Happy New Year – Hoorah!

So I’ve signed up to be a part of this thing called the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour … I think. At least I think I signed up for it. Anyway, I’m going to try blogging at least once a month starting in 2018, so might as well try to start today. January 31, 2017. Maybe it’s just my way of trying to piggyback onto something larger than me, and so motivate myself to write on a more regular basis.

So to continue, I’m going to be using this opportunity to shamelessly self-promote my book, which I never really did on this blog, Analog Verse.

(See I’m even better at promoting my blog than I am my book.)

But it’s been a good year for me, for my book, for my writing, for poetry. We had a book launch all the way back in January of this year (2017) at Angst Gallery that I didn’t really promote on this blog. Then we had another Portland book launch at Mother Foucault’s Book Shop – that I dind’t really promote. A little bit. But it takes a lot of work to do promotions. (That’s why a lot of companies have their own promotion department, as a paid staffing gig.)

We don’t. Tourane Poetry Press is a very small company run out of Willow Glen, California.

So because I didn’t do the promotion thing, maybe I short-changed my supporting readers who helped me do the whole book-launch thing. So let me begin with that.

At the Angst Gallery book-launch we had Nathan Tompkins, Alex Vigue, Toni Partington, and Jennifer Robin as guest-readers. And we had cake!

It was a very family-friendly affair, my mom brought a cake, my wife brought our children, and a lot of folk from the community showed up as support. Lots of people from my church, Toni Partington’s husband (and the poet laureate of Clark County) Christopher Luna MC’d the event – it was quite overwhelming, and filled me with so much hope. Very lovely. Leah Jackson, the gallery’s proprietor was smiling as it did just what she built the gallery for, to create community and support artists around the Vancouver area.

At the Mother Foucault book launch we had Jennifer Robin (again), Amie Zimmerman, and Mike G. Adam Strong acted as the MC. And again, it was just an amazing night. So to all those artists that helped and inspired and supported and wrote and read and submitted work and were turned away, and turned away, and turned away again … and then finally published, I owe a great debt of appreciation.

I continue to read at the Ghost Town open mic (which continues to be run by Toni and Chris) and also I want to still support Tony’s Talking To, which has now been taken over by Mike G. And the writing community in Portland and Vancouver continues to be lush and amazing. (And I continue to have a big box of books to sell.) And so to all those things continuing in 2018, I say hoorah!

And so to hopping on the Poet Bloggers Revival Tour, I say hoorah!

Hoorah!