Writing Process Blog Tour, the Supermoon, Auburn Days, and another shot postponement
- At August 11, 2014
- By Jeannine Gailey
- In Blog
0
Supermoon! (Perseid shower the next two nights as well!) And a little Anna’s hummingbird that guards the feeder in our back garden:
Well, the reading and panel at Auburn Days was fun, got to chat with other local city and county Poet Laureates, which was fun, but I came home feeling a bit under the weather, and woke up this morning in the full grip of an eevil upper respiratory/sore throat thing – on one of the hottest days of the year! What’s the logic of that? So we had to postpone my shot again, this time til Thursday.
Thanks to Joannie Stangeland (http://joanniestangeland.com/2014/08/blog-tour-2014-snapshot/) and Jose Angel Araguz (http://thefridayinfluence.wordpress.com/2014/08/04/my-writing-process-blog-tour/) for tagging me in this round of the Writing Process Blog Post. They’re both wonderful poets! I think I may have done this before, but I guess an update might be in order:
What am I working on?
Right now, I’m finishing up edits for my fourth book, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, which is coming out in spring 2015 from Mayapple Press, and adding poems to my fifth manuscript, about, among other things, apocalypses, scientific scams, neurological short-outs, which is currently titled Field Guide to the End of the World.
I’ve also (shhhh) been working on some short personal essays and pieces of short fiction. I can’t say I’ve mastered the other two genres yet, but it’s kind of fun to pick up some books on writing in other genres and experiment a bit!
How does my work differ from others in its genre?/ Why do I write what I do?
Everyone’s writing mirrors their interests, the way their brain works, the language they use every day, the books they read.
I think my work reflects my interests in pop culture, science and archetypal mythology. If the question is, why I write poetry at the exclusion of other forms, well, I’m working on it!
How does my writing process work?
I often write poems after interacting with other kinds of art – visual art, music, novels, comics, movies, sometimes even just reading a news headline or seeing a particularly interesting or funny image in a magazine. I often write late at night, when my subconscious is more awake and my inner critic is a bit quieter. My earlier work was very much inspired by mythology, but I feel like lately I’ve been more inspired by science and science fiction, which means my next two books have a bit of a different flavor than my first three. In The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, for instance, there are references to radioactive elements, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Madeleine L’Engle, and The Day After Tomorrow. In my newest poems, I’ve been inspired by things like as mundane as Anthropologie catalog and even having HGTV on in the background!
I’d like to tag poet Natasha Moni, a medical student whose book The Cardiologist’s Daughter is coming out this fall! Her web site is http://www.natashamoni.com/blog
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.
