New Author Website

Hello, anyone possibly reading this!  I finally went ahead and made that author website, and all my writing-related news and updates will now be found there:

https://jekihlstrom.wixsite.com/work

Thank you for reading!

Blogging Time

I'm probably going to be transitioning this blog into more of a basic writerly website with bio info and links to poems and reviews and stuff.  It would be neater and more useful for anyone who's interested in what's up with me or my writing.  And there will be no inevitable sense of failure when I remember how long it's been since I've last posted!

But, again, using my two toddlers as an excuse, finding time is oh so difficult sometimes.  Most of the time.  I could blog about what I really think about time (that it's not really a thing, actually, anyway, and not really the enemy I make it out to be.)  But I don't have the time!  Har har har.

Anyway, here are two newsbits:

Two new poems up since last month at Ginosko:  

Ginosko 17, 2015-2016

One of these poems is very personal and both are ones I'm glad to see out there.  Many thanks to this journal that publishes thoughtful poetry and occupies a much-needed niche.

Secondly, Melusine's 13th issue just launched on Sunday!  This one took a while to get together, but I like it a lot.

Melusine 8.1, Winter 2016

Well, my daughter, the older toddler, is up from her nap.  No more blogging for now.  I #amwriting, though.  And bettering the manuscript.  And sending it out.  Need to send out some more poems soon; they're ready and waiting for me to sort through the list of awesome new journals that I've only just recently discovered thanks to people who keep up with lit stuff much better than I do.  Sending out a (small) boatload of submissions is the next thing on the list, actually, for as soon as there's more time...

July

I figure that if I title a post "July" that follows a previous post entitled "June," my 0-3 readers won't notice that an entire year + 1 month, rather than simply 1 month, has elapsed since my last post.  But I guess this paragraph kind of ruined that whole plan, didn't it?  I've foiled my own undoing yet again.

I guess it would suffice to blame a new baby with a toddler already on hand for the blog-less year, but in truth it was an older family member's illness, combined with the time devoted to the kids, that pretty much completely took over my life from about the time of that last post until early this April, when my family member finally and rather suddenly recovered.  

I don't usually write plainly about very personal events in poems that I attempt to publish, but one of the poems that was just picked up by Ginosko for publication this Fall/Winter (yay!) does talk about this experience.  Caring emotionally for a very sick and very close family member, while also caring for a new baby and another very young child, was such an overwhelming experience that it's hard not to commemorate it in some way, because it really did alter my whole relationship with reality, in a way probably only surpassed by the birth of my children.  

Basically, life as I knew it in August 2012, before my daughter was born, is barely recognizable to me now.  I guess that's how it is with most parents.  And it's not like I hadn't heard that line before.  But if I'd listened enough to believe it, maybe I would have had kids earlier, so I could get on with this new phase of my life earlier.  Because, whatever its drawbacks, it's so much more, well, real.  And now that my "real life" is here, all I wish is that there were more of it left.  There's so much I want to learn and do, but not so much for myself anymore, to accumulate accomplishments, but instead out of some drive to participate in the world, a drive that's much stronger, for me, than the drive to achieve ever was.  I'm brimming with ideas, but my entire outlook has changed, and I'm not sure yet exactly what to do with them.  And the unfortunate thing is that, even though my outlook has changed, not every messed-up attribute and maladaptive behavior or cognition has fallen immediately into line.  What takes a lifetime to learn to do badly and view erroneously takes more than a few years to learn to do productively and in good health.  All the mindfulness training and life-affirming philosophy in the world won't work miracles.  During that "lost" year of being entirely engulfed in the role of a caretaker, I thought I had managed to make some kind of leap that would have been otherwise impossible, without that experience of almost losing myself, or my "self."  The last few months have reminded me, at times harshly, that I'm not there yet, not even close, really, but maybe closer than I was before, and I guess that's something.  So on, on.  My biggest challenge lately has been maintaining focus.  I have a billion things to read and find it difficult to get through more than a page of anything, and my memory is utter crap.  Lack of sleep is a big part of it, and I can try to blame the kids in part for that, but there's also the trap I've fallen into of overthinking everything except the things that could benefit from a little reflection. 

So, yeah, that bit of oversharing aside, there's the only real literary news I've had in quite a while, the two poems forthcoming in Ginosko, about which I'm pretty excited because they're poems I'm proud of; they came from an authentic place.  Now to try to find more of that, the poems and the authentic place.  More difficult than it sounds.

June

And another three months have passed by ... but this time I have a pretty good excuse.  I welcomed my little boy into the world during a St. Patrick's Day blizzard here in Maryland (not a particularly common occurrence.)  Despite the leonine weather conditions at his debut, he is a little lamb, the sweetest-tempered baby I've ever seen -- although, in stature, he may be leaning somewhat toward the leonine side.  His height and weight measurements were off the charts at his one-month checkup, but after his second-month, he's back to being just a bit tall, which is good enough, I think.  His sister is petite, and if he is aiming to be a giant, it wouldn't be long before people were confused as to which is the older.  At least my brother and I were grown before people started making that mistake.

In poetry news, I just found out the other day that I made the short list for Kore Press's First Book Award.  Since I had already seen the winner and two other finalists announced earlier and thought that was the last I'd heard of it, I was actually rather psyched to see my name on the short list.  Winning is nice, but "almost" is still encouraging.  There isn't always a lot of feedback in the writing world, so this sort of thing is what makes it easier to persevere.  There's another contest deadline coming up, and I'm kind of excited now to polish the thing off, add a few new poems, maybe subtract one or two more, and send it out again.

I also just saw the cover for the issue of the Free State Review where my poem will be appearing this summer ... excited about that, too!

I had been feeling a little discouraged lately about the writing endeavor ... there is never enough time to do as much of it as I'd like now.  I did manage to write a new poem recently, though, and am fairly pleased with it.  I've actually written three since March, which isn't bad, actually.  Not really bad at all.

March

I'm not sure how I missed this very lovely, thoughtful review of my chapbook in Prick of the Spindle that appeared in their previous issue from September.  It was written by Jen Dempsey, who is currently teaching English in South Korea.

The Winter/Spring issue of Melusine launched this past Sunday, which I am very happy about.  Besides the fact that I am proud of the issue, I'm also glad to be free to think about other things literary and non-literary.  Well, mostly non-literary.  Baby #2 is due in just a little over two weeks, which is kind of crazy.  For the longest time, it seemed as if I still had six months to prepare, mentally and otherwise.  I hope Baby #1 handles the company OK.  It will be pretty exciting for us to meet the baby boy, obviously; I hope his big sister will feel the same.  I think she will, at least in time.  She is a loving little girl, and there is plenty of love to go around these days... For now, I'm enjoying the hours spent, just the two of us.

I have a personal/writer's website in the works that is almost ready to launch, actually, and has been ready for a while, pending some finishing touches.  But, as with a lot of things, the next month or two won't be the time to put finishing touches on things, and so things will have to wait a bit longer.

In the meantime, maybe I will make some room on this here blog to compile links to the chapbook's reviews... It was released in 2011, but it's cool to think people are still reading it, and I'd love to expand its readership by another reader or two, despite my lack of finesse in the area of self-promotion.  I have one other literary project planned for the next week, but I'll see if I can manage both.  Then, of course, I might want to consider actually writing a new poem again.  There's an idea, huh?  I wrote more than I thought I would in A.'s first year, less so since the new pregnancy.  I definitely won't be doing NaPoWriMo this April, technically speaking, but, hey, if I can write just one poem all month, I'll consider that a modest success.  Maybe in May, I could try for two.

News, of Literary and Other Varieties

Despite spending a beautiful Christmas Day with family watching A. run around like an espresso-fueled elfling enjoying her first real holiday haul (we'll have to scale back next year so she doesn't start forming expectations of how much "stuff" she is entitled to...) I have still been fighting the winter blues as usual this season.  It's especially tough being stuck inside even on sunny days because it's like 20 degrees out... and not getting outside enough this summer to get my quota of Vitamin D probably didn't help, either.

I feel (more than) a little anxiety about baby #2's arrival this March.  (Did I mention this news here yet?)  He was a planned surprise, I guess, the surprise being how quickly he was conceived in comparison to his sister, despite the fact that I was only barely still in my 30s when he was conceived (and will no longer be in that demographic when he's born.)  So we were thrilled, but on the other hand, I'm also kind of freaked out about the prospect of raising an infant and a toddler all at once.  Our hunter-gatherer forebears apparently timed their births more like three or four years apart, and so did my mom, my immediate forebear, and I'm thinking they were all probably on to something with that plan... However, I got a much later start than any of my forebears did and so waiting that long wasn't an option, although both of my grandmothers did give birth to second and fourth children, respectively, at the age of 40, so maybe that should make me a little less nervous ... but I can't help but be a little worried about the birth, and the recovery, too.  When I was pregnant with A., I spent the entire third trimester in summertime, and although that meant my feet and nonexistent ankles resembled zeppelins, I was bathed in the optimism of summertime, a first-time prospective mother's excitement bred of blissful ignorance (despite the strong measure of realism that led me to delay this step for so long in the first place) and a relatively easygoing lifestyle.  Go to work, or -- toward the end -- work from home, eat, sleep, read, write, entertain myself on weekends and downtime in the same ways I had for most of my adult life (with the exception of alcoholic beverages.)  Now my life is radically changed -- in many ways, for the better.  I spend my days with a person I love more than I've loved anyone or even realized I could love anyone.  She makes me giddily, insanely happy just being her exuberant, affectionate little self.  And yet it's not an easy, stress-free life full of the sorts of things that used to make me feel productive or accomplished.  I neglect my writing for months at a time; Melusine issues lag; I can't even seem to keep up with posting baby photos on Facebook, much less socializing even as much as I used to before (which wasn't all that much.)  The house doesn't look much worse than it did before; in fact, with all the baby-proofing and reorganizing we've had to do, it probably looks a lot better, but it still isn't what I imagine most people's houses look like, and forget trying to cook healthy meals from scratch.  If I'm a housewife, I'm the worst one ever, a badge of shame as well as a measure of guilty pride, I guess.  When I spend time on one thing, like getting the house in order, another thing, like writing, languishes, and I'm not willing to give up on the writing.  I'm hoping that eventually my two contract editing gigs will earn me enough funds to hire a housecleaning service, but so far that's not been the case.

So that's what's been happening -- a much more confessional post than the vast majority of what I put up here, but what the hell; I may as well be honest.  And in the end, I still have no regrets; I just wish I had a lot more time, in the near-term and long-term sense of the word.

On to some poetry updates.  Well, for one thing, I actually wrote a poem!  I had checked my log on New Year's Day and realized I hadn't written anything in six months.  I've been polishing and sending my full-length manuscript out to contests, but I haven't been writing anything new.  So that morning while A. and her father were hanging out at the book store, I just sat down and typed up a poem.  It is a lot easier to write with six months' worth of unwritten poem juice brewing -- no need for writing exercises or my usual stream of consciousness tricks, and it wouldn't have mattered the subject; I was just ready to write something, good, bad or mediocre.

Secondly, I got a poem accepted in the Free State Review last month, which is exciting since it's been a while since I've had a poem in print (non-digitally.)  The issue will be out this summer.

Thirdly, I was included in the fun Tumblr blog Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants that ran briefly but memorably at the turn of the year.  I realize the impetus of the blog was a response to a feature story and I suppose there are politics surrounding that, but I'm not too interested in getting into the why of it all; I just think it was an awesome idea for a blog that took on a life of its own, and it was great to see that it touched a nerve among women writers, and maybe some guy writers, too, and made us all especially excited about what we do for a few weeks.  Poets don't always get moments like that, but I hope we see more of them this year.  Kudos to Becca Klaver for helming the project.

Finally, there's another belated Melusine issue to wrap up.  Fortunately, I'm not as far behind as I was last year at this time, when I should have just admitted that I had stacked my plate too high with giving birth in September and aiming for a new issue by the end of the year.  It seems like those two things should both be possible in a four-month period, and I'm sure there are others who could manage that, but then I'm not the most energetic person in the world, nor was I the most well-versed in the skills required for new motherhood coming into it, and then there's the fact that I have yet to recruit any kind of editorial staff for the journal.  I guess there's a bit of the control freak in me sometimes, but not the kind who wants to control anyone else, just the live-and-let-live kind of freak.  But sometimes it's good to admit I could use a hand with something.  On the motherhood front, baby #2 is probably going to remind me daily of that fine point as well.

Here's to more poetry (of all kinds) in the new year.  I'll raise my insulated paper cup of half-caff with milk & cocoa to that.

New poem online, etc.

Wow, it's been a few days since my last post.  Time does move at a different pace (both slower and faster) with a kid in the picture ... It's been fun, though -- a lot more fun, in general, than the earlier months, although the early days have their magic, too, but since A. got mobile and her personality started really emerging, it's been a blast -- OK, not a 24/7 blast; there's still plenty of drudgery inherent in parenthood and stuff like "alone time" and "sleep" that I still remember wistfully, but the little girl is so much fun.  She's very different from her mother -- vivacious and, shockingly, athletic.  I had talked early and walked just on time, was calm and quiet, and later serious.  She's a little ball of energy, mischief and affection, walked early and is still working on the talking (I don't think she has much interest in working on the calm and quiet, but that's OK.  She makes me smile.  It's going to be a crazy but fun ride with this one...)

Anyway, in poetry news, here's a new one in the fabulous journal KIN:  http://wearekin.org/author/jekihlstrom/precambrian