On Blog Rot…

So, it’s been a long time since I posted anything… and even longer since I posted anything that wasn’t meant to win me a free CD. (Thanks, le R!) But I thought I’d go through the short list, at least, of what’s been happening. So here is my life in bullet points:

Got a divorce

Won a Pushcart Prize

Got a boyfriend

Got short-listed by Best American Essays

Managed to hold on to the boyfriend for more than three months, which I hear isn’t really supposed to happen with the first person you date after a divorce, so I’m counting it as an accomplishment–though it’s probably more his accomplishment than my own…

Learned to ride a bike

Did not manage to actually get out and ride the bike often enough to get good, or even comfortable at it (I guess I’m logging failures, too, in the interest of balance more than honesty)

Had two essays published in one month in aspirational journals, Fringe and Pank

Finally finished reading Gravity’s Rainbow…which I started reading in 1983

And there you have it, friends… the highlights. And now, back to blogging. Because I’ve missed it. And you.

On Form Rejections…

It’s true, I’ve let this blog stagnate for a good long while. And I’m not back out of some pent-up need to write, or because something of import has happened that I want to share with you. Nope. I’m back because The Rejectionist is giving away mix CDs to five people who write blog posts on the topic “What Form Rejection Means to Me” and, well, I’m a sucker for a mix CD. (Yes, shut up, I’m pandering. If you don’t like it, go start your own pander-free blog.)

My favorite rejection of all times was a form rejection, though of course it wasn’t just any old form rejection. No, it came from one of the most prestigious journals in Creative Nonfiction (big giant hint right there, since usually I say I write memoir) and was for a piece that I had been invited to submit, although with substantial changes–in fact, I had to shave three thousand words off of it first, which required two weeks of pretty painful editing.

The first correspondence I got from this journal was an email entitled “About Your Essay.” It had nothing whatsoever to do with my essay, of course, it was just a form offer to subscribe. I was a little put off by the tricky subject line, but like any hopeful writer, I expect journals to treat me badly and to get bitch-slapped by apologists if I complain about it. Heck, I have even heard poets defending The Paris Review’s recent decision to “unaccept” a bunch of poems. We know where we are on the food chain: at the bottom.

Still, I was surprised when I got a form rejection of only two lines on a poorly-cut 1/6 of a page of typing paper, tucked into an envelope with–of course–a large, glossy page urging me to subscribe. I don’t remember what the rejection said, but it wasn’t the wording that made it so spectacular. It was the blood.

The thing had obviously been cut from a sheet of similar rejection slips using one of those machete-on-a-block-of-wood paper cutters, and some hapless intern had cut herself on the blade. A streak of dried blood two inches long and 1/4 of an inch across ran right through the “does not meet our needs at this time” boiler-plate rejection.

And I thought, “You know, it sucks to be a writer sometimes, but it must suck to be an intern at a journal like this all the time.” So I put the three thousand words back into my essay and sent it out again. Eventually, Ninth Letter took the piece, it was awarded a Pushcart Prize, and it will be listed as a “Notable Essay” in the 2010 edition of Best American Essays.

Was it the magic vodou power of intern blood that blessed the piece? Maybe. I hear it’s some pretty powerful stuff.

S

Listen to Ethel Morgan Smith

My great friend, and an even greater writer, at a recent Valentine’s Day reading of the MFA faculty.

Worth the listen!

My New Kindle…

There is much sturm and drang in the book world about the rise of the e-reader. It was with a fair amount of trepidation that I broke down and bought myself a Kindle, but I am VERY glad that I did. It came at exactly the right moment for me to appreciate it fully; I had just finished the book I was reading but was snowed in and could not go and get the one I wanted to read next. Thanks to my Kindle, I spent the day with mugs of tea and The Children’s Book instead of rereading something from my recently denuded bookshelves. (Nothing like a move and two flights of outdoor steps in the snow to make you pair down your book collection!)

The learning curve is steeper than it should be… Amazon has abandoned almost every principle of Information Architecture and put things in some very counter-intuitive places. Maybe that was on purpose. I most definitely do not feel like I am reading on a computer screen. I have the newest, smallish version–I don’t travel overseas enough to spring for the larger one–and it is the perfect size. I find it easy to read, it fits well inside my big, black, old lady handbag, and it holds a charge for much longer than I would have expected. I strongly recommend buying a cover for it; I found it attracts dog hair and lint like nobody’s business without it.

I was able to buy two of the three books I have been meaning to read, and the one I wasn’t able to buy seems to be a temporary casualty of the recent brouhaha with McMillan. The two books I did buy–Wench and The Children’s Book are recent, and so well-indexed. A friend tells me that older books that are not specifically formatted for the Kindle can be hard to navigate.

Once the roads are clear and I can make it to my office, I will load up the PDFs for my Metadrama class and see if it really is capable of managing those in a useful way. Stay tuned for a more thorough review!

The Defining Moment of the Aughts?

The Aughts are coming to a close, and I can’t say I’m sad to see them winding down. It’s been a decade of paying the piper for all that fun we had in the go-go nineties, I guess. It seems to me that we have a choice now to make; what moment will we use to define the last ten years of our lives? Surely it won’t be the day the banks collapsed; we’ve been saved by history from having to remember this decade for something as mean and stingy as all that mess. So will it be the day the city fell, or the day we finally stopped saying forever, “This country isn’t ready for a black president?” Will we choose the best or the worst moment to signify?

There are many reasons to believe that history will mark the day the towers fell as more momentous than Obama’s inauguration; after all, we celebrate Pearl Harbor day but have lumped Washington and Lincoln together for the lesser “Presidents’ Day,” and I do not think we should expect Obama to rise above either in our civic memory. (It would be asking too much not just of him, but of ourselves. We do not like to think of the living as great. I don’t know why.) The question of where you were on 9/11 has replaced the question of where you were when Kennedy was shot; too many of us now don’t have an answer the latter. Airplanes have been repurposed as tools of war and for a brief moment, even the guys who usually call it “Jew York” were willing to allow as to how Manhattan is actually part of the United States of America.

There is a strong argument to be made that the aughts were defined in that single moment of their first year.

But I choose to believe that we are defined not by our worst moment, but by our best. That the aughts will be remembered for being the decade in which we elected a president and a congress that brought us back from the brink of a new colonialism, oversaw the creation of a universal healthcare system, and began in earnest the hard work undoing the impending ecological disaster.

I choose to believe we will remember this decade not for what has been done to us, but for what we ourselves have done.

Writer Friends: Sara Pritchard

In keeping with my promise to spend this week introducing you to my writer friends, let me present Sara Pritchard, author of Crackpots, Lately, and innumerable short stories. I am introducing you to Sara first for a number of reasons; she is a writer whose work I greatly admire, reading her work will make you a better reader, writer, and/or person, and it’s so close to Thanksgiving that a good chunk of my time the last–and next–few days must be devoted to preparing the meal. Thankfully, I can fall back on letting Craig Seligman of the New York Times do a good bit of the introducing for me. From his review of Crackpots:

As it happened, I read ”Crackpots” just after finishing a celebrated novel by a precocious young writer that had irritated me because, despite all the talent, it clobbered you with pathos and delivered wisdom that clearly came straight out of books. ”Crackpots” does the opposite. The writing is dazzling, yes, but Pritchard allows the pathos — and there’s a lot of it — to rise out of her sentences like a scent. You discover it instead of being pounded by it. The author’s work has gone into constructing sentences that would contain, not sell, the emotion behind them, and she’s in love with a whole range of feelings. In the middle of tragedy she makes you laugh out loud.

Sara writes sentences that I could reread every evening for the rest of my life and still find lovely. Her characters have an emotional depth that takes the reader beyond feeling that she knows them and into a place where she feels she has befriended them. It is impossible, for instance, to read “The Pink Hotel” from the short story collection Lately without wishing to invite not only the narrator, but also her pragmatic and seemingly unflappable Aunt Dizzy, for lunch. Sara writes with an intimacy that leaves the reader missing her characters when their stories are told, and happy when they sometimes reappear in other, linked pieces.

Tune in a few days from now (once the dishes are done and the leftovers safely tucked away in the fridge) to meet Ethel Morgan Smith.

Writing Friends…

I am lucky enough to have several friends who are accomplished writers. Over the Thanksgiving break, I’m going to be taking a look at some of their works on this blog. But before I start looking at the individual works, I wanted to take a moment to just talk about what it has meant to have these writers as friends.

Writing is a lot of work. Some of the work is apparent; it takes place at the keyboard and produces a growing (and then shrinking) number of pages toward a completed work. It is easy, during this part of the process, to say to friends and loved one, “Sorry, I can’t do that right now, I’m working.” Much of the work, though, is less apparent. It might be done sitting on the back porch, staring out over the grape arbor, trying to puzzle out a specific memory that is needed in an essay but which you can’t quite pull up in adequate detail. It may involve laying on the living room floor playing an old Patti Smith album that triggers the sense memories of your college dorm room to adequately capture the smells of bong water and old laundry in your writing. Or, and for some reason it seems every writer I know has this experience, working may mean standing in the shower thinking over some plot element or structural problem while using up the last of the hot water.

Your loved ones may not be able to tell that you are working, and this may make you come to doubt that you are working. Your writer friends can reassure you that this does indeed count as “productive time” and that you aren’t being an unreasonably selfish person to find the hours of quietude you need. They may, though, if they are thoughtful writer friends with families of their own, suggest that you shower after everyone else who shares your hot water tank.

Writing is also scary work. What if you aren’t any good? Worse yet, what if you are genuinely bad… so bad, for instance, that you some day become known as the Rod McKuen of your day, or find your work being compared negatively with those paintings of big-eyed children from the sixties? What if you are both this bad and somehow still able to be published?

Your writer friends will tell you if something isn’t ready to send. They care about you, and they also don’t want to discover they’ve published a story that wasn’t yet ready to be out in the world.

Of course, this means finding writer friends you trust. There are, indeed, writers who are awful human beings and will find fault with your work just for the joy of feeling superior. Do not make these people your friends! Think charitably of them, be kind to them, but keep them at arm’s length. Work can ALWAYS be better. A good writer, though, is as good at pointing out what is working as she is at pointing out what is not. And you want the opinions of good writers, don’t you?

I am blessed to have as friends many wonderful writers, and during the upcoming week I will be sharing some of their work with you. Because this is also part of being a good writer friend: share your audience, your connections, your insights. The writers I’m going to share have been generous with their time, energy, and resources and helped me immeasurably. But that isn’t why I’m sharing them with you. I am sharing them because they are good writers, and you will be happy to have read their work.