Waking Up to a New President and Vice President, A Cold Week with Zoo Visit, More About How to Earn a Living as a Poet

Baby red panda cub at Woodland Park Zoom makes eye contact with me.

Waking Up to a New President and Vice President

This week was really stressful for me, like a lot of people, as the vote counts moved back and forth for what seemed like an interminable amount of time. So we took a (masked) trip to the Woodland Park Zoo to raise our spirits. Getting to see these beautiful red panda cubs (two of them!) made me feel better. Also, I researched possibly moving to Ireland. So that’s how the week was. I had trouble sleeping. I’m sure I’m not the only one who tried to limit the amount of news as they were counting the votes. I tried to distract myself by trying to learn to play the electric guitar (I’ll post a hilarious pic later) and reading a book on mystery writing and another on creativity, and even trying to write a bit of my would-be mystery novels. But it was a rough week nonetheless. My husband got the news that he was accepted into the graduate program at Pepperdine, so that was some good news.

Peacock with Autumn Leaves. The National Bird of India!

Yesterday, I woke up to cold rain, and went back to sleep. Then like magic, when I woke up a second time, like Dorothy, I was in a beautiful technicolor world where Kamala Harris is the first woman Vice-President and Biden had beaten Trump by a lot in multiple states, not just a little bit in one state. Watching their acceptance speeches, I was moved to tears by seeing all the little girls holding flags and Kamala Harris addressing them directly. In Biden’s speech, he didn’t say he hated anyone, or encouraged people to chant “lock him up,” or make comments about women’s bodies – he talked about healing, and making a plan with scientists for coronavirus. It was wonderfully unhorrible. That’s my baseline now – anything not actively stupid and hateful from a Presidential figure is a huge relief. I also saw footage of people in Philly, LA, DC dancing in the street, My friend in London said they set off fireworks where she lived all night. Paris rang church bells. The whole world seemed to be celebrating. Not the Civil War that people imagined, but real happiness, thankfulness, relief.

So I’m very excited about Kamala Harris being the first woman Vice President, (and a Gen-Xer at that, what what!) but honestly, I am so ready for a woman President! Next time, maybe. I wish January were already here. You know Donald isn’t going to do one useful thing in his remaining time, and probably will just cough on all the furniture to make the next administration sick. I hope they open some windows in the White House and hit that place with a lot of disinfecting robots  before they let Biden in! It seems Trumps’ chief of staff is now out sick with covid. Was this White House purposefully infecting everyone? It seems like it. Ugh, so glad to get rid of those anti-science, racist, misogynist jerks. And hopefully never talking about them again, except to discuss jail sentences.

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A Very Chilly Week with a Zoo Visit

It’s been a colder-than-normal week, but we decided to distract ourselves during the stress with a trip to Woodland Park Zoo to see the new little fluffballs – two red panda cubs that were born in May. We wore masks and the zoo was a little less crowded than usual (we went on Monday) and all the indoor things were closed but it still felt like something “normal” – even with our rising rates of coronavirus – that we could do that was still fairly low risk for me. I took a few pictures of the shadowed light on the 100-year-old carousel, because it seemed so haunted. They also had giant inflatable animals for their holiday lights this year. We saw penguins, a snow leopard, the red pandas (of course,) and beautiful wolves, meerkats, and owls. It was a quick trip, and of course, everything’s different with covid-19 and the zoo is no different, but I seriously thought about applying for a job petting red panda babies and/or feeding otters while I was there. Did you know one of my original ideas of what to do with my biology degree included becoming a zoo worker? I even took a class at the Cincinnati Zoo that covered what zoo work actually looked like, including training ambassador animals. Yep, that’s one of my “could have been” careers.

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More About Making a Living as a Poet

See this picture of a carousel with reflections of the sky? This is sometimes the image I think of when talking about things like: how to make a concrete living as a poet. I’m giving another talk tomorrow to the disadvantaged teen group in Ohio, and I’m supposed to talk about practical things like making a CV and grants and fellowships. Interestingly, I also had an e-mail this week from my teenage second cousin, who wanted to know about the same questions: how do I publish my poetry book, and more importantly, how do I make money doing it? Tough, tough stuff.

Sylvia Plath is a great example of a poet who hustled a LOT to make a living as a poet – she sold poems to The Atlantic and the New Yorker, she got grants and fellowships and residencies. She hated teaching. Probably not a great example to bring up to teen poets though, because the story of her suicide is more famous than the story of her hustle.

Most poets, honestly, don’t ‘make a living” as poets. I know poets who make their livings as doctors and lawyers, who are non-profit administrators, who work in publishing, and of course many work in teaching at creative writing and English programs. I personally earn a partial living as a freelance writer, sometimes supplemented with grants and poetry/review payments, but for twelve years I worked as a tech manager, marketing manager, and even an acquisitions editor for large corporations to earn a living. My husband right now has the job with the all-important health insurance, and if he didn’t, I would have to get that kind of job. Because MS, among other things, is expensive. I want to be honest and say: if my husband didn’t work in tech, I probably couldn’t have done things like work as Redmond’s Poet Laureate (which paid less than 5K a year at the time I did the gig) or spend as much time writing and applying for grants.

Me with teeny Fender, still with tags and sticker. (I know one song and I can remember maybe two chords, so not quite to rock star status yet.)

Interestingly, along with trying to learn electric guitar, I’m also applying for jobs again. Tentatively. I want to be giving back and being more productive. The good thing about all the quarantine is I’ve stayed fairly healthy and productive-feeling without all the running around regular life requires, and I have enough energy to think about at least part-time work in the literary publishing industry, such as it is. So maybe that will be my answer: don’t stop writing poetry, but consider adjacent work that will help you support yourself.

What advice would you give these teenagers? What advice would you give them about publishing books, earning a living?

Also, I know coronavirus is still taking its toll on America, and Trump is still President ’til January, but I encourage you all to celebrate, or at least, take a deep breath of relief. Ring your own church bells or light your internal fireworks or dance around to “Celebrate Good Times.” Small happiness has to be appreciated, even in the middle of a plague year.