5 lessons I learned while submitting to literary journals

As you know, I’ve been sending work out this month. So, in that light, I thought I’d reblog this very useful post from Dear Reader: A Writing Life Beyond the Page. 

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Dear Reader, What a wonderful way to spend a Saturday afternoon! The national organization, Women Who Submit, organized a national Submission Blitz on Saturday. Blitz as in everyone get in Formatio…

Source: 5 lessons I learned while submitting to literary journals

A Reflection on Not Working

Today I am off on an adventure. With my youngest sister and one of my cousins, I am going to stay at a cabin on Elk Creek, only about a half mile from where I grew up. I need to get moving — breakfast, a shower, packing up the car — but first, I want to spend a few minutes being the contemplative poet that I dream of being. First, I want to reflect on what this weird anxiety is that I’m feeling, this sense that I don’t have time for this. 

I’m signed up to teach a class this fall — a single section of English 101. (Long story short: my former boss asked me if I’d pick it up, at the last minute, and I said yes.) “Are you enjoying retirement?” people ask me. “What’s it like, not having to work?” “Do you miss working?”

I can’t really say that I’ve had time to miss working. I miss having students. I miss sharing the insights that come up for me and the books I’m reading. But I’m sort of busy. Time is not weighing heavy on my hands.

Once, way back in the day, when my daughters were much younger, my husband left a message at the Writing Center, where he knew I would arrive in the next hour. My friend Ann picked it up, and though I can’t remember the specific content, it was a list of things and kids I needed to pick up or drop somewhere, and all between leaving work and getting to bed. Ann said, “It makes me tired just to listen to it.”

My life is still a lot like that. Yesterday I had laundry to do and more boxes to move and unpack (this week we moved Annie back to Bellingham and are moving Emma into her downstairs room). The car had to go to the mechanic. I took two boxes of books to Half Price Books ($8.75!). I bought groceries ($103!). I made a lasagna to take on the trip with me. I took Emma to do homework at Barnes & Noble ($7.41 — why am I listing dollar amounts?).

Somewhere in there I managed to submit two sets of poems to journals (Silver Birch and Third Point Press). I also sat (at Half Price Books) and read a novel for 30 minutes. I ate dinner with my family (the ones who were home). There were quiet moments. At 10:00 I sat down again (while waiting for a load of clothes to dry) and read some more.

True, I had no papers to grade. I didn’t have to show up to a class and coax reluctant (or enthusiastic) students to discuss “The Horsedealer’s Daughter.” Even so, 24 hours, that’s all any of us get.

P1040277At the creekside cabin, I will not have to do laundry or cook (just warm up the lasagna). I will not have to buy sandwiches for hungry young adults or drive late papers to the high school. I won’t have to worry about my cluttered house, or the appointment with Emma’s principal, which I’m avoiding making, or … anything. I can put my feet up (on the rail on the back deck, I hope). I can talk. Maybe there will be a moment when I can pick up a notebook and a pen.

Mostly, I can just be there.

And maybe, while I’m there, I’ll remember that all I ever have to do is “just be here,” fully engaged, paying attention, embracing my life. There is not going to be a magic time — in the future — when you can write. If you want to write, you have to find time in the interstices in your life today.

 

Why do you do what you do?

Back in July (about a millennia ago) Steven Pressfield began a Writing Wednesday post by quoting from the documentary, I Am Not Your Guru, featuring Tony Robbins (and available on Netflix). If you know anything about Robbins, you know that he relentlessly asks, “Who are you?” “What is your destiny?” “Why were you put on Earth?”

Even though Pressfield admitted to watching only a fourth of the documentary, I had to see it for myself. One of my takeaways was this tee-shirt:

This summer I have done a lousy job of keeping promises to myself. I didn’t finish my novel by August 1, and then I didn’t finish by Sept. 1.

What I did manage, however, was to keep my promises to other people. I said I would send out 31 original postcard poems in August, and I did. I said I would start a “September Send-Out” project (sending out poems to journals every day in September), and I’m now 6 for 7 (and today isn’t over yet).

I said I would get my teenager through her on-line classes, and I did.

Another thing I said I would do is to coach my very first real client with her writing project. In August I said I would meet with her on Mondays, and except for Labor Day we have been able to do that. We’re both busy people, and one of the things we’ve talked about at our Monday meetings is how being accountable to someone else can help.

So, in that spirit, here’s the short list for how you can use accountability to make your writing project take root:

  1. Your first job is to find someone to communicate with who cares that you meet your goal. If they don’t care in quite the same way you do, they can still care that you keep your word to them.
  2. Think about what your goal is. “Write a book,” or a “30 page essay,” or a “brilliant poem” may be too daunting, at least for now. Brené Brown tells a story about helping her daughter see that her goal wasn’t to win her swim meet, but “to get wet.” Maybe, at least to get yourself rolling, your goal has to be to scribble for five minutes a day. When I’m trying to break into new material, I always tell myself that fifteen minutes count. Five minutes can count, for that matter. It all depends on what you agree on. Just get in the water.
  3. Agree, too, on the duration. Are you going to do this for 20 days or 30, 40, or 60? Do you get to take a day or two off each week, or is it really every day?
  4. So how do you use this caring person? (See item 1 above.) Send an email, a text message, or make a phone call once a day to update her on your progress. Maybe a weekly update is good enough, but an alternative (especially if you’re really feeling unmotivated, undisciplined, and maybe even completely undone) is to send a text when you sit down to begin, and another when logan1you finish.
  5. And just as you can write for a very short time (at least at first), you can also use very small rewards. Say “Yay!” Do a little victory dance at your desk.  Give yourself a gold star.

If you nurture it, it will grow.

 

 

A Little Journal Entry on Homework, Blues, and Gratitude

Back in the day, when I was reading every book I could find on infertility and adoption and…well, babies, I came across a story (somewhere in there) about a new mother — thanks to in vitro or some other modern miracle — with a cranky baby. Her friend comes to visit, and the baby is howling. The new mommy, at her wit’s end, says, “I know, I know, I asked for this.” And her friend says, “Honey, you begged for it.”

My daughters are no longer babies, but the last few months — with all three living at home — have somehow managed to remind me of the intensity and difficulty of having infants and toddlers and preschoolers underfoot. This summer, as much as I ever yearned to have children, I have yearned for them to grow up and move on. 

A lot of this feeling stems from Em’s summer on-line classes. “I can’t work at home,” she tells me. “I hate the library.” What she likes to do is to go to a coffee place and drink iced black-tea lemonades or fancy coffee drinks that look like milkshakes. But sitting at Tully’s or Starbuck’s, I can usually get her to focus for an hour or two…or more. Bit-by-bit she has worked all the way through an algebra class and part way through U.S. History. Wish us luck in getting through to the final exams (in both classes) by Sept. 6.

It’s so easy to complain about our lives, about diapers and crying babies and laundry and homework and housework and even book deadlines. But the other day, while supposedly working on a class, Emma wanted to talk about the our recent Mukilteo tragedy, the shooting of four young people who were Kamiak high school graduates.

I listened to Em as she reported on all that she and her friends have been processing, and what she has been told about the funerals. She concluded with something one of the fathers said: “I was supposed to be driving him to college. Instead, I’m attending his funeral.” And, looking old and wise, gravely shaking her head, she went back to work.

That was all it took to flip my blues off and the gratitude on. All the petty drama we’ve gone through in the last few months — the clutter and sugar and road trips for family stuff and the mess (which I am always complaining about) — is so worth it, with all three of my daughters. They have big hearts and they are fiercely independent in spirit, if not quite out of my house yet. Someday (I truly believe) they really will be grown up and ensconced in their own lives. And I will miss the hell out of them.

I have been reading a friend’s memoir about the decline and loss of her parents, and she shares this quote:

Those who can perceive eternity in the sea understand there is no death,

only change, there is no loss, only difficult gifts.”  -Maryanne Radmacher-Hershey

I am not sure that I’m evolved enough to fully take in what Radmacher is saying. I only know that it resonates with me. (See the blog, Spirit Stones, for more from my friend).

Meanwhile, I’m so thankful that I get to hang out with this kid. It’s been a great way to spend my time this summer.

 

(One of the young people killed had been in choir with Emma, and was planning to become a nurse. If you would like to donate to the Anna Bui World of Hope Scholarship, please visit this link: https://www.uwb.edu/advancement/annabui/give-to-anna)