Up at Salon: What I Read for My Mental Health During the Plague Year
- At September 29, 2020
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
0
Sunflower
My Article Is Up on Salon: Quarantine book club: Reading for mental health in a plague year
How Emily Dickinson, Octavia Butler, Joan Didion, Jericho Brown, and other authors helped me survive
Here’s the link to the article, which covers my struggle with my mental (and physical) health during the last few months, and how starting a reading club with my mother, reading poetry for meditation, considering the wisdom of Emily Dickinson and Margaret Atwood, and discovering how the genius of Octavia Butler, among others, helped built hope, resilience, empathy, and compassion.
Jeannine Hall Gailey served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington and the author of Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, and winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and SFPA’s Elgin Award, Field Guide to the End of the World. Her latest, Flare, Corona from BOA Editions, was a finalist for the Washington State Book Award. She’s also the author of PR for Poets, a Guidebook to Publicity and Marketing. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Poetry, and JAMA.
