New Interview with Bekah Steimel, Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas and Almost New-Year with Sylvia Plath-style Dreams and Goals

Merry Christmas, Happy Solstice from the Pacific Northwest

   Happy Solstice, Merry Christmas, and almost New Year!

First of all, hope you are all doing well and celebrating the holiday season with a little rest and relaxation and even a little poetry!

Here in Seattle a lot of people celebrate the Solstice, along with other traditional holidays, the longest night of the year – I think because the long dark feels more intense out here, especially when sunset is around 4 PM. This solstice we had sunsets, hummingbirds (and coyote howls), a full moon, and even cherry blossoms on a neighbor’s tree down the street! It’s a good time to think about our dreams and goals for the next year – which I did this year with a little help from Sylvia Plath. More about that later!

Interview with Bekah Steimel

Thank you to Bekah Steimel for doing this interview with me! I hope you enjoy it! I talk a little bit about my best advice for poets and my time working as Redmond’s Poet Laureate. There’s also a little poem for the resistance!

Field Guide to the End of the World on End-of-the-Year Gift Guide

Also, thanks to Serena Agusto-Cox for including Field Guide to the End of the World on her 2018 Holiday Gift Guide. 
Field Guide to the End of the World is a good book to read this time of year – it’s all about weathering disasters and apocalypses of various kinds. I’ve been reading, along with Plath’s letters, several apocalypse-y books, including M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs and the always mildly apocalyptic Murakami’s Killing Commendatore and we all know how much fun it is during the holidays to shut off all the noise (televisions, phones, etc) and spend some of that “darkness” time catching up on reading!

Talking Plans, Dreams and Goals with Sylvia Plath

So, one of the traditions as we head towards the new year is talking about our dreams, plans, and goals for the new year. Someone posted this from Sylvia Plath’s journal on Twitter, and I found another list from her school days in my own copy of her unabridged journals (click on each to enlarge):

No one was more ambitious than Sylvia, so we can all learn a little something from the lists, also, it’s always good advice to work on our inner lives and listen more (plus, French every day!)

So I spent my time thinking about what I wanted from 2019, what I wanted to accomplish, what I wanted to toss from this year, and what I have learned (besides not to date any guys named Hamish!)

Looking to 2019

I sat around a candle with a hot cider and thought hard about what I wanted. My dreams and goals may seem less ambitious than in years past – for instance, I want to spend less time in hospitals than I did the last two years, obviously (a modest goal for some – big ambition for me.) To do that, I need to practice a whole heck of a lot of self-care with MS, like, resting more, eating an MS-friendly diet (brains like avocado, blueberries and protein, apparently), doing my physical therapy, and choosing to surround myself with people who are a real support.
As far as writing goals go, we’ve got AWP coming to Portland in March 2019, so I’m hoping to make it to that and do some socializing, catch up with friends, and look at new journals and publishers at the Bookfair. I plan to finish up a seventh book manuscript and hopefully find a great publisher for manuscript six. I do want, like Sylvia, to make smart choices about people – I want to practice kindness and encouragement towards others, say thank you more often, and reach out and make new friends (don’t want to totally go the Emily Dickinson sickly-recluse route until I absolutely have to.) I want to try publishing essays and short stories as well.

Taking our writing seriously – like, carving out time to, as Sylvia says, “WRITE” – and submit work – which, from reading her letters and journals, I know she also took seriously. She reminds me to aim high, but also, not to isolate myself, which can lead to trouble, and she also represents what happens when you spend too much time trying to fulfill other people’s expectations of what you are supposed to be. (Embrace your strangeness, rather than spend energy hiding it.)  I was surprised this week to receive two surprise gifts from friends who live far away – and that reminded me I am blessed to have wonderful writer friends all across the country.

I want to spend more time appreciating the good things – spending time in nature, with my loved ones, just in general celebrating the good days. I know the holidays can be a tough time for people – a time when what we don’t have seems to be highlighted. As someone with a chronic illness, it’s hard not to worry about the future, especially with an incurable degenerative disease like Multiple Sclerosis. But I have hope. We have more medications and more tools, more research than we used to, and I have faced health challenges in the past. Even with the political turmoil in our country (and beyond) over the past two years, I try to have hope.

There’s a verse from Psalm 30 that says something like “Darkness may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning.” Wishing you all more joy and less darkness in 2019.