February Newsletter

Dear Comely and Perceptive Readers,

The end of the month is sneakier in February! But I made it just before my self-imposed due date. It’s been an exciting and productive month! March begins with the Women’s March in Portland, so check out my twitter/FB/Instagram for pics from that on Sunday.

Updates about my writing and publishing

Shout: An Anthology of Resistance Poetry and Short Fiction hit the market on February 2nd. It has become an Amazon bestseller (thank you to all of you who got your copy! If you haven’t yet but you’re interested, you can find info HERE), and it’s getting some great feedback. Some of the authors in Seattle have set up a signing up there, and my co-editor Zack Dye set up four reading/signing events in the Bay Area, so I guess that qualifies as my first real book tour!  

I’ve been working with the authors and editors of the other books that will be coming out from Not a Pipe Publishing this year, Heather S. Ransom’s Back to Green (sequel to Going Green and Greener) Kate Ristau’s Shadow Queen (sequel to Shadow Girl), William Schreiber’s Someone to Watch Over, Claudine Griggs’ Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and Jason Brick’s Fighting Upstream (sequel to Wrestling Demons). I am so lucky to get to work with these authors, and with editors Viveca Shearin, Sydney Culpepper, Madeleine Hannah, and Paula Hampton! This work would be impossible to complete without these editors, and the world is a better place for having these author’s voices in the world, so we all owe these editors our thanks. 

My own novel is coming along in fits and starts, and I waste too much time chiding myself for not making enough progress (a sentiment which, ironically, does not help me make any progress). Tonight I came across a comforting insight from two-time poet laureate Tracy K. Smith who pointed out that poetry is often a more social kind of writing. Perhaps that’s why I’ve been pulled in that direction so much, lately; I need my writing to be a bit more social than a novel affords, and maybe it’s okay to allow myself that. I have a book of my poetry in the hands of some great poets now, and if they tell me I wouldn’t be humiliating myself too badly, maybe I’ll put that out into the world this year for that very reason. And maybe it’s even acceptable to embarrass myself a little in order to get that human connection through my words. It’s okay to admit I need people. 

Link to an article

I’m a big fan of Michael Harriot, a writer for The Root. Besides his own insightful pieces, he maintains a blog of his responses to reader’s email questions, the Clapback Mailbag. This month he had a post where he responded to the hate mail received by his colleagues, and it was glorious:

https://www.theroot.com/the-root-s-clapback-mailbag-the-state-of-the-clapback-1841503378

Tweet from someone you should consider following

One person I love following on twitter is author Christopher Moore at @TheAuthorGuy His tweets will just make your life better. Like his novels. And waffles. 

Poem

This one has a fun origin story. A poet who is a twitter friend posted something about how she was frustrated that she’d thought of a poem but it had vanished before she could write it down. I suggested we write poems about where those poems go when they disappear. Here was mine:

Leaked

Not flowing like mercury

instead inching slowly

oily, viscous, sludgy paced but

still sinking between and dripping into

that room where 

fairies collect the residue

on the ends of wands and drizzle it

across the tops of pastries fed to nymphs

who are never prey for satyrs because

they own their bodies and are 

made so strong by

the magic

of the poems that slipped away.

Book recommendation

I recently read Omar El Akkad’s American War, and I highly recommend it. The novel tells the story of a second American civil war, and I went into that with some trepidation because it’s a subject I started writing a novel about many years ago and haven’t finished, and I worried about being influenced by Mr. El Akkad’s work. His book is very different than the one I was working on, so I shouldn’t have been worried about that. Instead, I should have been worried about being intimidated because of the quality of his prose. This is an excellent novel written before the Trump presidency, and I’ve heard Mr. El Akkad speak about how he designed it to help Americans understand how people living in war torn lands he visited as a war correspondent are not some inferior tribal people hell-bent on their own self destruction, but people exactly like you and me trapped in the power of cultural, economic, and religious forces beyond their own control. I think it was Ta-Nehesi Coates who said that when we look back at history, instead of asking how we would have done things differently, we should be asking why we would have done things in the same way, and American War will make you ask why, if you’d grown up in Afghanistan or Iraq or Syria, you’d be making the very same decisions about how to live or die or kill that the people there are making every day. 

Also, Heather S. Ransom’s Back to Green, the third book in her Going Green trilogy, will be available on March 10th. You can pre-order it now, and if you’re a fast reader, you can probably devour Going Green and Greener before your copy of Back to Green arrives. The end of this trilogy is excellent. Each book in the series broadens the scope of the protagonist’s life as she takes on a larger role in her world (and I love the way the covers get more crowded with characters to reflect that). It’s a great allegory for the process of growing up to be a more engaged citizen, but it never loses the sense that our place in our world is most deeply felt when it comes to our closest relationships, no matter how much the world’s challenges try to bend and break those bonds. Definitely worth checking out!

Announcements/reminders

It may seem like it’s a ways off, but I encourage you to sign up for our Writing Against the Darkness Team now. On the longest day of the year, June 20th, we’re going to participate in The Alzheimer’s Associations annual The Longest Day fundraiser by writing from dawn to dusk. You can participate wherever you are or join us at the Oregon Coast. Find out more and sign up HERE.

Sponsored section

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Put out the fires you can, and dance while you're doing it.

-Benjamin Gorman