Lately, I've been playing a game with rejection notices.
I've been counting them.
And I've been leaving their numbers on my Facebook feed.
Why?
Well, why not? Why take rejection seriously? I started taking it for what it is, a game, and decided to treat it like one. I started doing this at the beginning of the year. I count each notice and leave their numbers on Facebook (#1, #2, #3, etc.), and keep counting them until I get an acceptance. Once I get an acceptance, I start all over again. I clued my friends in to what I was doing, so they would know, but I stopped writing status updates that complained about rejection or made people tell me they were sorry it was happening to me. It happens to every writer and I wanted to stop making more of it than it was.
Since I've been playing this game, it's taken most of the sting out of getting a rejection, and helped me concentrate on sending work out and rejoicing when I get an acceptance. There's no rhyme or reason to this. One acceptance came after 8 rejection notices, another after 7. And in between, I just watch them do what they do, and file them away.
(Sooner or later, I'll probably stop these shenanigans, but for now, I'm enjoying myself.)
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
First and Foremost
In her blog post, "Confession Tuesday - the Yin and the Yang," Kelli Agodon discusses the struggles of writers, that our lives aren't always hunky-dory, that we spend a lot of time in self doubt, even when the writing is going well.
Most recently, I have spent time in the "where do I fit in?" chair after receiving a rejection claiming that the work I submitted was experimental, and then another saying that the editors liked my voice, but it wasn't what they were looking for. From submitting my first manuscript to contests and presses, to submitting poems to journals and contests, I have spent a lot of time lately wondering which editor will like my work and where I will fit in.
Is this important? After feeling this way for weeks, I came upon an interview with Nikky Finney, a poet whose advice I trust (she was the driving force behind my chapbook), in which she says:
"In that moment I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be in the world. Yes, I wanted to write about beautiful things, but I also wanted to hand something over to the reader that was more than beautiful words, something that might have the power and presence to make them stronger, better and wiser. I did not want to be the writer who was simply waiting for applause. I wanted to be smack dab in the middle—doing something foundational, something that might be helpful to another human being."
Isn't this why I've written about my experience as a mother, to shine a bit of light on someone who is going through the same experience? I wanted mothers to feel less alone, less trapped in the trade name of "mother," less prey to the chaos. I wanted to give voice to the complexity of that life and not sugarcoat it, not make it a relic. I wanted those things first and foremost, and somehow, my poems found a home. So I have to keep pushing. I have to keep writing what is true for me and reach out to those who feel as uncertain as I do.
Most recently, I have spent time in the "where do I fit in?" chair after receiving a rejection claiming that the work I submitted was experimental, and then another saying that the editors liked my voice, but it wasn't what they were looking for. From submitting my first manuscript to contests and presses, to submitting poems to journals and contests, I have spent a lot of time lately wondering which editor will like my work and where I will fit in.
Is this important? After feeling this way for weeks, I came upon an interview with Nikky Finney, a poet whose advice I trust (she was the driving force behind my chapbook), in which she says:
"In that moment I knew what kind of writer I wanted to be in the world. Yes, I wanted to write about beautiful things, but I also wanted to hand something over to the reader that was more than beautiful words, something that might have the power and presence to make them stronger, better and wiser. I did not want to be the writer who was simply waiting for applause. I wanted to be smack dab in the middle—doing something foundational, something that might be helpful to another human being."
Isn't this why I've written about my experience as a mother, to shine a bit of light on someone who is going through the same experience? I wanted mothers to feel less alone, less trapped in the trade name of "mother," less prey to the chaos. I wanted to give voice to the complexity of that life and not sugarcoat it, not make it a relic. I wanted those things first and foremost, and somehow, my poems found a home. So I have to keep pushing. I have to keep writing what is true for me and reach out to those who feel as uncertain as I do.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Doing the work
I've known for a long time that writers find solutions or answers to their writing problems by doing the work. By not stopping. I've shared this writing advice with my students and taken it when I've been stuck on a poem. If I don't stop writing, whatever problem I'm having is eventually resolved.
But I never thought this would be true for submissions.
I've been sending my first book to contests and presses for the past six months. Over Christmas Break, I began to get anxious. The university was on break so I had no schoolwork to keep me busy, so I started thinking about the presses I hadn't heard from yet, why I hadn't heard from them, and my close friends can attest to the fact that I got a little neurotic. Who wouldn't, but I was wondering when it would end.
It ended this morning.
You see, a week ago I had made a promise that I would not submit any work to magazines, journals, contests, or presses for an entire month. I needed a break from worrying about the response of editors and was sure that a break would help.
That was hogwash.
To be idle, for me, is to be anxious. This morning I prepared another copy of my manuscript to go out to a contest. Am I concerned about hearing a decision on my manuscript now? No, because I have it ready to go out. I have something to work toward, however small. I am doing the work of a writer.
And I am not going to stop doing this work. Why sit around and fret that the poems or the book aren't published yet? Why not be busy, be thinking toward something else? I have poems to revise, poems to send out, my manuscript to circulate. The real work is not in worrying or complaining, it is in doing.
But I never thought this would be true for submissions.
I've been sending my first book to contests and presses for the past six months. Over Christmas Break, I began to get anxious. The university was on break so I had no schoolwork to keep me busy, so I started thinking about the presses I hadn't heard from yet, why I hadn't heard from them, and my close friends can attest to the fact that I got a little neurotic. Who wouldn't, but I was wondering when it would end.
It ended this morning.
You see, a week ago I had made a promise that I would not submit any work to magazines, journals, contests, or presses for an entire month. I needed a break from worrying about the response of editors and was sure that a break would help.
That was hogwash.
To be idle, for me, is to be anxious. This morning I prepared another copy of my manuscript to go out to a contest. Am I concerned about hearing a decision on my manuscript now? No, because I have it ready to go out. I have something to work toward, however small. I am doing the work of a writer.
And I am not going to stop doing this work. Why sit around and fret that the poems or the book aren't published yet? Why not be busy, be thinking toward something else? I have poems to revise, poems to send out, my manuscript to circulate. The real work is not in worrying or complaining, it is in doing.
Monday, December 26, 2011
Looking back on 2011 and forward to 2012
Looking back over the past year, I realize it's been a good one. I've had more publications this year than I've ever had in one calendar year, my chapbook was accepted, and I started writing book reviews for various publications. I can attribute this success to one thing: getting over my fear of being rejected by editors.
Sometime in the Spring, I started sending out more than one or two submissions at a time. I've always been petrified of rejections, mostly because I've let myself take an editor's opinion too seriously (after all, it's only one opinion). What really inspired me was team teaching an advanced creative writing course with a colleague and requiring our students to submit work to 5-10 journals by the semester's end. I figured, if these students could do it at the beginning of their careers, why couldn't I? By that time I'd been out of school for over 10 years and had a very short list of publications to my name.
It worked. Now, at the end of the year, I try to have at least 12 submissions out to journals at a time. Once one or two come back, rejected or accepted (the former is the case more often than not), poems go out again. Keeping the door revolving has been good for me: it reminds me that I can't hold on to poems until they're perfect and I can't be too touchy about the decisions of editors.
It's also helped me in another way: to see any rejected poem from an editor's point of view, and to make any revisions that I think are necessary before submitting a poem again. I've even taken this so far as to revise and reorganize my first full-length collection after sending an earlier version to 6 contests and presses. I think it's stronger now; I will probably revise it again after sending it to a few more places.
I love revision. I still hate rejection, but making those notices into learning experiences has helped me immensely. For 2012, I want to study line and syntax in poetry so that I can make my line breaks more interesting and effective. I want to be more courageous and I want to feel uncomfortable in the first drafts of my own poems. I hope I can make these things happen, even if they don't happen until 2013 or after. I want to keep learning and growing, because that's what matters, after all.
Sometime in the Spring, I started sending out more than one or two submissions at a time. I've always been petrified of rejections, mostly because I've let myself take an editor's opinion too seriously (after all, it's only one opinion). What really inspired me was team teaching an advanced creative writing course with a colleague and requiring our students to submit work to 5-10 journals by the semester's end. I figured, if these students could do it at the beginning of their careers, why couldn't I? By that time I'd been out of school for over 10 years and had a very short list of publications to my name.
It worked. Now, at the end of the year, I try to have at least 12 submissions out to journals at a time. Once one or two come back, rejected or accepted (the former is the case more often than not), poems go out again. Keeping the door revolving has been good for me: it reminds me that I can't hold on to poems until they're perfect and I can't be too touchy about the decisions of editors.
It's also helped me in another way: to see any rejected poem from an editor's point of view, and to make any revisions that I think are necessary before submitting a poem again. I've even taken this so far as to revise and reorganize my first full-length collection after sending an earlier version to 6 contests and presses. I think it's stronger now; I will probably revise it again after sending it to a few more places.
I love revision. I still hate rejection, but making those notices into learning experiences has helped me immensely. For 2012, I want to study line and syntax in poetry so that I can make my line breaks more interesting and effective. I want to be more courageous and I want to feel uncomfortable in the first drafts of my own poems. I hope I can make these things happen, even if they don't happen until 2013 or after. I want to keep learning and growing, because that's what matters, after all.
Friday, September 30, 2011
The Mind's Muddy River: a review of The Glimpse Traveler by Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch never takes me anywhere I don’t want to go. In her poems, I’m willing to follow her to a Luxor bathhouse or to a lunch at Berghoff’s with her mother, and, in The Glimpse Traveler, Boruch’s first memoir, I follow her on a road trip to California with a young woman named Frances, who is searching for people who knew her husband, Ned, and with Woody, who had once been involved with a friend of our narrator’s (who leaves the narrative halfway through, on his way to Oregon). This is the early 1970’s, after Woodstock and the Summer of Love, and we meet young men and women who still live in the mind frame of that time, though it is slowly moving forward, into a new decade.
We don’t just follow characters in this memoir, but we follow memory, associations, and the wonderful images I associate with Boruch’s poems. She lets us see California, the ocean’s “immense heart beating as usual, those mountains beginning just a shade east of the highway and rearing into cliffs or sometimes they gently rose” (134). Boruch the poet, now writing in prose, is ever with us, offering us snapshots of what she sees, offering us glimpses of memories.
The Glimpse Traveler is a book composed of brief chapters preserving each moment. Through the construction and sequence of short chapters, we start to get the idea that this is how memory reveals itself: not through long narratives, but through moments we piece together and string into a narrative. This is first and foremost what I love about the book: that it gives the reader a different way to think about memory. She also offers a narrative of landscape and the history of America, through hitchhiking from Illinois to California, and through the memories she associates with this experience.
Boruch is a natural storyteller. At the end of each chapter, she ends with a moment of suspense so that the next chapter beckons. She keeps the voice of the narrator youthful (she is 20 years old when this experience takes place) through the language and lingo she uses, as well as the moments of innocence. For all the forward thinking offered us through the many people our narrator meets, it is not the current culture that tells us who we are, but our memories, our pasts, what firmly roots us to this earth.
“The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness,” says Annie Dillard in her essay, “Seeing,” and Boruch never dams the river of her mind. So much of this trip is not just a physical journey for the narrator, but also a psychological one. We get to know Boruch through the flashbacks and associations that occur with each person she meets and each experience she has in California. The nuns at her Catholic school, a cave exploration almost turned deadly, advice from her mother, all surface during this trip, and Boruch the storyteller doesn’t keep them at bay. How much of our childhood, our past, our perspective, goes with us when we venture into the world? This is who we have been, who we might remain.
Through this exploration of memory, with Boruch we follow Frances, the reason for this trip out West. And here we have another example of the importance of memory and what happens to memory over time. At the outset of the book, we see a quick glimpse of Ned through Boruch’s memory: a curly red-head, a hippie, but someone “on the far edge of that grid” (6). Ned has passed away in a car accident in Colorado before the narrative even begins, and Frances wants to know what happened to him, wants to find people who knew him before he died. When they finally reach California, no one Frances meets can tell her any more about him than she already knew. Certain friends didn’t understand him, others worshipped him, and it is only when she sees the artwork he created before his death that she begins to understand what thoughts might have been working in his head before the accident. How much of other people’s memories can we trust? And how long can we keep a person alive through the words of others before we realize we have to let go? How long and how far can we follow a ghost?
Of course, I haven’t scratched the surface of this beautiful book: the time we spend following Boruch to California, meeting all sorts of characters, the history and geography of America, and Boruch’s beautiful prose. But take my word for it, The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.
Marianne Boruch, The Glimpse Traveler, Indiana UP, 2011.
We don’t just follow characters in this memoir, but we follow memory, associations, and the wonderful images I associate with Boruch’s poems. She lets us see California, the ocean’s “immense heart beating as usual, those mountains beginning just a shade east of the highway and rearing into cliffs or sometimes they gently rose” (134). Boruch the poet, now writing in prose, is ever with us, offering us snapshots of what she sees, offering us glimpses of memories.
The Glimpse Traveler is a book composed of brief chapters preserving each moment. Through the construction and sequence of short chapters, we start to get the idea that this is how memory reveals itself: not through long narratives, but through moments we piece together and string into a narrative. This is first and foremost what I love about the book: that it gives the reader a different way to think about memory. She also offers a narrative of landscape and the history of America, through hitchhiking from Illinois to California, and through the memories she associates with this experience.
Boruch is a natural storyteller. At the end of each chapter, she ends with a moment of suspense so that the next chapter beckons. She keeps the voice of the narrator youthful (she is 20 years old when this experience takes place) through the language and lingo she uses, as well as the moments of innocence. For all the forward thinking offered us through the many people our narrator meets, it is not the current culture that tells us who we are, but our memories, our pasts, what firmly roots us to this earth.
“The world’s spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind’s muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness,” says Annie Dillard in her essay, “Seeing,” and Boruch never dams the river of her mind. So much of this trip is not just a physical journey for the narrator, but also a psychological one. We get to know Boruch through the flashbacks and associations that occur with each person she meets and each experience she has in California. The nuns at her Catholic school, a cave exploration almost turned deadly, advice from her mother, all surface during this trip, and Boruch the storyteller doesn’t keep them at bay. How much of our childhood, our past, our perspective, goes with us when we venture into the world? This is who we have been, who we might remain.
Through this exploration of memory, with Boruch we follow Frances, the reason for this trip out West. And here we have another example of the importance of memory and what happens to memory over time. At the outset of the book, we see a quick glimpse of Ned through Boruch’s memory: a curly red-head, a hippie, but someone “on the far edge of that grid” (6). Ned has passed away in a car accident in Colorado before the narrative even begins, and Frances wants to know what happened to him, wants to find people who knew him before he died. When they finally reach California, no one Frances meets can tell her any more about him than she already knew. Certain friends didn’t understand him, others worshipped him, and it is only when she sees the artwork he created before his death that she begins to understand what thoughts might have been working in his head before the accident. How much of other people’s memories can we trust? And how long can we keep a person alive through the words of others before we realize we have to let go? How long and how far can we follow a ghost?
Of course, I haven’t scratched the surface of this beautiful book: the time we spend following Boruch to California, meeting all sorts of characters, the history and geography of America, and Boruch’s beautiful prose. But take my word for it, The Glimpse Traveler is more than a book written about a generation; this is a book about memory and how we recall the intense moments of our lives. Most writers would reveal the story in long chapters, steeped with descriptions and dialogue, but Boruch offers us something different: the way memories are really revealed.
Marianne Boruch, The Glimpse Traveler, Indiana UP, 2011.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
"The Photographer" by Linda Pastan
Still working on the boot camp prompt for Day Four, as it involves research and the information I read today needs to sit a little while before it becomes something. More tomorrow. For now, a poem I fell in love with yesterday.
The Photographer
In Memory of Tom Victor
It wasn't my soul he captured
in his intricate box
but his idea of the poet
as beautiful woman. He ran ahead
kneeling in front of me,
a seductive supplicant murmuring:
"lovely, lovely... turn
your head a little... lick your lips,"
as if he were instructing me
in the myriad gestures of love.
And in those moments
I became beautiful for him,
you can see it in the finished photograph
which rose like Venus
from its bath of chemicals.
When I look at that picture now I see
a woman with widened eyes, a fan
of hair, iconic cheekbones,
a woman quite different
from the plain one I see
in the mirror every day.
I was transformed as language itself
is transformed and quivers in a poem, though
the words themselves, taken separately,
would seem quite ordinary.
-Linda Pastan
from Queen of a Rainy Country (Norton, 2006)
The Photographer
In Memory of Tom Victor
It wasn't my soul he captured
in his intricate box
but his idea of the poet
as beautiful woman. He ran ahead
kneeling in front of me,
a seductive supplicant murmuring:
"lovely, lovely... turn
your head a little... lick your lips,"
as if he were instructing me
in the myriad gestures of love.
And in those moments
I became beautiful for him,
you can see it in the finished photograph
which rose like Venus
from its bath of chemicals.
When I look at that picture now I see
a woman with widened eyes, a fan
of hair, iconic cheekbones,
a woman quite different
from the plain one I see
in the mirror every day.
I was transformed as language itself
is transformed and quivers in a poem, though
the words themselves, taken separately,
would seem quite ordinary.
-Linda Pastan
from Queen of a Rainy Country (Norton, 2006)
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Poetry all around
I'm in my home state this week visiting family. I haven't written a lick of poetry since I stepped off the plane (I wrote a few lines in the airport). Even though I'm not writing during these days of rest and rejuvenation, poems have been cropping up all around me. I met a friend for lunch and she shared two separate poems as a response to George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From." One had been written by her daughter for a High School English class, the other by my friend, who wanted to try the exercise. I was tickled when she showed them to me. If anyone thinks poetry is dead, it's alive and well in my small town.
And it's alive and well in my parents' house. A few days ago, my father showed me two poems he's working on. I was amazed by his ability (they were damn good poems), stunned that I hadn't known about his interest in poetry until this very week, and proud.
I'll be ready to get back to work when I return home. This is turning out to be a very inspiring trip to the homeland.
And it's alive and well in my parents' house. A few days ago, my father showed me two poems he's working on. I was amazed by his ability (they were damn good poems), stunned that I hadn't known about his interest in poetry until this very week, and proud.
I'll be ready to get back to work when I return home. This is turning out to be a very inspiring trip to the homeland.
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