Second Edition of She Returns to the Floating World is available and other news!

If you’ve been waiting for She Returns to the Floating World to be re-released in print, you’ll be happy to know Two Sylvias Press has now released a second edition, complete with new internal art work by (cover artist of my first and third books) Michaela Eaves. You can order it from Amazon here.  I’ll also have copies available at the Two Sylvias Press table at AWP!

In other news, Elizabeth Austen has been chosen as the next Poet Laureate of Washington State! I couldn’t be more pleased. Here’s a link to an interview I did with Elizabeth a couple of years ago…

I’ve been reading a book called Chronic Resilience: 10 Sanity-Saving Strategies for Women Coping with the Stress of Illness. It was good to read a book about chronic illness with no saccharine tones or upbeat-weirdly unrealistic advice, and it made me think about the levels of expectations I have about my life and the goals I can have, the self-care I should be thinking about, etc. Anyway, it was a self-help type book I could actually identify with and that I felt had a lot of good tips for women with chronic health conditions. And I thought about how resilience was a wonderful quality that is undervalued, too. Not giving up, despite bad news or multiple relapses, is difficult, in both the writing life and living your life with chronic health problems, and the ability to keep pushing forward is a strength that must be built up over time.

I had about five pieces of disappointing news come in this last week, as well as feeling off my game health-wise, so I had to really rally to come back to the computer at all, as if all it held for me was bad news and more bad news. I had to step away and reassess what I was doing with my time, energy, money, etc. I’m still evaluating. I even posted an article from Slate on Facebook (here’s the article) which talks about how the mantra “Do what you love” can work against us, particularly women, even more particularly women who are adjuncts, unpaid interns, or caregivers. Doing my taxes always puts right in my face the dubious fact that I earn about what I spend on my writing business, and not much more, which can be discouraging. I need to think about how to improve my life, not just be a victim of a bad economy, a world that doesn’t value poetry, and, the crappy health stuff. What steps can I take to embrace the good things and close the door on things that aren’t working for me?