Unexpected Collaborations…Perfume, Songs, Jewelry, and Jobs

So, I found out I still can’t make my announcement yet. Beginning of next month. Sigh. But I can tell you I really enjoyed meeting with our mayor! He had even read some of my poetry. How cool is that? It makes me feel more civic-minded, that’s for sure…

I was thinking about the unexpected collaborations that sometimes we wonder into, like my work with painter Deborah Scott on my upcoming book, Unexplained Fevers. I didn’t plan for that collaboration to happen; she just happened to ask to meet for coffee one day last year, and we got to talking and here our plan is now, actually happening! Poets and artists, working together.

So when I was up at the Skagit Valley Poetry Festival, I ran into someone working at one of the cute retail shops there that I had chatted with a few times before – she has an advanced degree in Medieval Literature, so we have a lot in common – and she told me about some jewelry she was designing that was sold in the local museum gift shop. She showed me some of her designs, and, as she and I had talked before and she knew a little bit about my writing, offered to do a custom “book pendant” – a tiny book, with usable paper pages, with layers of stamped-and-etched metal as the “binding.” Here’s one of her designs for my “She Returns to the Floating World” book, named after one of my poems:

Isn’t that amazing? Her name is Melinda Erickson, and her work can be found in galleries and gift shops, including the La Connor’s Museum of Northwest Art. And here’s a link to her blog.

Another happy accident has been working with poet and perfumer Karen Carissimo, who contacted me because of a mutual poet friend down in San Francisco. I have a bit of a passion for perfume, as those of you who’ve been following my ramblings for some time might know; my first job out of school with my pre-med degree was managing a small perfumerie in Cincinnati that specialized in hard-to-find European perfumes, so now I have a terrible addiction to difficult-to-find perfumes like Cartier’s Panthere or Caron’s Blond Tabac. Besides being a wonderful writer herself, she’s talented at creating custom perfumes, and through correspondence she’s working on a perfume for me, with notes that belong to my second book – the bright top note of cherry blossom, the coolness of bamboo and peony. Really an amazing honor!

And of course the experience, which also happened recently in some kind of lucky coincidence, of working with Seattle musician Joy Mills, who created a song out of my poem “Sleeping Beauty Loves the Needle.” I just loved it. You can see/hear our collaboration here on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5-Zw9yJ3WY&feature=relmfu

So I was thinking about the opportunities the universe might provide us with, things we might not even think to ask about but that we’ve always wanted…my upcoming announcement has to do with this too, something I hadn’t thought to ask the universe for but something I’ve wanted since I moved to the Northwest thirteen years ago.