A Few Poetry Updates

This post is for all the poetry fans out there. (But the rest of you are more than welcome to read it too. After all, we lovers of poetry are a very open and accepting crowd, always happy to add a few more members to our club.)

I have a few pieces of poetry-related news I’m excited about and I want to share them with you.

First, I have a poem in this year’s Texas Poetry Calendar. It’s on the August month-view page, so if you’re flipping through looking for the date when the temperature is finally going to become reasonable again (somewhere around mid-September, hopefully) don’t forget to pause and read “August in Texas.” It won’t cool you off, but it will at least remind you that, yes, it’s this hot every year and, no, the heat won’t last forever.

Next, I also have a poem in this month’s issue of The Texas Observer. My haiku appears on page 42. I’m excited to be published in this magazine, but I’m even more thrilled that my favorite poet, Naomi Shihab Nye, is the person who selected my little poem. I first heard Naomi speak when I was a senior at UT in 1998, and I have loved her work ever since. I own over a dozen of her poetry books, as well as her novels for young readers and her books of essays. My favorites are Fuel (poems), Never in a Hurry (essays), and This Same Sky (poems she selected from around the world). Any book that has her name on it is worth a read. Her introductions breathe life into all the collections she edits, and she has an amazing gift for connecting with people via podium, page, or in person. Naomi is the poetry editor for the Observer, and she always includes a short message about the poems she chooses. Her sweet comments about my haiku mean so much to me.

Last, but definitely not least, I’m on the board of the Austin Poetry Society, which is about to kick off a new season of monthly meetings and contests. We have some great guest speakers lined up this fall, so if you live in the Austin area and you’re one of those people who likes poetry, consider joining our society. You’ll get access to our newsletter (cleverly named the Museletter) as well as eligibility to enter our monthly and annual contests, where you can earn cash prizes for your work.

And even if you’re not a member of APS, you can still be a part of The Poetry Caravan of Austin, a new and very worthwhile program where volunteers give free poetry readings at senior homes, memory facilities, and shelters in the Austin area. Our fall schedule is now online, and it’s easy to sign up. If you’re curious, check out our Facebook page to learn more and hear from some of our volunteers.

Well, that’s about it. Thanks for letting me plug my news, as well as the poets and organizations I love and believe in. Oh, and just so you know, if you made it to the end of this blog post, you probably are a fan of poetry, at least on some level. (Come on, admit it.)

5 Cool Books to Read When It’s Hot Outside

The heat index yesterday in Austin was 104 degrees. That kind of temperature just makes you want to climb into one of the compartments on the frozen food aisle and take a nap on the bags of edamame. But that’s a good way to get kicked out of your favorite grocery store. The next best way to survive the heat is to curl up in a dark, air conditioned room with a good book. If you choose the right book, you can transport yourself out of the hot, humid central Texas air, and into a winter wonderland.* Here are five books guaranteed to cool you down at least a few degrees.

[* Warning! Winter wonderlands are not always pleasant places.]

I’ve given each book three different ratings:

Entertainment Value = How much I enjoyed the story, regardless of the weather.
Iciness Factor = How much it made me want a sweater while reading.
Squeamish Scale = How much it disturbed and/or traumatized me.

(Note: Ratings are on a scale of 1-5, 5 being the highest. Also, my levels of squeamishness and cold-tolerance may differ from yours.)

1. Greenglass House by Kate Milford

This charming middle grade novel is set in a big, ramshackle inn on the top of a snowy hill overlooking an inlet of harbors in the middle of winter. Milo and his parents run the inn and it’s usually empty during the cold season, but this year a succession of odd characters arrive, bringing with them mystery and adventure.

Entertainment Value = 5 – I loved this book. To read my full review of it, click here.
Iciness Factor = 3 – The descriptions of the snow and the wintry winds and all the coats and galoshes they put on before going outside will definitely make you shiver, but there are also plenty of scenes by the fireplace and lots of hot chocolate.
Squeamish Scale = 0 – Nothing to scream (or squeam) at here.

2. Surviving Antarctica: Reality TV 2083 by Andrea White

This is a cool book (pun intended). It’s a historical fiction novel set in the future. (Um, what?) The year is 2083 and five fourteen-year-olds are re-enacting Robert F. Scott’s 1912 doomed expedition to the South Pole for reality television and a chance to win big prizes, if they survive. The story combines futuristic technology with quotes from the real explorers’ journals and makes for a gut-wrenching and gut-freezing read.

Entertainment Value = 4 – This is a fast-paced, interesting take on the dystopian genre. Fans of The Hunger Games would enjoy it.
Iciness Factor = 4 – The descriptions of blizzards and snow blindness and ice crevasses and Antarctic temperatures will definitely transport your senses to a cooler climate.
Squeamish Scale = 2.5 – It’s been a while since I read this, but I only remember a couple of things that truly gave me the heebie jeebies. One had to do with eyes, and I’m pretty squeamish when it comes to eyes.

3. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Nothing keeps you cool like a day in a Siberian prison camp. Ivan Denisovich Shukhov was wrongfully sentenced to ten years of labor in one of the coldest places on earth. Solzhenitsyn’s novel depicts one of his three thousand, six hundred, and fifty-three days of internment.

Entertainment Value = 4.5 – A great read. Ivan handles the cold, hunger, and injustice of his situation with dignity, strength, and even optimism.
Iciness Factor = 5 – This book will chill you to your bones. And make you hungry for bread.
Squeamish Scale = 2 – I don’t remember anything violent or gross in this book, only general suffering and despair.

4. The Shining by Stephen King

A family of three spends the winter at a luxurious hotel in Colorado. That’s one way to summarize this book. Another way is… A writer with a history of alcoholism and abuse, his nervous wife, and their strangely gifted five-year-old son take on the job of off-season caretakers at a haunted hotel. Horror ensues.

Entertainment Value = 5 – I can’t believe I waited so long to read this book. It’s amazing. To read more of my thoughts on The Shining, click here.
Iciness Factor = 3 – If you want it to make you even colder, you can always put the book in the freezer like Joey did on Friends. I always loved that episode. Although, now that I’ve read the book, I know that Joey was actually describing the movie.
Squeamish Scale = 4 – This book is high on the squeamish scale, but it’s my kind of squeamish. Good scary stuff.

5. In the Kingdom of Ice: The Grand and Terrible Polar Voyage of the USS Jeannette by Hampton Sides

This nonfiction book tells the story of George De Long and the thirty-three men who set out in 1879 to try to reach the North Pole on the USS Jeannette. Two years into the voyage, after being trapped in the ice for more than a year, the ship sank, stranding the crew almost a thousand miles north of Siberia.

Entertainment Value = 3.5 – This is a well-written account that reads like fiction in many ways. It’s interesting and informative and gripping, but very harsh in places.
Iciness Factor = 4 – It takes more than a hundred pages to actually reach the arctic, and Sides doesn’t dwell on the cold as much as Solzhenitsyn does, but the very thought of being marooned on an ice pack should cool you off sufficiently.
Squeamish Scale = 4.5 – If you’re squeamish about things like frostbite, syphilis, starvation, and dogs dying, be wary of this book.

Happy reading! May your teeth chatter with delight. 🙂

Where Ideas Come From

I just picked up an old journal from January of 2011 and found the first, very rough, draft of my poem “Enchanted Rock in September” which was published in the 2012 Texas Poetry Calendar.

If you’d asked me yesterday, I would have guessed I wrote that poem in the summer, or maybe during a poetry lesson with my seventh graders during the fall of 2010. I never would have come up with the truth—that I penned it around 10:00 p.m. on January 31st while sitting by the fire pit in my backyard waiting on a cold front.

Here a few of the thoughts I captured that night before I turned my attention to poetry:

“I am sitting in my backyard writing by the light of the campfire I just made for myself (with the help of the fire-starter log from HEB). My plan is to sit here and write in my journal and drink this High Life and read Lolita and enjoy the evening for as long as I like… Tomorrow we are getting a true ‘arctic blast’ that will drop our temperatures down into the teens at night with wind chills in the single digits. Not exactly campfire weather to me. I’ll probably be inside the house, next to the fireplace, wearing a sweatshirt and a scarf, drinking hot tea with a cat on my lap. But tonight I’m wearing my Spider-Man t-shirt and jeans and flip-flops. The thermometer on the back porch says it’s sixty-eight degrees and there is a little breeze that brings along a cool kick with it once in a while—a hint of the cold to come. Perfect weather… Just went inside to check the forecast. They’re saying there will be a low overnight of 50 and a high tomorrow of 35. That doesn’t make any sense to me and makes my brain hurt… I hear a guy whistling a tune. It kind of sounds like it’s coming from the veloway [the bike and rollerblade path behind our house]. A musical rollerblading ghost perhaps? Probably just a neighbor.”

That forecast still doesn’t make any sense to me, nor does it make sense that on a January night of campfires and arctic blasts and rollerblading ghosts, I chose to write a poem about hiking up Enchanted Rock in September. But I did, and I’m glad, because I really like that poem.

Ideas can come out of nowhere. My story “A Fair Day,” which starts out with a man staring at a severed human elbow, was born on an airplane on Christmas Day in 2010, as my husband and I flew from his family’s home to mine to celebrate the holiday. The fact that a hot air balloon features heavily in the story comes from some stationery I had at the time. I have no clue why my brain was creating murderous characters and gruesome deaths on a day when I was sublimely happy and enjoying time with loved ones. It just did.

Other times, the inspiration behind a piece is easier to pinpoint. In my story “The Jack-in-the-Box,” a twelve-year-old girl whose father has just died begins receiving messages from the clown inside an old jack-in-the-box toy. The seed for this story was planted when I was playing with my two-year-old niece and her own jack-in-the-box. Hers had a dragon inside, not a clown, but it still scared me. Jack-in-the-boxes have always scared me. My niece wasn’t frightened at all and just kept playing the thing over and over and over, and I found myself thinking, What if one time when the lid popped open something was different? I started writing the story and discovered what would happen as I went.

Sometimes the motivation behind the story actually gets edited out during the revising process. The idea for “The Girl in the Attic,” which was published this summer in Growing Pains by Sinister Saints Press, came from a friend’s Facebook post. She wrote, “Omg. Something in my attic is knocking. Like, ‘Hello? Is anyone home?’ knocking. If I don’t come back… don’t send anyone after me.” I immediately started typing out a story about a girl who hears a knocking coming from the mysterious attic door she’s not allowed to open and decides to investigate. I was well into my first draft and struggling to keep the thread of the story intact, when I realized the knock didn’t make any sense in the literary world I’d created. So I deleted it. There’s still a girl and a mysterious attic door and good amount of horror, but no knocking sound. The story didn’t need it. And yet, without the Facebook post about the knock, I never would have written the story. (Oh and my friend did come back from her attic, by the way. All was well. This time.)

You never know when or where a good idea will strike—on an airplane, by a campfire, or even just checking Facebook. I guess the important thing is to recognize them when they come along, trust your instincts, and see what happens.