Update: New Job, Popular Culture Association Conference, Ferry Frogs, and Tea Parties

Pro Tip: If you don't know how to begin your blog post, try "the photo of a strange thing I saw" cold open.

It's been far too long since my last blog post, and even longer since my last personal update, so here's a quick recap of the past few weeks (and an effort to pretend that I've been busy enough to have an excuse for not blogging):

1.) I got a new job! I am now a part-time staff writer for Children of Nations, a Christian nonprofit that works with orphans in Africa and the Caribbean. This news is so fresh that I haven't even had my first day in the office yet, but I'm too excited to wait to share it. (Generally, I don't discuss my "in-office" professional life on this blog, but I really want to you to check out the marvelous work COTN does.)

2.) I've spent a lot of time lately either writing (on things that aren't this blog), spending time with friends and family (birthdays, family visits, etc.), and dealing with mold. One of these things is not like the others.

I've learned that A) my family is very sensitive to mold and B) "mold hunt" is the worst form of scavenger hunt ever invented.

Rules:

Replace "You're getting warmer/colder" with "You're getting damper/dryer."

Try to guess which area or item in your house will unexpectedly become a sponge.

Find mold.

Five bonus points for each body part that either swells or turns red and itchy.

As I type this, I have approximately one hundred books piled on my bedroom floor; all pulled out so that I could find the single book that decided to go fuzzy on me. (So long, The Book of Tea.)

All the topics I'm "totally going to read up on one of these days."

3.) In slightly older news, the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association conference was held in Seattle at the end of March. This was the closest McFarland Publishing (the publisher of that book I contributed to) was going to be to me all year, so I took a Thursday off and headed down to the conference.

Here I am with the lovely people at the McFarland table. (Many thanks to Gary and Karl-Heinz.)

The closest I will ever get to taking a photo with actual Dick Grayson, Boy Wonder.

Guys, I had a wonderful time at the conference. I can't even tell you. Most of the sessions I sat in on were about comic books, so I basically got to spend the day listening to academics overthink of one my favorite mediums. I was in heaven.

I also wandered the city and ended up eating macarons for the first time (from Belle Epicurean and The Yellow Cupcake Bakery, both of which I recommend).

And at the end of my trip, as I was waiting for my ride at the Bainbridge terminal, who should keep me company but this giant frog pictured above?

4.) I celebrated National Poetry Month in my typical fashion (with literary littering).

5.) I threw a small circus-themed May Day tea party with some wonderful friends.

I don't have any photos of us sitting at the table, but I promise I actually have friends.

My mom and brother created these little critters and their maypole, so I can't take any credit for them.

Now that we're caught up, I can get back to my regularly scheduled posting.

Strange Book Saturday: Boring Postcards USA

I'm introducing a new series of posts: Strange Book Saturdays!

In these posts, I invite you to gawk with me at oddball books. I won't write these posts every Saturday, but when they do show up it will be on a Saturday (or late Friday evening). Because I am a sucker for alliteration.

The preliminary "strange book" is a long-time favorite of mine: Boring Postcards USA (Phaidon).

Exactly what it says on the tin.

A friend and I used to send each other bizarre books we had discovered, and I think this is the first one she sent me (thanks, Cara!).

I spent three and a half of my college years in northern Indiana, yet I still never managed to cross a stretch of road quite this unremarkable.

Warning: You spend enough time staring at these postcards, you start to believe their claims. When I first saw this photo, I grimaced. Now, it actually makes me a little hungry.

The wonder of the book lies in the fact, not that someone took a photo of each of these places and objects, but that someone turned these photos into mass-produced postcards. What's more, some of these cards have obviously gone through the mail. I like to imagine the sort of messages sent from middle-of-nowhere America:

Dear Joan,

I wish you were here. But for all I know, you are here because "here" is indistinguishable from anywhere else.

In the moments between eating at diners dubbed only "Diner" and driving under the blue eye of a sky that never blinks, along a purgatory of endless interstates, I think of you.

Yours,

Jack

This looks less like a location you'd send a postcard from and more like the setting of a low-budget horror flick.

There's a part of me that desperately wants to take a road trip and find all the places where these photos were taken, to create a "before" and "after" series. Which seems like a waste. It's not as though there aren't many more interesting locales in the world, enough that I will never have time to visit them all. (If you'd like to learn about little-known, non-boring sites to plan a road trip around, check out Atlas Obscura.)

But Boring Postcards appeals to a part of me that relishes innocent delight in the ordinary. Anyone can see the beauty in the Grand Canyon. It takes a vigorous imagination to appreciate the beauties of the Gaines Truck Stop in Boyle, Mississippi. At one point, each of the places depicted here meant something to someone, was worth snapping a photo of or sending a note from. Even if only to say, "This is where I was today when I remembered that I love you."

Poetry and Edible Houses: Christmas 2015

Someday, I will write a holiday-themed post before the holiday in question. But today is obviously not that day.

We had a simple, stripped down Christmas this year. (Thank goodness.) But I did attempt some baking. Last year, a friend gave me some house-shaped cake molds.

One of the houses came out cleanly:

Gluten-free gingerbread cake with chopped candied ginger and powdered sugar snow.

The other one. . .less so. At which point, it was 11 p.m. on Christmas Eve, and I decided that the only logical thing was to attempt to glue it together with cream cheese frosting.

Remember how I said that I don't bake much? The last time I had tried to make frosting, it went flat as a lake and turned into glaze. ("How can you mess up frosting? There must have been something wrong with the sugar," my mother said. Sure, let's go with that.) But this time, it actually became frosting, so I'm marking that as a success.

I knew the second house wasn't remotely pretty, but I was still a little shocked when Mom said, "Oh, what a cute chimney."

That's a tree, Mom. Obviously.

Well, at least it tasted good.

This year, my church's Advent sermon series was titled "Simply Jesus." I wrote a poem for the series that was handed out at our five o'clock service. 

A small Christmas gift to the other members of Gateway Fellowship.

I realize that (unless you are Orthodox) we are well into the post-Christmas season now, but I've included the poem below for those who are curious.

Simply Christmas

Don’t misunderstand, I love

the ridiculous ritual

of it all: the maudlin movies, the bell-song,

the scent of cinnamon and cloves, the way everything

is red and green and glitter

until your eyes water. The trouble

lies under the glitz and the gilt,

near the core of Christmas: a human poverty, the empty ache

that called the riches of Heaven

down to earth. The trouble is I know

there will never be enough

in my checkbook to give

the people I love the gifts they need most.

So the ache in me prays for the ache you:

May you receive a spark of courage

to light the woods ahead of you

in dark months. May you find a peace

to wrap around your head like an oversized

scarf, blocking out the cold and anxious wind.

May you maintain that stubborn flame of joy

we find in the Beatitudes: “happy are. . .

the poor in spirit, the ones who mourn, the meek,

the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers,

and the persecuted.” May all your God-given hungers—

for food, for safety and shelter, for love, for justice, and for family—

be filled. May you find your people this year,

your place of belonging, and may you discover

forgiveness for those who once ignored your worth.

May your heart not just be a cup

waiting to be filled, but a channel

that spills into the thirsty world. May you give

as you have received. And may the gift

that stays the closest to your

heart be the one that first arrived

without receipt or ribbon, tagged

for the world God so loved

with Heaven’s brightest beam and wrapped,

by human hands, in simple

swaddling cloth.

CSI: Turkey Division

Last week, I managed to come down with the flu, which I'm still fighting, so between that and work deadlines, blogging just didn't happen.

But I did manage to accomplish other things. Exhibit A:

Things I made: maple-glazed roast turkey, sausage and chestnut stuffing, gravy, and green beans with maple-Dijon almonds. Things I did not make: canned cranberry sauce. (There were also mashed potatoes, but the less said about those, the better).

Exhibit B:

This is the only photo I have of the table. Behold! a bunch of covered dishes and some foil lumps.

In case you haven't figured it out yet: I cooked my first Thanksgiving dinner this year. I cannot adequately express how aggrandized my sense of accomplishment is. When that turkey came out of the oven, I wished there was a cliff nearby to pose on top of.

Gluten-free sweet potato chiffon pie: Exhibit C? Beautiful thing I did not make. (I've run out evidence of "things I did instead of blogging," but I still have photos left.)

I talked Mom into making the pie, and it was delicious. (Baking frightens me a little. I feel there's some truth in the adage "Cooking is an art; baking is a science." And gluten-free baking is like replacing half the elements in your experiment with "things nearby on the periodic table" and hoping the result won't burn off your eyebrows.)

We have a mini-fridge out back where we kept the main dish (in a brown grocery sack). When I retrieved it on Thanksgiving morning, I said "hi" to the neighbor's turkeys, like usual. And suddenly, I felt like I'd been interrupted in the middle of dragging a carpet-wrapped body from my car trunk: "Heeeey, Bob. . . . How're the kids? Nah, nah, I got this, thanks."

Later, they visited the scene of the crime.

"You know and I know what happened here, Becky, but no judge is going to convict on butter splatters alone."

"I can't prove you did it, but I can defecate on your deck."

I can't end a post without giving you something to read, but I really just want to suggest every article I've read about Ian Dengler, food sleuth. He can deduce your family's history just by hearing what you eat for Thanksgiving. Also, I love breakdowns of what people eat in each state for Thanksgiving. So here's one on the most googled Thanksgiving side dishes by state (chess bars for Kentucky sounds about right). Moving across the country has driven home the truth that there's no agreed on "typical" Thanksgiving meal.

I've been asking people this all week (and loving the answers): What dishes (beyond turkey) are required in your family to make Thanksgiving feel like Thanksgiving?

Impromptu Poetry

Poetry has a way of cropping up in unexpected places. Yesterday, in celebration of a dear friend's birthday, I went into Port Townsend. We saw the Rhody Parade.

We attended a cake picnic (and community dance party).

We went to a carnival.

View from the Ferris wheel.

And when wandering through the Farmers Market, I met this woman: Afrose Fatima Ahmed.

She was typing out name-your-price poems on a portable typewriter. I was impressed both by her ability to focus in the midst of the market noise and by the quality of her lightning-speed work. Her website contains some brief information about what she refers to as her "impromptu poetry."



I find this idea of a poem written instantly and then cast out—bread upon the waters, no copies saved, no revisions made—both intriguing and terrifying.

How I Celebrate National Poetry Month

Just because April is almost over doesn't mean that I'm done celebrating.

Of course, I've been celebrating by reading and writing poetry. But National Poetry Month is also about sharing poetry, so for the last two (going on three) years, I've also done the following:

After the third attempt at photography, I was like "Maybe the air in here is just blurry."

The other side looks like:

Throughout the year, I write down lines of poetry that capture me. And when April comes, I hide them away in various places for members of the unsuspecting public to find.

Like many of my ideas, this tends to work better in theory than in practice. This year, I didn't get around to finishing all my cards until yesterday, so I've only hidden five so far. Also, even when I finish my cards in time, I tend to forget I have them with me. (I carried fifteen to church today, and I left with the exact same number.)

Sometimes, I worry that the only people who will find them will be much-put-upon custodians, who will slowly grow to hate both poetry and April. ("Another flippin' index card?! April is the cruelest month.")

But I do like finding small, beautiful things in unexpected places. And I doubt I'm the only one.

There's still some April left. So let's see if I can dispose of fifteen more cards before May 1st. Any ideas?

Quick Update and More Shameless Self-Promotion

Between a stubborn illness and editing deadlines, I haven't had much time to even think about blogging. However, since some people (i.e., almost two people) asked about places to find my poetry, I'm happy to use that as an excuse for a post.

My Easter-themed sugar cookies. Because I'm almost as proud of these.

I currently have three poems in the most recent online edition of SNReview, which can be viewed for free.

I've also placed second in the 2015 Koser/Lohr Honorary Award contest sponsored by the Pennsylvania Poetry Society. (Later, my poem will be printed in their annual publication, but I don't have any information about dates yet.)

Happy National Poetry Month, Happy Easter!

April is National Poetry Month.

The Academy of American Poets (through poets.org) offers a list of 30 Ways to Celebrate National Poetry Month. And Writer's Digest's "Poetic Asides" blog is encouraging people to write a poem every day this month through daily prompts (and contests).

Later in April, I will write about what I do to celebrate this month of poetry.

But right now I'm the middle of celebrating something even dearer to me (though I find it impossible to separate poetry from the Gospel). Happy Easter, readers!

The exterior of "Crossroads: Where Art and Passion Meet," a yearly Stations of Cross through art in Port Townsend, WA.

With friends Heather and Vicky. (Thanks so much for taking me!)

The Egg and I Road and a Giant Metal Fish, or Spring Comes to the Olympic Peninsula

So it's April and I haven't even posted my Fifty Books List from 2012 yet.... It seems like I can only manage one of two things: I can have a life or I can have a blog about my life.

But one of the books I read last year was The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald, which was alternatively interesting, funny, depressing, and startlingly racist.

I knew Betty MacDonald for her Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle series, which I loved as a child. But she was probably even better known for her memoir about struggling to run a chicken farm on the Olympic Peninsula in the late 1920s. The Egg and I became wildly popular, spawned several copycat titles, and many films (most of them about Ma and Pa Kettle, sort of precursors to the Beverly Hillbillies).

I have trouble deciding how much I actually like the book, but the setting of the book is close to where I live now. There's an egocentric delight in reading good descriptions of local scenery.

After church on Easter, we took a drive.

And here's a view from Egg and I Road. (We weren't sure where exactly the farm had been located, but here's a farm that makes me think of Betty MacDonald's house huddled at the feet of the mountains.)

Then we turned onto Egg and I Ridge Road.

And then we were done being vaguely literary and we went here:

Do you know what's inside the giant metal fish? If you guessed "most of creation," you'd be correct.

That's what I call making efficient use of your giant salmon.

MLA Conference in Seattle and Some News

Okay, first things second. I will have two poems in an upcoming edition of The Sow's Ear Poetry Review (when I find out which issue, I'll let you know). I'm so excited, you'd think I was up for a Nobel.

*****

Earlier this month, the Modern Language Association held its annual conference in Seattle. Several sessions were open to the public. So I went up on Thursday night and spent Friday at the conference. (Many thanks to the Seattle Brengans for room, board, and good times.)

Here are some photos from the Kingston ferry dock.

After being happily landlocked for so many years, I'm amazed that I live near all this water.

I didn't get much sleep the night before the conference, and I discovered that when I'm tired I can't understand directions. I lived at the help desk. Here's a photo of part of the lobby area with one of the conference workers helping an attendee who isn't me, for once.

Being in such an academic environment was both invigorating and bemusing. Before one session, I heard a woman behind me mutter something about "the politics of periodism." I couldn't decide if I was more tickled by the fact that there are people who can say things like "the politics of periodism" and Foucauldian without blinking—or by the fact that I knew what she was talking about.

Some of the sessions were academics presenting papers on minutiae that I suspect you can only appreciate if you're already studying those particular subspecies of English literature. I felt relief that I wasn't a doctoral student (and gratitude that other people are willing to be doctoral students and let me pick their brains).

I stumbled into my favorite session of the day by accident. (I had intended to go to a session on Harold Pinter, only to realize that session was on Saturday. Did I mention that I can't read directions when I'm tired?) Author Richard Van Camp's session was so good, I worked up enough courage to ask to have my photo taken with him.

Speaking of awesome writers... here's the Chinese poet Xi Chuan answering an audience question.

The man next to him is his official (written) translator, Lucas Klein. A poem would be read in Chinese, and over half the audience would laugh or nod. Then those of us who spoke only English would eagerly wait for the translation so we could find out what everyone else was reacting to.

I left the conference feeling revitalized and with an even bigger to-read list. (Special thanks to Scott who talked to me during lunch and gave me some great suggestions.)

2012 Reading Challenges (part 1)

Happy 2012, everyone!

I hope you all had a good Christmas. Most of our decorations are in boxes, which are hidden behind other boxes somewhere in our storage unit. So we had a sweet, simple Christmas this year.

That's a bay tree for a Christmas tree. And note the wood stacked under the fireplace. Most of that ended up in the last upstairs room that needed flooring. (And don't worry, that's a fake log in the fireplace.)

Normally, I would now post my Fifty Books Challenge list for 2011, but I realized that I had neglected to post a list for 2010. In part because I was more worried about moving and selling the house than blogging, and in part because I wasn't sure I had actually read fifty books. But by including some of the longer, more "word heavy" graphic novels I read, I just made fifty. 2011 will have to wait until the next post. Here's 2010.

Fiction  

YA/Juvenile   
Nonfiction  
Memoir
Collections (short stories, essays, etc.)  
Drama  
Poetry

1. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress—Dai Sijie (tran. by Ina Rilke)
2. Good Masters, Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village—written by Laura Amy Schlitz, illustrated by Robert Bird
3. The Literary Enneagram: Characters from the Inside Out—Judith Searle
4. The Glass Castle: A Memoir—Jeannette Walls
5. 1984—George Orwell
6. Shriek: An Afterword—Jeff Vandermeer
7. The Patron Saint of Liars—Ann Patchett
8. Castle Rackrent—Maria Edgeworth
9. The Bible Cure for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue—Don Colbert
10. Wide Sargasso Sea—Jean Rhys
11. Early Irish Myths and Sagas—trans. by Jeffrey Gantz
12. In Country—Bobby Ann Mason
13. The Names Upon the Harp: Irish Myth and Legend—written by Marie Heaney, illustrated by P.J. Lynch
14. The Color Purple—Alice Walker
15. Homer’s Odyssey: A Fearless Feline Tale, or How I Learned about Love and Life with a Blind Wonder Cat—Gwen Cooper
16. Murder in the Cathedral—T.S. Eliot
17. The Stranger—Albert Camus
18. The Messiah of Stockholm—Cynthia Ozick
19. Literary Feuds: A Century of Celebrated Quarrels—From Mark Twain to Tom Wolfe—Anthony Arthur
20. One Hundred Years of Solitude—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
21. The Quiet American—Graham Greene
22. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone—J.K. Rowling (audio book)
23. A Clockwork Orange—Anthony Burgess
24. Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader—Anne Fadiman
25. 99 Poems in Translation—selected by Harold Pinter, Anthony Astbury, and Geoffrey Godbert
26. Moll Flanders—Daniel Defoe
27. How Reading Changed My Life—Anna Quindlen
28. The Reader—Bernhard Schlink (trans. by Carol Brown Janeway)
29. The Complete Persepolis (graphic novel)— Marjane Satrapi
30. Bone Black: Memories of Girlhood—bell hooks
31. Longing: Stories of Racial Healing—Phyllis and Eugene Unterschuetz
32. Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India, and Indonesia—Elizabeth Gilbert
33. Watchmen (graphic novel)—written by Alan Moore, art by Dave Gibbons
34. Get Known Before the Book Deal: Use Your Personal Strengths to Grow an Author Platform—Christina Katz
35. Once Upon a Quinceanera: Coming of Age in the U.S.A.—Julia Alvarez
36. Coraline (graphic novel)—written by Neil Gaiman, art by P. Craig Russell
37. What Ever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? (graphic novel)—Brian Fies
38. Wish You Well—David Baldacci
39. Mushishi (Vol. 1)—Yuki Urushibara
40. Smile (graphic novel)—Raina Telgemeier
41. Inside the Beverly Hills Supper Club Fire—Ron Elliot (as told by Wayne Dammert)
42. Their Eyes Were Watching God—Zora Neale Hurston
43. Maus (graphic novel)—Art Spiegelman
44. Sarah’s Key—Tatiana de Rosnay
45. New Covenant Bound—T. Crunk
46. The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel—Nat Gertler and Steve Lieber
47. Drinking Coffee Elsewhere—ZZ Packer
48. American-Born Chinese (graphic novel)—Gene Luen Yang
49. The Art of Reading Poetry—Harold Bloom
50. Watership Down—Richard Adams

Total:
22 fiction.

11 non-fiction

7 memoir (though maybe Whatever Happened to the World of Tomorrow? should be here too)

4 juvenile/YA (or 5, since Smile is a YA memoir)

3 collections

2 poetry collections

1 play

Out of those books 6 were graphic novels. (A medium I started exploring in 2010.) And 10 were on that literature list I like.

There were other things I read that were too short/word-light to make the list. I thought a few of these were worth mentioning:

• A Day in the Life of Ireland: Photographed by 75 of the World's Leading Photojournalists on One Day, May 17, 1991—Collins Publishers

• Mouse Guard: Fall 1152—David Peterson (graphic novel)

• The Arrival—Shaun Tan (graphic novel/picture book)

Moving Update: Notes from the Northwest

What does Bethany do during those long stretches when she's not blogging? Generally, she shuffles commas for money, writes, gets sinus infections, and reads books which she then fails to blog about.

Oh. And she moves across the country.

In May, my family and I moved from western Kentucky to Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula. (Finally, a legitimate excuse for being behind on all the things I'm usually behind on anyway!)

There was (and is) a lot of work to be done on the house and not enough space for everyone and all our boxes, so I spent two weeks (which quickly became three months) in Salem, Oregon with my wonderful grandmother.

A quick recap of things done and seen in Oregon:

Hanging out with family and learning how to gamble.

                          

                                       Birthday parties.

                                         Memorial Day.

Fourth of July.

                             Reader's Guide bookstore.

Salem Public Library.

Powell's Books. This photo is of my favorite room in Powell's. (And note those lovely wooden shelves.)

I’d been to Powell’s when I was younger, and it wasn’t as big as I remembered, but it’s still huge. You need the map. (In my imagination, Powell's was the size of Disneyland, except better because it was entirely books.)



There were quirky little things all over the store, especially in the Literature and Fiction section: handwritten notes with employee recommendations, search tips on alternate spellings of authors's names, mini-reviews, etc.

(See the size of this Graham Greene section?)

I wanted to get some photos that showed how large Powell’s is, but I was a little distracted.



English Country Dancing. That red blur is me.

Dancing that requires an understanding of left vs. right is generally not for me. But I loved English Country Dancing, though it took all of my focus to follow the instructions. I've gained a new respect for Elizabeth Bennet, who could converse and dance simultaneously.

Most of my things (read: books) are still in boxes, but I'm happy to be back "home" in Washington now. It's beautiful here: ocean, mountains, really tall evergreens. I can't get over how tall some of these trees are.

Here's a tree looming over our roof.

Or for scale: Here's my family and some of the trees at the Dungeness Recreation Area.














I'm slowly settling in, but I'm still missing a certain... Kentuckiness. Things are different here. Not better or worse, just different. I enjoy meeting new people and seeing new places (though I still spend far too much time in front of my computer screen), but I keep wishing someone would say y'all.