Tulip Festival, April Rains and One More Week of National Poetry Month

Glenn and I at the Tulip Festival

Skagit Valley Tulip Festival

In a month that has been almost entirely rainy, we went up the day before Easter – a day that started gloomy, but turned sunny in the late afternoon – to La Conner, Washington for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. I don’t have quite as much stamina to tramp in the fields the way I used to, but it was still wonderful to see the fantastic flowers, La Conner was cool but sunny, had many bald eagle sightings. The tulip fields never fail to inspire me. This time I came home and wrote a poem after Sylvia Plath’s ‘Tulips.” Here are a few pictures of flowers, eagles, and us posing among the flowers!

Tulip fields with Mt Baker

April Rains and One More Week of Poetry Month

This shot reminds me of what I love about spring in the Seattle area, the parts I haven’t gotten out enough it because April has been almost unremittingly cold, gray, and rainy. It’s almost my birthday. This month has had a lot of medical appointments, dental appointments (why is this always the case around birthdays?) which can be both anxiety-provoking and depressing. I have to get even more blood work and another brain MRI in the next two weeks.

Glenn took this shot – thinking about possibly using it as an author photo – yay or nay?

I’ve been writing but haven’t been submitting as much, and I need to work on a book review and getting my two manuscripts-in-progress ready for another round of submissions. Submitting seems to take more mental energy than writing – or is it that writing poetry is more fun that submitting and revising, so it seems to take less energy? Anyway, I’ve found myself fairly exhausted this month, more than the usual MS “tired-after-trying-to-do-stuff” type – plus fighting off some pretty severe anemia. My usual coping mechanism for this stuff is socializing – which I haven’t been able to do enough of – and getting outside, which I also haven’t been able to do enough of. We did manage to plant another tree (after the little Pink Lady apple, a bare-root late-blooming pink cherry which I hope survives) plus we’re slowly filling our planter boxes with annuals. And the birds have been singing through the storm.

The weather report is starting to show some clearing, plus my birthday (not a big deal birthday, but still) is a few days away, and I’m going to try to do something fun that day – go to an art gallery or the Japanese Gardens. Or maybe Open Books!

I am wishing you all a great final week of April, National Poetry Month. I am wishing you all health, more poems, and more flowers.

 

Poetry Month is Half Over! Poems Up at Menacing Hedge, Plus Ilya Kaminsky and Mark Doty visit a Seatte coffee shop, and More Blooms

 

Pink Dogwood

Poetry Month is Already Half Over!! Don’t Panic.

“Eek! I haven’t done enough poetry!” Some of you might be thinking. Hey, relax! April is not just poetry month, it’s also a beautiful season of flowers (and here: rain, rain, and more rain) and my birthday month! It’s time to do some fun stuff outdoors, plant some flowers, write some poems, buy some poetry books you might have been wanting, sit around, relax. Spend time convincing me they’re not trying to turn Daenerys into a villainess. Read a little, write a little. Go to a reading…

From the latest issue of Menacing Hedge

  Three New Poems in Menacing Hedge

The new issue of Menacing Hedge is out, and I have three poems in there, along with other poet friends like Maya Zeller! Sneak peek at left, to one of the poems that forms the theses of my next manuscript-in-progress!

And another poem tells you how to make a narrative poem work.

 

 

Natasha K. Moni, me, and Ilya Kaminsky

Ilya Kaminsky and Mark Doty Read at a Seattle Coffee Shop, and I Was There For It

We’ve had a number of terrific readers in Seattle recently, but I hadn’t been well enough (or free of doctor’s appointments enough) to make it to any until yesterday. Last night Ilya Kaminsky read from his terrific new book, Deaf Republic, and Mark Doty read poems, and it was wonderful to see them plus say hi to a punch of local poets I don’t see often enough. Thanks are due to Susan Rich for arranging the reading!

Me with Cherry Trees

Glenn shot this pic on the way to the reading. We pulled over in a school parking lot because the cherry trees were so astounding! I have been hibernating a bit lately due to cold weather and being slightly under the weather, but it was so cheering to hear such great poetry and see so many friends in a warm setting. And there’s something rejuvenating about getting out, dressing up a little, being around humans who aren’t trying to take blood or give you a prescription!

 

 

More cherry pouf blossoms

I am wishing you all cherry blossoms, good poetry luck, and some happiness is a world that seems to be always on fire. Take a breath. Listen to the birds whistling in the rain.

Happy National Poetry Month, April Gloom (and Blooms,) and More Post-AWP Thoughts

 

Camellias

Happy National Poetry Month!

Are you enjoying April so far? We’re having our longest, rainiest, grayest stretch so far this year in the Seattle area, and I have been down both physically and emotionally, so not a lot of getting out and about, though I have a couple of shots of cherry blossoms at the Seattle Japanese Gardens. I am planning to get up to the tulip fields sometime soon, too! Those always cheer me up.

 

April Blooms (and Gloom) and NaPoWriMo

Do you try to write a poem a day (NaPoWriMo?) in April? It’s National Poetry Writing Month as well. I don’t love prompts (or the pressure to write every day) but I always do write a bit more during April. April is also my birthday month, so I always have a lot of emotion – blossoms, birthdays, poetry, and always, always, inevitably, some damn medical testing! LOL. I went in for some routine blood work to see if I was well enough to start a new MS drug, and the results came back that I was severely anemic (like, enough to get an iron IV?) and sicker than I thought. I had felt a little tired and groggy since I got back from AWP, but I thought it was just MS and allergies. So I am doubling up my iron (steak! mushrooms! beets!) as well as supplementing with iron, folic acid, and b12 and apparently need to rest and get better from a big upper respiratory virus. I’ve been trying to read more, sleep more, take my vitamin c and up my liquids. I have written maybe five poems that I’ve liked so far this month, and lots of weird fragments. The black hole (of course) inspired one, and somehow every time I have to walk into a hospital in spring I write a poem about it. I’m also working up the courage to send out my two in-progress poetry manuscripts out some more – one is very political and feminist, and the other is more somber in tone, about getting diagnosed with cancer and then MS, and all the surrounding solar flares and eclipses. I also have to send out some work – during my down time after AWP, I’ve gotten lots of poems back (hello rejections!) so I have to get on the ball. I was encouraged that I got a positive, ‘send more’ rejection from the one piece of fiction I had out – I don’t have more, but it was nice. I may try to write another fiction piece this month if I get inspired – it’s much harder work for me than writing poems. I listened to a Sylvia Plath reading and realized how much her sense of line and sound – I started reading her at around 19 – had influenced my own work. Her voice was pretty great, too, kind of deep and clipped and a pronounced New England accent. I also have a review or two to do. I find that reviewing takes a different kind of mental energy than poetry writing – or even fiction writing. I also have plenty of reading from the stack I brought home from AWP! Which reminds me…

A Few More Post-Mortem AWP Thoughts…

A few more thoughts from Portland’s AWP now that they’re over and I’ve had some time to think.

  • A Greater Influence of Social Media – I noticed this for the first time at this AWP, and no so much at AWP LA (2016.) Many people – including the nice people at registration – mentioned how they followed me on Twitter, Instagram, the blog, or Facebook. I had lots of people come up already familiar with my writing, my life, and tell me things that had inspired them or that they loved. That was really nice, and different. I literally could not walk (or wheelchair) anywhere without stopping to talk to people who recognized me (again, this did not happen at AWP LA.) So what does this mean? All of our work on social media is not in vain, after all? That it really does help build community? Especially meaningful: writers who also had MS or other medical problems who told me reading about my journey had helped them. Wow. Also got a lot of positive feedback about talking about the discouragement of rejection. Interesting!!
  • Bigger Bookfair: I missed seeing some big names at the Bookfair (some pretty big places decided not to have a table this year) but it had to be one of the biggest bookfairs ever – I don’t think anyone could hit every table over three days. And there was a bonus off-site small-press bookfair for local small presses that couldn’t afford AWP (I loved the idea, but did not make it.)
  • It’s Hard to Take Your Own Advice: So, remember all those posts about eating and drinking enough and getting off-site from AWP and enjoying the city? I got off-site exactly one time, and ended up subsisting on handfuls of carrot sticks with Greek yogurt in between events, and sometimes string cheese. Never had time for room service or a regular meal of any sort, because I was rushing around so much – partly because it was hard to get around and to and from the hotel due to construction, but partly because I expected to have the same pace I had when I was younger. I should have scheduled much less. I’m afraid AWP had more of a toll on my health than I should have let it have. Note I am still mostly in recovery mode!
  • AWP: A husband’s perspective. Glenn was able to come to all of my events because of the “accessibility assistant” ticket he got to AWP, and besides the difficulties getting into off-sites and into the conference area itself (“they need to do a better job of making off-sites handicapped-accessible,” he said, “and the entrance was much too far from the bookfair”) he seemed to have a pretty good AWP experience. I always think about how weird industry conferences appear to outsiders – after all, I’ve been to robotics conferences, web security conferences, and Microsoft tech conferences – but people were very friendly to Glenn – many recognized him from pictures on social media – and he thought all the readings were very engaging. He was sad we didn’t get to see more of the bookfair, which he felt was much easier to navigate than, say, the art-and-comics fair at San Deigo’s ComicCon, in a wheelchair. We do have a lot of friends around the country now – which made the whole conference feel more convivial.

Overall, I am glad I went, but probably won’t go for the next few years (San Antonio, Kansas City, and Philly are all pretty far from Seattle, and travel can be problematic with a wheelchair and a faulty immune system.) I hope the next time it comes within my orbit it will be a little more disability-friendly. We can always hope! That would have made things a little easier. I’m glad I got to see so many friends and faces from the literary community across the country – friends from Florida to California, and all points in between, and it’s always nice to discover new lit mags and publishers that might not have been on your radar. I wish I had gotten out into Portland more – it was mostly beautiful weather and I had a plan to hit a couple of bookstores and art galleries that didn’t happen. And now, into April – hoping I can get my energy (and iron) back, get out into the tulips, and get some more writing and submitting done!

 

AWP Report Part II, A New Poem in The Pinch, and a Video Reading

 

Sylvia with the new issue of The Pinch

A New Poem in The Pinch

First, thanks to The Pinch, who published my poem, “Another Rescue Attempt,” in their beautiful latest issue. Here’s Sylvia posing with it! And here’s a preview of my poem. My first fairy tale poem in a while:

With my lovely editors Kelli and Annette at Two Sylvias Press and Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson

Report from AWP Part II, with Pics and Video

I finally got to go through the bookfair for a short time after the book signing. It was wonderful but dizzying – so many thousands of booths that you couldn’t possibly see them all, especially if you stopped to talk to anyone. I never saw many booths I specifically wanted to make it to, but this was my first pass through. I got to hit Cincinnati Review, my publisher Moon City Press (where they had just sold out of my book Field Guide to the End of the World after this picture – on Friday!) and Barrelhouse Review to see lovely and talented Killian Czuba. 

By 4:30 PM, we went back to the hotel room. I was planning to meet a friend (Hi Lesley!) for dinner at 5:30 and then go to my offsite reading at 8 PM. So I’d have to change, wash my face, and make it fifteen minutes away in rush hour traffic, and eat, and my body was feeling…well, I was basically lying prone on my couch and my legs and hands didn’t want to move. I had no idea how I was going to do the reading at 8 PM. Remember yesterday when I was talking about AWP making me feel my disability more clearly? This was one of those times. When I was younger, and healthier, I totally could have made this schedule work – but now, with my current stuff, I couldn’t. So I rested, drank hot tea, took some of my MS treatment medications, changed clothes, and went to the offsite reading. It was in a crowded hipster brewpub not far from the conference.

I asked the host from the Spoon River Poetry Review if I could read early, as I hadn’t eaten all I day and was shaking all over. So I went fifth and got to watch a few more readers before I had to go. I was really impressed – one, by how young everyone was (I think I was the oldest person in the room) and by the wonderful women poets of Obsidian Press, and the editor of Noemi Press. It was honestly a pleasure listening to all the readers and I left wishing I could have told all of them how great they were.

I went back to the hotel room with its eerie, mostly-construction view through the now empty beautiful, oddly-eighties-esque hotel lobby (see pic of me in reading outfit with Hotel Lobby collage art) and Glenn made some food (food allergies make most room service a no-go, so I subsisted mostly on string cheese and carrots for the three days I was there) for me and I put together my panel notes and reading for the next day and fell asleep. The third day was actually my biggest in terms of what I had to do – a panel on Poetry and the Body, a visit to the bookfair, and a reading that night before taking off for home – so I needed to crash in order to have some energy for the next day. Looking back, I wish I could have seen more people, socialized more, stayed later at things, but I know these days I have to be very careful about preserving energy – with MS, you go from fine to zero in about 30 seconds. 

Here’s a clip of one of the poems I read at the reading, “My Life is an Accident,” which is forthcoming in the next issue of Spoon River Poetry Review and part of my newest manuscript. (It’s not a flattering angle; forgive me for being vain!)

Next: AWP Part III, Where I talk about our panel “Poetry and The Body,” the Saturday Bookfair, and the final reading with Moon City Press.

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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