockdown

I was thinking about life as a writer during lockdown, especially as a writer with a compromised immune system. Playing it safe is no joke for me. I’ve been writing quite a bit, reading too, and doing recordings of poems (so far, for Tacoma’s Poet Laureate Abby Murray, Moon City Press – Jeannine Hall Gailey reads “Post-Apocalypse Postcard with Love Note”, and EcoTheo.)

I thought this blog post I wrote a few years ago for Trish Hopkinson’s blog might be helpful for those of you trying to figure out how to promote your new poetry book during quarantine – I wrote this for those with disabilities and chronic illness in mind, but some things are very similar – like the inability to travel or do in-person readings: How To Promote Your Book with a Chronic Illness or Disability.

Flicker in the Planter

I’ve been sending out work tentatively, as it feels hard to believe that poetry can be important in such a time of crisis. On the other hand, I’ve been buying books from local bookstores to keep them in business, subscribing to lit mags even with the post office being threatened by the President and his bullying GOP with shutdown. (Write to your congressperson to protest this lack of funding for the Post office, the lack of which would make us effectively a third-world country, and would prevent voting by mail.) So many things are uncertain: when will we be able to get out of lockdown? When will we have a treatment, much less a vaccine? When will the death tolls start to dwindle? How will this hurt people’s mental health and the economy? Uncertainty is difficult for human beings to sustain for long amounts of time. Poetry and music seem to offer some comfort for me as they resist certainty, and encourage us to dwell in possibility.

Pink tulip magnolia

Pink Supermoons and April Flowers

We had a supermoon this week, the closest the moon will be to use this year, a Pink Moon. The spring magnolias are in bloom, apple and pear trees, daffodils, early tulips. Here is the gallery from this week. I think about the good things that might come from this global shutdown: clear skies in previously smoggy cities like LA, mass sea turtle egg laying and panda mating with the lack of humans in zoos and beaches, a decrease in crime and traffic deaths. Maybe we can hope for good to come from this pandemic horror: in the future companies will encourage more telecommuting, schools will allow students who want to to study from home, and people in general will become more aware of the threats to the immune-suppressed. I wish you health and peace this week, and flowers, and moonrise.

 

 

 

 

Jeannine Hall Gailey

Jeannine Hall GaileyJeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World.  Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.

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