If you've been receiving my newsletter, or following me on social media, you're all-too-aware (and probably tired of being aware) that I've been traveling in support of my new book of poems, The Familiar, which came out from TRP: The University Press of SHSU (Texas Review Press) in February of this year. It was a book tour that depended on the kindness of many people, but particularly that of my husband, who held steady at home with the three kids while I went to the Midwest more times than I've ever imagined I would or could. (It was all fantastic, btw. Ten out of five stars!)
I didn't have a single event booked for the month of June, though, which was some kind of kismet because June still managed to feature more than enough chaos for your ol' gal here.
The month began with two blue jays attacking our Plott hound in the backyard because their fledgling offspring jumped out of its nest, but couldn't fly yet—and curiously, Lutz (the Plott hound) hadn't tried to shake it like a rag doll yet, but was investigating. (Apparently his prey drive kicks in with fur-bearing animals, and automobiles like UPS and oil-delivery trucks, not feathered creatures.) So after trying to return it to the nest, which failed, we relocated the little guy to the next yard over, and Lutz was safe from the parental ire of the blue jays.
A few days later, we discovered a nest of four rabbit kits, which we protected from our two hounds by some miracle for the entire week they were growing big enough to leave the nest. And luckily, we noticed them just as they were vacating the nest for good, and right before our dogs did.
No sooner had we set those little guys free in a field down the road, when the dogs discovered a family of opossums living under the bike ramp, and one of those little guys met an untimely end. Several shrews and a fledgling mourning dove, also, were NOT lucky enough to dodge the twin maws of death during the month, but, as Vonnegut would say: So it goes.
(But also, why do these animals keep raising their young in a yard that MUST smell overwhelmingly of dog?)
And then my little 11 year old, who has been a walking meme since birth, had ALL the feels over 1) her eldest sibling transferring from community college to a four year school upstate and 2) leaving elementary school herself and transitioning to middle school this fall. Luckily, there were maybe 3,764 end-of-school, final-year-of-elementary events to remind her of the latter, too, so over and over again she had to live through good-byes that aren't real goodbyes because our town is the size of a postage stamp and our school district is incredibly insular.
Thus, June was a month of little animals having to leave the security of their nests and move on to the next big thing, and it involved all the trauma of a Disney movie's first act, and yes, I'm very aware I'm calling my youngest a little animal. She is, by far, the most feral of our offspring, so it's quite apt.
By some stroke of luck, her anxiety over leaving meant that I didn't have any time to acknowledge or process my own feelings about my last baby moving closer to teen-hood.
I've crammed all of those feelings deep, deep down in my subconscious. They're packed tightly next to my feelings about having our 19 year old leave in August for Binghamton University in upstate New York, and I'm confident they'll ALL resurface at a completely inappropriate and out-of-context time much, much later. Stay tuned! I'm sure it'll be fun for all to witness when it happens.
And now that I've successfully squashed all of those more consequential emotions into some dark recess of my "personality," feelings of being adrift and unfocused with regards to my whole author/writing/poet career are washing over me in waves. When I have a chance to stop and do any kind of reflecting, it's with a good amount of indecision. The spring events, and thus the bulk of my book tour, are more or less over. There are one or two festival/reading opportunities that I'm waiting to hear about, but all in all there's nothing on the docket, which is a relief to my family and also to some small extent, me.
I don't have any regrets about the amount and extent of travel I did over the first 6 months of the year, and I made some fantastic new acquaintances and reconnected with old friends. It wasn't always physically easy, I had to let other areas of my life slide, and there were a handful of moments where it created real conflict between me and my loved ones because, yes, I was taking off yet again.
But also I learned a good deal through this experience about what it means to believe in your work, and support it in even the smallest, most humbling ways. And there were truly humbling moments that countered all of the confidence-boosting ones. I know—because people have either said it directly or more or less expressed it in some oblique way—how solipsistic I appear if you take my Instagram posts and book promotion nonsense at face value. If you look at all of my book tour events in places that are not an easy distance from my home base, it might appear a little, well, extreme for a book of poetry, let alone fabulist narrative poetry. (And can fabulist narrative poetry even compare—in significance, in timelessness, in universality—to the lyric, one might ask?)
If anyone thinks I'm riding high on super-charged self esteem, I would ask them to picture me at an event sitting idly while person after person asks the other poet to sign their book, or sitting for hours at a book table where no one approaches (and if they do, they make it clear that poetry, or at least this poetry, isn't what they like to read). Or the one event where a man spent the better part of a day camped out by my book table, telling me about his re-imagining of Dickens's Christmas Carol, and then going to the local library to print it, and then bringing it to me and insisting I read its three or four pages of unintelligible, lacking-punctuation-or-paragraphs, and then insisting that it's a necessary and important work and that he's sure someone will want to make a movie out of it.
Moments like the first two examples are expected, almost like when one is attempting to have work published: you're going to face rejection. These moments are like small checks to the ego, and reminders that sometimes, you are not for everyone. And that's okay! That's normal! That's to be expected! I can roll with those moments. I accept them. Moments like the latter are more disturbing, and I'm less equipped to handle them. I'm not good with confrontation, and as much as I'd have liked to tell that man to f*ck off in a firm but polite way, I lack that particular skill set and so I didn't.
But these moments will continue to happen if I put myself out there—I am, more or less, inviting those moments when I engage in book (or self-) promotion activities.
Yet, there are other moments. Where a woman approaches me after a reading and says, "I have felt all of that," or better yet, "Have we lived the same life?" That makes me feel less lonely. It makes me feel less strange. It makes me feel like my book and my writing and maybe even me, myself, we have a small place and purpose, if even for a brief 10 minutes in a coffee shop with two or three other people in attendance. Because some of what I put into these poems reflects someone else's experience, too, and maybe that means I'm a shade closer to figuring out something during my time on this earth. Because too often I feel like I haven't figured out a damn thing and never will.
So I try to hold on to solidarity with readers and other writers. And squash the moments that are less pleasant, and bury them deep inside my consciousness like the good little lapsed Catholic that I am. Yay repression!
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