Woodinville Book Club Meets and Talks Art and Fraud, Last Visit to the Flower Garden on a Chilly Evening, More About Submission September

Me with a good book and a glass of wine, pre-book club at J. Bookwalter

Woodinville Book Club Meets and Talks Art and Fraud

The first meeting of the “Read Between the Wines” Book Club was this Wednesday to talk about Barbara Bourland’s Fake Like Me. It was a great group – I got to meet a couple of poet friends from social media that I’ve never met in person, two of the winery people showed up to talk with our group about art (turns out one of them had an art degree!) and fraud, what makes art “art,” women’s reputations as artists (and writers), and Fake Like Me‘s literary predecessor, Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca. We got a quick picture with at least some of the group as a hot air balloon rose overhead. Book club magic!

Next meet up will be appropriately spooky, Japanese ghost stories retold with a comic and feminist contemporary twist in Where the Wild Ladies Are by Aoko Matsuda. We are meeting at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville at 6 PM on October 19! I am really looking forward to talking books and getting to know more readers, writers, and artists in the community.

Me holding dahlias, with sunflowers

Last Visit to the Flower Farm on a Chilly Evening

I had been a bit under the weather after the book club (sometimes MS can clobber you if you do too much), so Glenn decided to cheer me up after a few days of bed rest with a special after-closure visit (with permission – thanks guys!) to my happy place, JB Family Growers Lavender Farm and Flower Farm in Woodinville. This time it was cold enough to need a sweater—just last week it was 90, remember? And it was dark by 7 PM! It’s turning to fall rapidly. But a lot of the flowers were still in full bloom and beautiful; we got to see some beautiful dark red sunflowers we had never seen in bloom in any previous visit, and while Glenn was taking a picture, a hawk swooped out of the sunflowers and almost grazed him as it chased some swallows! And we found some dahlias that matched my sweater.

Steller’s jay in my flower box

More About September Submission Season

One of the good things about doing a “submission season” with your friends—our group tries to do a submission a day on a certain month, this year September, is that is motivates you to look at journals you might not have heard of, or considered before, or considered outside your reach. When you really look at where you submit over time, it’s probably the same places over and over again, and maybe there’s an editor at another magazine you’ve never sent to that will absolutely love your work. It’s also a good excuse to get to the bookstore in person and look at literary magazines available in your area—you might be surprised what you can find. It also forces you to take a look at the poems you’ve been writing—is this one ready to send out? Why has this poem you like been sitting around, not submitted anywhere yet? And also to update your records—in my case, an Excel spreadsheet—to see how many poems and submissions you have out. Sometimes I catch duplicate poems or even duplicate submissions— hey, I’m as human as the next person, and probably slightly worse at keeping records. So, I encourage you all to take a look at your poetry and see where you could send your work and try some place new this month. And take advantage of any nice days to get out and see the last of the flowers, or the beginnings of fall, put on a jacket, walk around, drink a hot cider. I am definitely going to try to take advantage of this as we transition into the rainy season…