Elgin Award for Field Guide! Good News and Perspectives from the Wheelchair

Elgin Award for Field Guide to the End of the World!

First of all, some good news to announce, finally! Field Guide to the End of the World has won the SFPA’s Elgin Award for speculative poetry. I was so honored to be nominated (amid a lot of friends with good books and chapbooks, this year, so check out the nominees – all the book noms are great and I voted for both chapbook winners Neil and Margaret whose chapbooks are totally worth getting) and extra honored to win, especially in a year that let’s say, in an understatement, has been challenging. Here’s the official announcement on Facebook (will update when they get their web site updated!) This is a great time to order a signed copy from me or order from Moon City Press or from Amazon and finally get the copy of apocalypse poetry you’ve been really needing!

Perspectives from the Wheelchair:

It’s been a little over a week since my new neurologist started me on steroids, what with all the fun and complications of that. More energy – yes! But also, terrible insomnia? Stomach troubles? Other indignities? Well, it was nice to get my speech problems to resolve and a little cognitive boost, but not sure it was worth all the downside? (Let’s not even talk about my research into MS meds – 14 approved from RRMS but none of them look even remotely attractive in terms of problems, side-effects, complications – especially with me, the person who gets allergic..to b12 shots and OTC children’s meds. It reminds me of researching chemo drugs last year for carcinoid – it wasn’t that they were bad, it’s that they didn’t seem to have terribly encouraging results, beyond helping symptoms.

I am not back on my feet yet (still deemed a fall risk as my left leg doesn’t seem to cooperate and my vertigo is still there) and I’ve got  a couple of months (!!) still of testing remaining – EMG tests, autonomic nervous system, stomach and eye tests, all in the coming months to help determine what exactly is going on, what processes and treatments might be most likely. I am still doing therapies – card matching games, writing with my hands, typing is still not great (so many more typos!) and trying not to let my stomach.dizziness.houseboundedness stuff get too depressing or overwhelming. My insurance – for which I am very grateful – has sent a non-ending troupe of therapists to my home to try to get me back to some semblance of normal – occupation therapists who help me figure out how to do simple things, physical therapists, speech and swallowing therapists (didn’t even know that was a thing, but yes) – and others, too, if I want or need them. I’m still not getting out of the house much as getting dizzy results from things like swinging my head around too fast, I’m still in a wheelchair, it takes a LOT of my daily energy to shower and look like a regular human still. But I want to get there. And the docs think the steroids should help me get on the recovery path a touch faster, so perhaps worth the pain-in-the-ass level? (Those of you with autoimmune problems who have to be on these things all the time, my sympathies – and also any coping mechanism tips appreciated in the comments? )

So as a writer, I’ve been struggling to write a few poems – and when I tried to send things out, I’ve been botching things – editor’s names, guidelines get mixed up, so I’m clearly not at full-blown writer’s mode yet. In the next month or so, I’m going to try to do a radio/podcast thing and a Skype class visit – I’m hoping the steroids will help both the cognitive and speech stuff enough to make me seem at least sort of “normal.”

After facing the challenges last year of researching and testing for rare kinds of cancer (which, by the way, the best they can still say is that “you probably don’t have it but we have to keep watching the liver tumors”) it seems like MS shouldn’t be worse, or even as bad – but it’s weird because the endpoints of the diseases are different, and some of the research on MS – now I’ve read about fifteen books on the subject – are incredibly depressing accounts of the progression and the disabilities and the ultimate failures of a lot of treatments. I’m mostly trying to focus on the positive things I can do to make things better – Vitamin D, physical therapy – and maybe trying to get out of the house a little and do some things that make me feel happy (which wards off the crazies and anxieties I think.) I have a big goal while on the steroids of trying to make it to the zoo – after trying shorter hops to the local bookstore. I’d like to do something to celebrate the Elgin Win too!