You are currently browsing the monthly archive for September 2007.
When I teach creative writing, I try to be as honest with my students as possible about what it’s like to live as a writer — the hard work, the early mornings, the up-t’il-four-a.m.-with-those-two-commas nights, the stuffing envelopes, the months of silence, the mailbox full of rejection slips. It’s not that I want to discourage them — quite the contrary, I want to encourage them, to let them know that they’re not alone, that we all struggle like this, that part of being a writer is dealing with rejection and just getting back again to the game, always finding ways to remember why it is that you do what you do, and that those reasons go far beyond the little slips of paper tucked inside your SASEs. But it’s difficult to convey just how difficult it is — how easy it is, especially in the publish-or-perish culture, to get bogged down with the rejection slips.
This is one of the reasons why I love teaching World Literature: you’re constantly reminded of the why, and why the why goes beyond the slips. Today, it was a small realization: we still read Lysistrata because, yes, Lysistrata says something important, but, more than anything, it’s just funny. It’s enjoyable. And reading Sappho, my throat catches, I feel what she feels, and I remember the beauty, the rush, the gut feeling at that first reading — and that the reason why is bigger than the slips piled up on my desk.
* * * * * * * * * *
If I meet
you suddenly, I can’tspeak — my tongue is broken;
a thin flame runs under
my skin; seeing nothing,
hearing only my own ears
drumming, I drip with sweat;
trembling shakes my body
and I turn paler than
dry grass. At such times
death isn’t far from me.
(from “He Is More Than Hero,” trans. Mary Bernard, 1958)
Yes, folks, we have reached That Point in the semester, when it is not only difficult to find time to blog, it is difficult to find time to eat, sleep, shower, and brush one’s teeth. Some day, they will find a way to combine all four activities. Some day.
My Internets have been on the fritz, and I’ve since re-discovered that I can be super-productive, even in the midst of That Point in the semester, without Internet Scrabble. I’ve just finished performing reconstructive surgery on my manuscript, and finally have a draft I’m completely confident in — let’s just hope that someone else is confident in it, too!
Sometimes I wonder if the most important thing to learn about being a writer is to respond on a daily basis to abject despair with hope.
One should replace “writer” with “human being,” probably.
I am beginning to come up for air after the whirlwind trip to New York and subsequent tsunami of catch-up in both work (all three jobs) and life, though one would never know it from the levels of dust which apparently stalked and overcame my furniture in my absence.
New York was, of course, amazing. Being part of one of Toadlily’s Quartet Series books has been a blessing beyond words: how incredible to find yourself in the midst of this community, part and parcel of four poets who’ve spoken volumes to each other with and in their work. It was wonderful to meet these poets in person, to finally hear aloud the work I’ve read and loved so many times, and to hear the stunning new pieces they’re working on. Though Gladys Justin Carr couldn’t make it this time, I’m looking forward to meeting her in November. And reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe was such a wonderful experience (not to mention the ricotta gnochi and Zinfindel afterwards!). I was able to spend a bit of the day before the reading in the city. I hadn’t realized how deeply and dearly I’ve missed New York — both the city’s bustling, bristling festival of life and the sweet, tree-drenched, stone-overpassed-studded landscape of the suburbs. There really are few places like it.
I’ve spent much of my time since my return elbow-deep in a drastic and dramatic nip/tuck operation on my manuscript. I think I’ve finally gained enough distance to be able to really break it apart and put it back together. I moved quite a few poems from Manuscript 2 to Manuscript 1, and was finally able to excise the poems I didn’t feel totally comfortable with in Manuscript 1. I also finally revised some of the poems I wrote during the hectic rush of madness that was my NaPoWriMo project with my most wondrous NaPoWriMo partner, Ross. Now it’s time to see whether or not I can gather up the guts to send it out again.
No matter how much I try to avoid it, I still find myself dejected by The Slips.
We’re nearing the end of the Iliad in my World Literature classes, which always makes me sad, but will probably do wonders for my stomach, as it means less reading about eyeballs popping out of heads.
An important note: I missed the MTV VMAs, and have not been capable of watching the entirety of Britney Spears’ performance, as it seems far too terrifying and sad. Bahktin might have had a good deal to say about it, though.
Blogosphere, I apologize for the spate of radio silence, but I have been preparing for an absence of several days, as I’m flying to New York on Sunday and reading at the Cornelia Street Cafe Monday night for the Toadlily Press Edge by Edge launch reading. I am beyond excited about this, but boy has there been a great deal of catch-up work that had to be done in advance. This is the point where the whole “working three jobs” metaphor becomes painfully real.
Updating my CV this morning, I noticed that a great many of my poems have appeared on page 13 of journals. I wonder if this is a sign?
Hopefully I’ll see some of you New Yorkers on Monday! I’m planning on busting out some new work, which is terrifying, yet thrilling.
I have been lax in my submitting as of late, and determined to take this holiday (always a day of mourning, as my white shoes must find a new home in the back of my closet) to make up for it. I just put together so many submission packets that it’s quite possibly I will lose my hands entirely, due to paper-cuts. But this is still a triumph, as I am adhering to my very important new rule: I cannot gripe about not getting anything accepted if I’m not working steadily at sending work out.
Someone once described the life of a writer as working three jobs: there’s Job One, the job that pays the bills and, if you’re lucky, gives you insurance — in my case, that’s teaching. Then there’s Job Two, which is submitting, resubmitting, querying, requerying — trying to get your work out there. And then there’s Job Three, your real job, your most important job — the writing. And Job Three is worth any trouble Job One and Job Two may cause.
It’s always a challenge, though, to make sure that Jobs One and Two don’t take over your life, and you remain faithful to Job Three.
For high school, I was ridiculously lucky enough to attend the Alabama School of Fine Arts. The first day of school, each year, was a day of excitement and triumph — I couldn’t wait to get back to school and get back to work on my work. Before ASFA, though, things were dramatically different. The first day of school was a day of nail-biting, stomach-searing anxiety. What if I did something humiliating in front of a classroom of people who would snicker and giggle and never let me forget it? What if it turned out that I was so supremely uncool, unhip, and un-part of that world that no one would speak to me except to call me brace-face and four-eyes? What if no one liked me, and I’d have to spend another year sitting in a corner on the asphalt parking lot that made up our playground?
Such were the thoughts that ran through my mind this Friday morning as I drove from Auburn to almost Georgia with my friend Whitney, on my way to my first day in her eighth grade English classroom. During the summer, a team of fantastic, enthusiastic, passionate people and I worked to develop an outreach program to teach creative writing to middle and high school students. This year is the pilot year, and I will begin an artist-in-residency in Whitney’s classroom in the spring; this semester, I’ll be making a few trips to get to know the kids and, more importantly, let them get to know me. The first of these trips was Friday, and I entered the front door terrified, nearly paralyzed with flashbacks of my elementary and middle school social failures as soon as the smell of Clorox and cafeteria chili dogs assaulted my senses.
But all of this fear vanished, like magic, mere moments into Whitney’s first class. Watching her in the classroom was like watching a master at work: she inspired so much in these students. You hear a great deal about elementary, middle, and high school education, how we are failing our students, how our students are failing each other. And there, in front of me, was a living, breathing example of a teacher who excelled in leading her students to excel. As the day went on, I was ecstatic to see something I never dreamed could exist: class after class after class of 13 year old students who were ecstatic about reading, who loved to read so much that they had to be told, repeatedly, to put their personal reading books up, and who carried that enthusiasm with them when they left the classroom, even, as another teacher told us, to the point of doing their science classwork a day ahead so they could sit together and read.
Their passion was contagious. I left the school, at the end of the day, with more energy that I’ve had for months, and the sincere feeling that I was incredibly lucky to be in that classroom.
The cafeteria food, though, could still use some work.
Emma Bolden is the author of How To Recognize A Lady, a chapbook of poems published as part of Edge by Edge, the third in Toadlily Press' Quartet Series, and The Mariner's Wife, a chapbook published by Finishing Line Press. Her third chapbook, The Sad Epistles, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She was the recipient of a Tennessee Williams Scholarship to the Sewanee Writers' Conference and was named a Finalist for a Ruth Lilly Fellowship by the Poetry Foundation/Poetry magazine. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in such journals as Prairie Schooner, the Indiana Review, Feminist Studies, The Journal, Redivider, The Greensboro Review, and Verse. Her manuscript was a semi-finalist for the Perugia Press Prize. She is a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Georgetown College, where she also serves as the poetry editor of the Georgetown Review.
SocialVibe