Plath Poetry Project Feature Today, Facebook Memories from Three Years Ago, Publishing and Writing Under Stress,

Lavender Field

Plath Poetry Project Feature Today

I want to start this post by thanking the Plath Poetry Project, where my poem “Hospital Room in Spring” is the feature today. It was inspired by Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Tulips.” Today’s blog post talks about writing under the stress of health issues, and publishing under that pressure as well, so the poem is thematic!

Here’s a peek at the poem:

From the Plath Poetry Project

Glenn and me last weekend

Facebook Memories from Three Years Ago

I had a very jarring experience. Facebook Memories put up a picture of me from three years ago. I had just gotten my hair cut short in preparation for chemo and I made the public announcement that I had cancer. At the time, three different doctors, including an oncologist, believed I had six months or less to live. I had fourteen tumors of varying size in my liver that they couldn’t treat with radiation or surgery.

I’ve kept the short hair, and the tumors haven’t gone anywhere, although now they are being classified as “benign or at least indolent.” Of course, we have to have MRIs every six months to make sure they don’t grow or turn into cancer. I have the stubborn desire to survive. To persist.

Pic from August 2016, from Facebook Memories

Since that time, you may know if you’ve been following this blog, I’ve gotten diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, was hospitalized with “flares” twice (both time also in August,) wrote two books – one about being diagnosed with terminal cancer and then MS, and the other weather aberrations, fireproof girls, and the political culture since 2016. I am hoping to get them published before anything else happens to me. I believe in the #writetolivelivetowrite motto. It has been a rough three years. I listen to more Beyoncé than I used to. The word “Survivor” is in a lot of my playlists.

I am very thankful for the support given to me by my husband Glenn, who has been there for me every second of the last three years, and my friends, far and near, who sent flowers and cards and reminded me that I was loved. I had very good health insurance which ensured I could see doctors for second opinions and more out-there treatments. I had two friends with similar diagnoses – both younger than me – who passed away in the last three years. So I know that I am lucky. It may not always feel lucky, but there it is.

I posted a short message about this Facebook memory on social media, and was overwhelmed by 1. supportive messages and 2. the number of friends who had no idea what the last three years had held for me. It’s a reminder that when we feel lonely and that no one cares, maybe a lot of people care, but they just didn’t know what’s going with us. You might not know just from looking – you might see that my hair is shorter, or that I use a cane – but our surfaces rarely reflect our real struggles.

Sylvia with all my books

Publishing and Writing Under Stress

So the one thing I didn’t stop doing when I thought I was dying was writing. I’d finished the first draft of my sixth manuscript in six months. And I really didn’t stop doing most things – although  it was certainly interrupted by a lot of unpleasant tests – but I signed the mortgage on my house, I brought home my re-homed delinquent kitten Sylvia (who to this day I call my “cancer-curing” kitty.) Here she is posing with all my poetry books to date.

Then I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. I spent months learning to talk, walk, and swallow normally(ish) again after the damage the brain stem had sustained. This changed the book – it began to contain this disorientation, that I may have survived my cancer diagnosis, but now I had a different, incurable, debilitating disease. I lost words, often. But I still wrote. The book also contains documentation of the sheer weirdness of the weather and solar events of the past few years. It seemed like my body and the weather were misfiring at the same time.

Then, after Trump’s election, I felt an increased urgency – probably like many poets – to write poetry that was more political. For me, that meant writing about women that were survivors – and also women that had been oppressed, suppressed, raped, and literally burned at the stake – and what our future as women might look like. If women are going to survive the violence of men, we must change.  As I write this, by the way, the news is reporting a Bellingham college student murdered, shot by an ex-boyfriend in her home.  I continue to write poems. Writing under the stress of health issues, of the oppressive political climate, under the stress of  in the hopes that maybe these poems will make things better for others.

I am now sending both books out to publishers. I am hoping to get a great publisher, with great distribution, with more marketing firepower, who sends books in to the big prizes (you may not know this, but many poets from very small presses don’t have a shot at the big prizes because they can’t afford the fees or the copies.) I want to get these books out into the world soon.  The urgency my health struggles has given me about publishing has never let up. I want to get them out in my lifetime, which lately, has seemed sort of a fragile ideal, or at least one I can’t count on 100 percent. It’s been almost exactly three years since my last book of poetry, Field Guide to the End of the World, came out. Even if a big publisher decided to take one of my books tonight, it almost certainly wouldn’t be out for another year.

And getting published in a tough business. Poets right now are sending out their work, paying contest and reading fees of up to $30 a pop. Lots of them. I know some of them, and they are great poets. There is so much great work out there, so many poets hoping to be read. You just have to send out your work and hope it speaks to a publisher at the time you’re sending it. No one is guaranteed anything in the poetry world. I hope my work finds its way to a publisher and an audience. Today I will send out my books again. I will continue to hope.