Waterfalls, Recovering from Family Visits, Hot Weather, and Rejection Manifestos

Well, that’s it – I’m another year older, my oldest brother and sister-in-law are back home in Tennessee, and we are recovering from the visit – you know, laundry, grocery shopping, sleep – and reveling in the unexpectedly warm weather. Yesterday it was 80; today it was 88. It’s a great time to visit a waterfall – that’s what we did for my birthday, visit Snoqualmie Falls and Ollalie State Park, home to a smaller but still forested and beautiful waterfall. The drive up always makes me feel at home – driving into the snow-covered faces of mountains dotted with pine trees, the roar of the water, the blooming azaleas, rhododendrons and dogwood along the side of the road. (My brother still lives in Tennessee, where I grew up – and he said this waterfall visit was his favorite thing he did the whole eight days he was here. It made him feel at home!) There are the falls, and Salish Lodge in the background (you may recognize it from the credits of Twin Peaks!)

Poetry month is over, my birthday is over, and now I can breathe a sigh of relief and relax, at least until the Skagit Valley Poetry Festival in a couple of weeks! So what to do with this nice bit of downtime? Michael Schmeltzer, friend and editor of River & Sound Review, has a rejection manifesto here. Since rejection is a big part of being a writer (at least, being a published writer) I think it’s worth talking about. Especially when you first start out, it can be really discouraging when you get, say, seventeen rejections for every one acceptance. But the truth is, it happens to everyone. And remember: encouraging rejections, with comments or asking you to send again, mean you should actually send again. (Something I didn’t do when I was starting out.) You can read more of my thoughts on rejection here.

On my birthday, I got a couple of phone calls from friends and family, my brother took us out to a cool Puerto Rican restaurant/dive bar (or the closest thing to a cool dive bar in Redmond) called La Isla, and I sold one book and got invited to be on an AWP panel. All in all, not a bad way to turn a year older! Birthdays! They always make me wonder about what I’m doing, where I’m going, all that existential crap. I don’t have it all figured out yet, which can be frustrating. But maybe I’m on a good path. I hope so.