Happy Solstice! A New Poem in Crab Creek Review, Reading at J. Bookwalter’s, Birdwatching as Contact Sport, Cyclical Economic Misery

Poppies and Mt Rainier, Woodinville Lavender Farm

Happy Solstice!

Happy Solstice! I hope you are taking some time to celebrate, even if it’s just an American soccer victory or extra sunshine that you can feel good about. Our local lavender field had a celebration with vendors for the Solstice, and stayed open late, so we wondered around and took some pictures. It’s also Father’s Day, so for those who are fathers, who lost fathers, who celebrate their fathers, sending good thoughts your way. And Happy Juneteenth! It’s also been a crazy heat wave (nineties again tomorrow), and we are already eyeing with suspicion the fires that are popping up around us.

A New Poem in Crab Creek Review

Sylvia and Crab Creek Review

I just had a new Solstice poem come out in the newest issue of Crab Creek Review, but ironically, it’s about Winter Solstice. Here’s a sneak peek:

Great Blue Heron flying overhead

Readings and Birdwatching as a Contact Sport

In the last few days, I MC’d a reading at J. Bookwalter in Woodinville for their Wine and Poetry series, with poets Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, a local oceanographer. It was warm and sunny (you can tell I’m wearing sunglasses because there was so much glare inside!), but it was a good night AND Glenn did his first ever open mic performance, which I wish I had recorded, where he recited John Berryman’s Dream Song 14. I realized he is a better public speaker than I am, lol.

Catherine Broadwall with her new book, me, and Deirdre Lockwood with her new book

We also tried a real birdwatching trek because someone had posted about seeing a Lazuli Bunting at a local park. So, forgetting I don’t do well in heat, or sun, or, let’s face it, outdoors with hills and a lot of brush and non-paved pathways, we went on an adventure to a well-known birding trail at Marymoor Park. Despite wearing long sleeves, long pants, shoes and socks, plus sunscreen and two kinds of insect repellent, I still got attacked by a tick on my wrist while I was taking a shot (brushed it off within ten seconds, but still managed to leave a bite behind that required a doctor visit) and a black fly (which I am allergic to), so after an hour, I had to call it quits. It felt like nature had personally attacked me and told me I was an indoor cat, and keep to my own space, lol. On the birdwatching side, we saw about forty Great Blue Herons fly right over our heads, I saw Purple Martins and Tree Swallows and Yellowthroats, and multiple pairs of Lazuli Buntings (which is my first time ever seeing this dream bird). Oh, and did I mention my three-year-old Sony camera’s motherboard went out WHILE we were taking pictures? I didn’t get as many good ones, but it was still fun to see those birds.

Wide shot, poppies and mountain

Cyclical Economic Misery

I wanted to share some advice from my mother, who is 74 this year. I was discussing our money woes (too much outcome, not enough income) and the global stagflation that is making everyone nervous, and she told me not to stress out about money this year. I am 53, and the economy has never felt so bad to me—and I graduated into a recession in 94, lived through the dot-com recession, the housing recession—and this is definitely worse. My mother was recalling the seventies, when we also had a big stagflation problem, gasoline stations had LINES, interest rates for credit cards and mortgages were at 17 percent and higher. Of course, they weren’t coming out of a global pandemic, but they were at the tail end of Vietnam and a very unpopular President. She said in these years, we have to remember miserable economic times are cyclical, that we will (hopefully) survive them, and we won’t always be worrying so much about paying for groceries and student loans and medical bills. We in the Pacific Northwest are also in the middle of a nasty heat wave (record-breaking June temps, including nineties for more than one day) and so is France, where they don’t have a) ice and b) air conditioning. Seattle homes and businesses didn’t used to have air conditioning when I moved here but it is slowly becoming more widespread as global warming beaches gray whales and makes being outside or inside miserable, and people literally die from the weather. The climate, while some of it is man-damaged, is also cyclical—before humans arrived, we still had mini-ice ages and heat waves, California still had wildfires regularly, volcanoes caused their own globally important weather. What is the point of saying all this? Yes, we are in a hard time, the hardest time I remember in my lifetime, a time that can beat up hope and leave us cringing at every weather and news report and struggling to pay the bills and find work, and meanwhile it seems that billionaires are running the show while politicians get dumber and more corrupt. But people have felt this way before. We will survive this. I don’t know if we will return to the optimism that characterized the late eighties and the whole of the nineties, but I will sustain a hope that it will, that we will get a better President, better people in charge, a movement towards justice and protecting the rights of women and the environment. A recent poll showed that more people would vote for AOC than JD Vance. That’s got to be a good sign of something, right? RIGHT? Okay, economic musings are done.

In the meantime, enjoy your solstice, your World Cup, your lavender fields and anything else you can find joy in.

Woodinville’s Lavender Farm Opens, Hot Weather and Football, Summer Bugs and Birds, and More

Beloved Woodinville Lavender Farm Opening Weekend

This shot of purple and white lavender blooms are from our local beloved JB Family Grower’s Lavender Farm, across from Willows Lodge in Woodinville.

I’ve been down with a summer virus all week (fun!) and the heat was pretty intense for Seattle this weekend (over 90 degrees!), but we managed an evening visit right before close. A lot of the lavender is already in bloom, as well as a wildflower field including poppies, and the gift shop is selling lavender lemonade, so I say go for a visit as soon as you can! The mountain was out when we were there, and it was wonderful to stand in the field and watch the sun over Mt. Rainier.

The third picture is of cherries in my neighbor’s tree, not pictured are the tiny squirrels shaking the tree to make cherries fall on me, and chittering as they pointedly ate the cherries right in front of me. It was clear they had taken control!

Not a hummingbird – Hairy Woodpecker on a hummer feeder

Hot Weather, Football, Baby Birds

The overly record-breaking heat has brought out the birds—some of them in strange places, like this baby Hairy Woodpecker on our hummingbird feeder.

I have another shot of baby woodpecker being fed and a Rufous Woodpecker hanging out in our bird feeder.

With MS, you have to avoid the heat, and I wasn’t feeling my best this week (had to postpone a meeting with poets and a root canal), so I was inside to watch the amazing American soccer game in the World Cup, where they beat Paraguay by three points. Seattle is a host city, so the World Cup is all over the news (and many of us have had to cancel downtown doctor appointments and visits to downtown for any reason because of the crowds and traffic).

And I can’t talk about it in detail, but we’ve also had very stressful in-law drama over the last two weeks—dealing with aging parents in a far-away state with multiple issues is no joke—and so we’re hoping for a less stressful rest of the month.

This Thursday night (6/18) is Poetry Night at J. Bookwalter’s Books, and the featured readers are Catherine Broadwall and Deirdre Lockwood, 6:30 Thursday night, with wine available and a short open mic after.

Hoping we all stay safe in the heat and remember to take care of yourselves and others this week.

Reading with Kelli in Shoreline, Goldfinches, Hummingbirds, Woodpeckers, and Losing Things

Kelli Russell Agodon and me

Reading with Kelli in Shoreline, WA

I had the pleasure yesterday of being of the opening reader for Kelli in Shoreline at the new Ridgecrest Books, which kindly sold my Flare, Corona alongside Kelli’s brand-new Accidental Devotions. The bookstore folks and the larger than expected crowd (they ran out of chairs! Hadn’t seen that happen since an Open Books reading in Wallingford!) were very welcoming. And they bought books! I also saw some old friends I hadn’t seen in years, which was nice. One of them noted “You’re not in a wheelchair anymore!” which made me wonder when they had seen me last—six years maybe? Anyway, Kelli did a great job, it felt like a great night of really nice people. It almost, somehow, felt like a pre-Covid reading.

Goldfinch in fountain with flowers

Backyard Birds and Managing Loss

I was a little down physically this week treating a bad tooth and a hurt rib, but I got a great show from my goldfinches, hummingbirds, and woodpeckers. And, I sent out my book manuscript to a few new places I hadn’t tried before.

Even in the middle of family drama and my body being a little broken-down, I try to be aware of the little beauties around me, the cherry tree that rustles with little squirrels throwing cherries and chittering at me, the woodpecker and goldfinch that are no longer afraid to land next to me outside.

We had some family stuff that happened that reminded me that life is not steady, that change is the only constant, and sometimes, those changes are not the changes we’d choose. Parents getting older, our worrying about them, and my own body, struggling with what can be several debilitating problems at once, realizing we don’t have forever, and neither do those we love. It can push us into depression or push us to try to make the best of every day we have. It’s also realizing that although right now is hard, we’re not having as bad a time as we had in the past—reading from Flare, Corona always reminds me that I had some of the worst news and the worst health of my life when I wrote that book, and I survived a terminal cancer diagnosis and an MS diagnosis and severe flare almost a decade ago now. We lose things in life—our memories, our ability to run or walk, our balance, money, security, loved ones—and we have a choice, to continue on or to stay in mourning or lament our inability to trust and secure our lives exactly the way we want them to be. Sure, the world can feel like it’s in constant apocalypse right now. But we have a choice in what we do every day with that. What do you do with your last day on earth? Why, write another poem, of course.

Rough Week with Blue Minimoon, Baby Foxes, Tooth and Rib Drama, and Summer Approaches

Red fox triplets

Rough Week with Blue Minimoon and Baby Foxes

Well, I was supposed to spend the last week on the San Juan Island at a writing residency. The first day was glorious – beautiful warm sunshine, seal heads bobbing in the water, and my first ever real-life encounter with baby foxes! The second day was cold and rainy, but I got a lot of reading and some writing done. The third day, sadly, I woke up with my jaw swollen from a tooth infection (root canal next week!) with fever and it was determined that I should probably get home so I could rest, get antibiotics and move up my root canal.

Me and Glenn getting ready to leave for San Juan Island with mountain in background, pre-tooth

So we had to leave the island early, rapidly throwing everything back in our bags and catching the last ferry out of town. I was pretty down for a couple of days, and yesterday was the first day I felt good enough to go out – for ice cream and Blue Moon pictures – and promptly threw out a rib sneezing and coughing (it is definitely crazy allergy season – visible pollen was floating around our drinks while we saw outside with our dessert.)

I felt very lucky that I saw any fox kits at all, on this trip, honestly, because I’ve been to the island many times and though I’d seen otters, seals, eagles, whales, and adult foxes, this was the first time I got to see baby foxes cavorting among poisonous hemlock flowers in bloom (which smell very good but even the pollen can cause neurological symptoms, note to people not familiar with this plan which is everywhere on the island, along with beautiful pink and white flowering laurel, also considered a noxious weed on the island, but not quite as potentially harmful.

Blue Micromoon

Here is the rising of the Blue Micromoon of May, which is slightly smaller AND a rare second full moon of the month. Apparently, all weird moons are signs of health doom for me, so I should really pay more attention to them (see many blog posts where weird supermoons coincide with unexpected trips to the hospital.) Should have paid attention to that horoscope!

Anyway, one thing I did get to do during the residency besides writing a new fox poem was look over my manuscript, and you know what? I had the strong feeling that, at this point, I could make it different, but I could not make it better. I definitely had the feeling it was time to send that manuscript out and start on a new project at last.

Mountain (I think Rainier?) from San Juan Island lookout

And what about you? You say your week was drama-free? Well, enjoy it while you can. The summer is coming with all of its accompanying pleasures and risks (wildfire season, anyone?) We’re supposed to plan for summer by 1. getting together your reading list for summer, 2. maybe planning a big trip, 3. preparing for ever-increasing food prices by starting your own organic farm. As a writer, do you find you write more or less in summer? I was looking back and seeing patterns, that I do not write as much in the summer as I do in fall or spring. Part of this might be because the heat and MS do not mix, and I tend to have a lot more fatigue and neurological symptoms in summer. But I am committed to sending out the old manuscript so I can work on some new work. The kit foxes – a sign of new life? And another first – though the rabbits have not returned since being wiped off all the San Juan islands a few years ago by a contagious plague – I saw quail here which I never have before.

Green Herons and Goslings, AI Lit Mag Scandals, Planning for Writing Residencies

Green Heron (!!)

Green Herons and Goslings

It was a wonderful week for bird watching – we saw goslings, ducklings, Great Blue Herons, a Green Heron (much rarer!), more Goldfinches. We had a couple of perfect sunny days to see flowers blooming – roses, peonies, clematis, azaleas, even lavender in some places already.

The Pacific Northwest, and specifically, Seattle is doomed, say some, with their new millionaire tax. Yes, why would anyone want to live here? I mean, there’s no state income tax for anyone but millionaires but… a millionaire tax? I’m out! Just kidding.

Me in Kirkland with roses and Lake Washington

Planning for a Writer’s Residency

I’m planning for a writer’s residency and thinking about what makes for a successful residency – crunchy snacks? comfortable pants and shoes? Inspiring reading material? A set of goals? I want to work on my book that I’m still sending out and write some new work – either essays or flash or poems. I haven’t felt very creative the last few months for some reason.

So I’m hoping this time away will give me some new perspectives, some time away from social media, television, and the routine.

This pair of barn swallows is gossiping about AI writers

AI Lit Mag Scandals

This pair of barn swallows is gossiping about the latest AI lit mag scandal – that a very prestigious fiction contest at Granta was won by an AI story possibly written by an AI company. The prize came with some pretty good money attached so the human beings who were rejected are pretty steamed, understandably.
Then there’s other scuttlebutt: if AI writing can only be judged by AI tools, um, isn’t there a snake biting its own tail or something? Is the author even a real person or just some AI collective hoping to scam the system? If the writing was boring and rote, is that what the literary community prize system rewards? Is this the end of human writing??

Okay, probably not. But it does point out that now we literary writers – basically making a couple of dollars a year – are now competing not just with human writers, but with AI. I mean, can’t they just leave us alone?

Okay, wishing you all a good week, with very little scandal, a lot of late spring moments of wonder, and time to write and be inspired.