Links to My Interview at Rattlecast

 If you missed my live interview with Tim Green at Rattlecast, you can still watch it recorded at one of these links:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rattlecast/id1477377214

https://soundcloud.com/rattlepoetry/ep-63-jessica-goodfellow

https://www.rattle.com/audio/63-Jessica-Goodfellow.mp3

https://www.facebook.com/RattleMagazine/videos/397542021408452/

I won't be listening; I find hearing myself kind of horrifying, but you can listen if you'd like, and you can even reassure me that it went well, if you are up for that kind of consoling! 

Rattlecast #63

 Friends, I'll be interviewed by editor Tim Green on Rattlecast #63, the podcast of Rattle Magazine. It will also be broadcast live on YouTube and archived there at https://youtu.be/pt8x2WImxdI It will also livestream on Facebook and Periscope.

The live event is on 10/20 at 9 pm EST. 

And you can download it from wherever you get your podcasts later. 

So, there's that. 

 

Perpetuation of the Species: Poets Respond

Rattle has a weekly feature in which a poet writes about a current event. This week the Poets Respond poem is my brand spanking new poem about the refugee crisis.

It's nerve-wracking to write a poem on Friday and submit it 15 minutes before the midnight deadline, and then have it appear on Sunday. But I do hope you read the poem, and perhaps respond yourself to Poets Respond.

Thanks to Tim Green and Rattle for giving my newest poem a home. It's heart-breaking that the refugees aren't able to get a new home so readily.

Wakening, for Nepal

With the loss of life so high in Nepal, and especially with the loss of so many climbers on Mt. Everest, Nina Romano of Bridle Path Press has decided to re-post my poem "Wakening" on the press's Poet's Corner. "Wakening" originally appeared in Rattle.

I hope this poem can be of some comfort to someone during this crisis, and the aftermath, which lasts for so much longer than those of us whose daily lives are unaffected can imagine.

Wakening: Rattle

My poem "Wakening" is featured at the Rattle homepage today, thanks to editor Timothy Green. There's a recording of me reading it too. Enjoy.

Winter's Rattle

I have new work out in Rattle, volume 46, a poem called "Wakening" about the loss of my uncle on Mt. McKinley. Thanks to Tim Green, who chose the cover art by James Bernal with a view to my poem.

3 Interesting Things

1. A two-hour reading and Q&A with Etgar Keret here (from Front Porch Journal). What's not to love!

2. Shawnte Orion, participant in the Writing Process Blog Tour, has a new book out. Congratulations, Shawnte, on the release of The Existentialist Cookbook!

3. Rattle has a call out for Japanese forms for its Spring 2015 issue. Haibun, haiku, tanka, renga--all the different forms--they want 'em. Deadline October 15.

SoCal Reading

If you'll be in Southern California on Sunday, August 10th, please consider joining William Trowbridge, Taylor Supplee, and me for an evening of the Rattle Reading Series. It's at the Flintridge Bookstore and Coffeehouse in La Cañada-Flintridge. Followed by an open mic!

Would love to see you there!

Submissions Call: Japanese Poetic Forms

Rattle has a submissions call out for poems based on Japanese forms (haiku, renga, haibun, senryuu, tanka, etc.).

It's for their Spring 2015 issue, with a deadline of October 15th. I'm going to encourage some of my students to submit! Maybe you should too!

Incidentally, The Roaster Moan Poetry Cooperative has a class starting next week in Japanese poetic forms, with Alan Summers as teacher. Check it out, but do so soon!

Rattle Seeks Singles (With Kids)

Rattle is seeking writing by single parents, the group of writers with the least amount of time to write, I should imagine.

Rattle has a lot of interesting themed issues, often based on facets of the identity of the writers, such as lawyers, southern poets, clery, Australian poets. Be sure to check them out periodically to see if they've identified you.

Hear the Rattle

Don't forget about RATTLE's audio archives, with now nearly 300 poems uploaded. This is useful to listen to before giving a poetry reading, particularly if you don't have a lot of experience reading poetry aloud.

Do you have any favorite audio archives online?

Gailey on Getting Reviewed

Poet Jeannine Hall Gailey blogs about how to get your book reviewed here.  A veteran reviewer, Gailey tells how she and others who review poetry choose which books they will spend their time commenting on. Then she provides specific tips for bringing your book to a reviewer's attention, including: put a personal note in with the book copy you send to the reviewer, follow up later, and make suggestions about which literary magazines might be receptive to a review of your book.

Gailey's final tip was one that really hit home: be a reviewer yourself. Gailey admits that she is more motivated to review a book by a given poet when that person's website or blog (or personal note) mentions their own reviewing activity. Plus, it's one way of giving back to the literary community, whether anyone rewards you for it with a review of your book or not.

I have never written any reviews, mostly because it never occurred to me that anyone would value a review written by an MFA-less, poetry-self-educated person like myself. But now I am wondering if there is a place for a review by me somewhere.

Recently I have noticed a few journals that list books they have received for review and which they would be happy to send a volunteer reviewer.

Rattle's online review policy, for example, includes the following: "...we offer the E-Review forum. Almost anything goes here — reviews can be very brief or very long, they can be high praise or healthy criticism. If you read a book and you have a reaction, write up a review and send it in. We encourage the personal narrative in particular (see this note). We’ll screen for content and quality, and we won’t be able to put everything online, but if you have something useful to say, that others might want to hear, we will. Just follow the guidelines here, or request a book from this list. And if you’re just looking for a good book, go ahead and browse." This paragraph follows an explanation of why Rattle has gone to an all-online policy for reviews, including the spatial problems print issues face in reviewing more than a few books, any chapbooks at all, or prose books.

Another journal that I noticed as offering review copies to people willing to review is Verse Wisconsin, whose reviewing guidelines you can find at this link. Scroll to the bottom of the page for guidelines, and look to the right column (beginning at the top of this page) for a list of books available for review.

I'm sure there are many other journals that would be happy to have reviewers volunteering their services. I've only started keeping my eye out for them recently, so these are the first ones I've run across. If you've had success placing an unsolicited review with a journal, let us know!

Chase is On

As part of Rattle's newest issue themed "Buddhist Poets," the journal offers an interview with poet Chase Twichell. If you want to read an excerpt, they offer one in their always-free always-interesting online eIssue (no.11), beginning on page 28.

And if it's not too silly to say this, here's an excerpt (or two) from that excerpt:

"Well I think one of the dangers of writing for a long time is that you become more and more conscious of what you’re doing, which eventually becomes a kind of reflex of self-consciousness so that you start to write something and you think, “That’s no good,” and you censor yourself, you pause, and it’s very hard to just put the stuff out there and worry about it later...."


"...at that point I started working on the computer instead of longhand. Because I used to keep every draft, in case there might be some gem in there that I’d overlooked, and I’d go back five years later and think, “Oh, I really was a genius, I just didn’t know it at the time.” And basically I go back through that old stuff and that’s just what it is, the throwaways; that’s where they should have gone. And so I began to work on the computer , which I’d never done before, and it meant letting go of things all the time, just as part of writing. “I don’t like the way this is going, am I going to stick with it?” “Nope, gone.” Or just getting to a sticky part in a poem, being able to make the choice between saving it for later, throwing it away, or working it into the poem. And so I have two notebooks. One of them is called “The Compost,” and that’s where all those little scraps that might develop into something go, and usually that’s where they stay, although every once in a while I will be able to use something somewhere or some snippet will turn out to be the seed of another poem. And then there’s one called “The Orphanage,” which is for polished, perfected bits in poems that look like poems, sound like poems, but are really fake poems. They all go live in the orphanage and I hope someday I can adopt some of them but so far they’re all still in there."

Love Chase Twichell, love Rattle. Enough said.