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I’ve worked with other writers on journalistic stuff but never my creative stuff. Of course, with poetry it wouldn’t make sense. I am part of a poets group that’s been meeting monthly (until the pandemic got to roaring) for a decade or so. I do find that the expectation of bringing a poem every month has been a good spur to draft or revise new work. Other than that I’ve had very little experience with collaboration of this kind. But based on my poets group experience, I’d say that developing that expectation of new work could be really helpful to almost any writer.
I wonder if we should establish a thread specifically for draft exchanges and responses? I say this rather sheepishly, since I have a manuscript I’ve promised to comment on but my job duties have been expanding, so I’ve fallen behind with it!
I don’t see it as depressing, amiga. I see it as the way things are and have always been. Read the biography of any writer and you’ll find that the ones we still read were read in the first place because of what we today call “influencers.” There are examples of brilliant writers who wrote in isolation, but when this or that book of theirs was finished, they had to set about helping it find an audience, and this has always been a matter of getting the word out through one’s network of friends, family, and professional admirers. The issue, I guess, is that the networking process can also elevate works and artists that aren’t really good. Only time can help us sort that out. Time and the influencers and networks of subsequent generations….
Very cool, Nikita! There’s nothing better than an acceptance for work you’ve stuck by through doubt and disappointment for so long. Let us know when the piece comes out! I’ll make sure it gets mentioned in our University College newsletter. Braggin’ rights! 🙂
I somehow didn’t picture you in Portland, Nikita. A great but vexed city going way back. I imagine the turmoil on top of the pandemic doesn’t help.
It’s hard to walk away from work that pays, even if it’s not so rewarding, but it always creates space for new opportunities to come in. At least in my experience.
Thanks for the Ethan Hawke talk! He’s an inspiring person in so many ways….
Hi, Joe. No need to worry about the question of personal losses. I’ve entered that time of life. But things are happening out of order—a nephew and niece in their 30’s, for example—and I don’t like it one bit. A good friend went into to have her stomach pain checked out and was diagnosed with bile duct cancer, a rare thing especially in women and untreatable; the diagnosis was 10 days ago and she’s now in hospice. It’s the kind of thing that throws one’s sense of purpose into the deep freeze.
I’m happy with the book, but I’ll hate it when it comes out. This my particular mania. Even when, as the last time with NYQ, the proofreader helped to create a completely pristine book—not a single typo!—I nevertheless hated it when it came out. What do I think I’m doing? This is all dreck. You know, that kind of thing. Eventually I get comfortable with a book and feel ok, and eventually it feels like something somebody else wrote.
I’m watching a documentary about Miles Davis on Netflix when I’m doing my treadmill routine in the a.m., and at one point they’re talking to his nephew, who talks about how Miles hated the idea of repeating himself and so had none of his own albums in his house. This forced him to focus on new work. So I violated the Miles Davis guidelines by revisiting my past, doing the necessary CPR, etc. Truth is, once the initial hoopla of a new book is over, I never look back at them, but I don’t know if my ego is strong enough to get them all out of my house….
How is your work coming, amigo?
When our granddaughter was a pre-teen, we gave her a winter muffler/hat for Christmas that was designed to look like an owl’s head. She started calling herself “Little Owl.” Still does, sometimes….
To be honest I haven’t been writing much. Work has been a scramble, but mostly the pandemic and some personal losses have been enervating. I do have a collection coming in the Fall from NYQ Books (see my current page here: https://nyq.org/books/author/josephhutchison). These are “rescued” poems from my first 15 years of writing–poems completed but left out of my early collections or never finished because of various skills I lacked at the time. I set out to do a chapbook of 24 pages or so and ended up with a full-length book. Surprise!
I like this, Joe! It puts me in mind of Pablo Neruda’s late collection The Book of Questions, beautifully translated by William O’Daly. Each poem is in couplets, and each couplet is a question. For example:
XXV
Why did the grove undress itself
only to wait for the snow?And how do we know which is God
among the Gods of Calcutta?Why do all silkworms
live so raggedly?Why is it so hard, the sweetness
of the heart of the cherry?Is it because it must die
or because it must carry on?Hi, Bill! Glad to have you aboard. Just want to say that I’m getting a “Can’t Find the Site” message on your website. I’ll check later but thought you should know. I’m looking forward to fishing around in it!
Fantastic news, Kirk! We’re all wishing you great good luck with this. I remember this as a short story that needed “a little fleshing out.” Wow!
Hi, Sally! If you do your submissions through Submittable, you can track the simultaneous ones there. They’ve added what they call a “Universal Submission” that lets you even track submissions that don’t actually go through Submittable. I haven’t used it yet, but I will….
Short of that, a simple Excel spreadsheet can work nicely. I’ve done that in the past and just put the titles of simultaneously submitted work in red. Makes them fairly easy to track….
Other suggestions, folks?
That is an impressive list, Nikita! I wish mine were that ambitious. I think I’ve said before that my journal-keeping has always been desultory at best, but I suspect it would give me a boost to keep track of the apparently random writing I’ve been doing. I do have little clutches of poems and one essay-spinoff of a talk I gave a couple of years back out to 11 journals. How did that happen?! The pandemic, of course: my sad rebellion against the virus….
Keep up the great work!
Just FYI, the Pulitzer-winning author Lawrence Wright has a new book, which he began in the summer of 2017 and finished last October, long before this novel coronavirus surfaced. Which matters because it’s about a worldwide pandemic. Details here: https://www.indiebound.org/book/9780525658658
Sally, I don’t seem to be following your blog. Can you send me the link? Though I’m pretty sure you’ve done that before….
Thanks!
Oh, my friend, does this all ring true! All writers feel insecure—we areoften insecure in our work and our lives, and this insecurity is only exacerbated by the virus and its enablers (the bevy of political cronies our chaos-addicted leaders field to shake things up wherever possible). It’s no wonder so many of us feel unmotivated, undermined, directionless!
Personally, I envy the folks who seem to be able to tap into this internal/external chaos and emerge with excellent, uplifting poems and essays and stories. While I struggle to get down a few words here and there that will not do. “[M]y errors and wrecks lie about me,” Pound writes in one of his last Cantos (“CXVI,” since you bring up Seneca, the Roman): “I cannot make it cohere.” In that Canto Pound realizes that what his work lacks is charity. “Charity I have had sometimes, / I cannot make it flow thru. / A little light, like rushlight / to lead back to splendour.” Others seem to be able to let their most positive desires flow through into their work, and it gives them a powerful sense of mission. I envy them!
But every time I feel I’m wanting, I have this opposing impulse, and something always emerges and sometimes that something even coheres. I’m attaching a new poem as an example—a draft (#14), but, as my fellow poet Sandra S. McRae puts it in the title of her latest book, All the Way to Just about There. Whatever its flaws, I do know it’s the best I can do right now. I think we all have to acknowledge when we’re doing the best we can do and forgive not being able to do more. The “more” will come….
I wish I could recommend a clear way forward, amigo. You might start with “media fast,” starting with a whole day without news or Facebook or feeds, then work toward no media on weekends, etc. Or just allow yourself 30 minutes a day, strictly enforced. The problem, of course, is not the media but the chaos, and the media’s job is to spotlight and question and explain the chaos. But it infects us, I think, that chaos, and turns our personal insecurities against us. So don’t let it overwhelm you!
The saddest line in your post, I think, was this one: “By pressuring myself, I’ve diminished the joy and calm I usually feel when I write.” Man, do I recognize that one! And yet when the attached poem first reared its angry head, it wasn’t long before I started to enter into that “joy and calm,” I believe because it put me in touch with the flow of charity that Pound realized toward the end of his life was missing from his work. I can say a little of it made it into mine, and there is joy in that!
Hang in there, Joe! From “The Other Joe”….
An interesting list of “how to write” books. Many good ideas scattered among them, I’m sure!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/apr/17/stephen-king-anne-lamott-10-books-how-to-write
