Last night I went to hear Tess Gallagher read at the new library which doesn’t look like a library at all but more of a big museum which is storing every book just in case mankind is suddenly obliterated.
I went b/c I was suppose to be her student last August but her mother was dying and b/c honestly I felt like if I did not do something literary soon my head would implode. Note: not explode, implode—there's a difference.
Gallagher was quiet and lovely and now I want to be quiet and lovely. She gave the best answers EVER during the very horrid part of a reading when people can ask questions like how do you “craft” a poem and what made you decide on the title of your book.
Note: this is generally when I want to start rampant poet killing.
Honestly I just wanted to know if she desired to strangle the man in front of me who wanted her to sign a Ray Carver’s book instead of her own. What are people thinking????
All that said we share the same name, even though she is Teresa with an “H” and we both have poems about head shaving and a hunger to be read. I tried to pull off being called "Tess" in 7th grade (it is in my middle school yearbook) yet no one but me seemed to pick up on the change.
But I did send off three submissions today due to older women poet guilt which is a disease all its own.
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5 comments:
The question "what are people thinking?" assumes that people are actually um, thinking. (grin)
Nice pumpkins. Seen any white ones? I want/need a ghost pumpkin and there's none to be found in these parts.
What's this older woman poet guilt disease? What are the symptoms? You're not even forty yet, chicka. Geez.
I'm almost forty....like really ALMOST and I am going to send you white pumkin seeds so you can grow your own next year.
Older woman poet guilt disease is not required until you're at least 125 years old.
Years ago (1990) I heard Tess Gallagher read on the first night of the Port Townsend [Washington] Writer's Conference. She was filling in at the last minute for someone else who'd had to cancel.
This was just a couple of years or so after Raymond Carver had died. At one point during the reading, she told a brief story about a man -- I want to say a police officer or sheriff's deputy, but it may have been some other "official" person, I can't remember now -- who came to her door one day asking for Raymond Carver. She repeated what she told the man: careful step by step directions to the local town cemetery, where she told him he would find Carver.
White pumpkins? REALLY? I will trade you something for those seeds. I've never seen a white pumpkin. I am very excited.
What can I send you (name a category, not an object.) will you, will you?
signed,
A Really Older Woman Poet
hey chicka I just saw this...a room when I come to visit and if Suzanne and Emily can come at that time I will bring you a million seeds!!!!
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