When It Rains it Pours

When is it going to stop?

It's beginning to feel a little Biblical here with all this rain. Very "forty days and forty nights." Very "these are the last days." It really brings out the apocalyptic in me. I drove to Tacoma yesterday for a classroom presentation and an evening reading, and it was a total white-out on the freeway almost the entire way, with all the mist from the semis and the rain and the standing water. My knuckles were actually swollen from how hard I was gripping the steering wheel.

But it was a really fun presentation and reading. Thanks to Allen Braden for inviting me. The Gallery Reading Series takes place in conjuction with art exhibits at the college's art gallery. There was a fascinating exhibit by Frank Lind, a painter, who takes works by old American artists such as Winslow Homer, and adds new characters to them, like a woman mooning us from the rocks over a beach. They were really fun paintings to look at.

I got to read with Sharon Hashimoto, and hear some of her poems from The Crane Wife, which is a wonderful book, some of the poems exploring her family's history of being interned in camps during WWII. It won Story Line Press' Nicholas Roerich book prize recently. I went out for a celebratory drink after with Allen, Sharon, her husband (the poet Michael Spence), and Patrice who works with Allen at TCC. We sat in a semicircle in front of a nice fireplace in the lounge of a Keg near the campus. And it finally stopped raining for a few minutes for part of the drive home.

In other news: four poems accepted for Prairie Schooner. I guess when it rains it pours.