A Dispatch from the Valley
On hope, longing, novelty, & transformative failure.
Hope is a powerful motivator for me. The trick is to expect nothing, but to lace everything you do with longing. For what? Something better? Something more? Maybe. These next couple of weeks will be the second anniversary of my story collection being published and the first publication anniversary of my poetry collection too. There is a large part of me that wants to stop myself from focusing on anniversaries, because it means my longing is stuck in the past instead of dreaming up futures. This is tricky, though, because between everything connected to the pandemic (in addition to going back to school this past fall), I’m living in a fraught present.
Most of my writing time has been dedicated to scholarly work, and all of my reading time has been dedicated to keeping up with my own grad coursework in addition to creating lessons for the classes I teach (maybe in May I’ll share everything I read during my first school year). I have friends’ books that have been piling up since last summer that I’m planning to start tackling in May. I also have at least two long-form fiction projects I’d like to wrap up over this summer. One aspect of beginning a critical-heavy program is that I’m not taking creative writing workshops, so I’m not forced into that deliciously productive space where you create because you have no option but to create.
When, at the start of the fall semester, I told a professor at my current graduate program that I’d like to finish two novels during my PhD and he laughed (it was definitely at me and not with me—although not unkindly), I didn’t understand it in the moment, although now I’m fully entrenched in this mental place where all the critical and pedagogical work leave me too exhausted to focus on anything else. I understand that automatic response now. Hah! Two?!
I’m not talking about the rigor of academia to scare anyone off (quite the opposite, I’ve grown so much this past academic year), but more that as I enter the final month of my first academic year as a PhD student I have to be vigilant about how to protect and manage my time over the oncoming summer. I took out loans this year because I went back to school to think and create and make. I set aside loans for the entire summer so in the instance that I don’t work, I can treat myself to writing full-time before the grind continues. If I’m going into debt, I might as well do what I love to do.
While I’ve gotten over most of the imposter syndrome that comes with being a writer, I still feel like I’ve got some nerve to say I have a “writing career” from someone who has mostly been paid in the currency of two complimentary literary magazine issues. The word “career” is too tied up with capitalism in my mind, and as someone who deals with poems and short stories, I’m not exactly in the most economically lucrative corner of the creative writing world to make that bold claim.
Commerce is not the reason I write though (I doubt it’s the reason most of us write). It’s this incorrigible bloodforce in me that makes the magic words appear again and again. The spell is never done being cast. It won’t be until the mortal body fails.
One question that has been on the back of my mind these past couple of years is what to do with my arcane ways. Where do I go from here? In addition to hope, novelty has been a key motivator for me. The challenge of new experiences, of doing something for the first time—or at least what feels like the first time.
When I went through my MFA program, I was admitted as a poet, so when I started taking fiction workshops, I was filled with a type of giddy wonder for just being trusted enough that my sense of poetics could be transmuted into fiction. I was a secret agent in the land of fiction writers, but somehow they had allowed me to stay and integrate as one of them. That excitement resulted in many stories, and those stories resulted in Moonflower….
Most (all?) of the stories in that collection were written between January 2015 and January 2017. It feels like I’m looking through a telescope into the stars of another person’s life when I think of writing a book within 24 months. Who, me? I did that?
I wrote a lot. A lot a lot. I wrote dozens of stories during my MFA. I wrote hundreds of poems in the ten-year period before that. Then…I stopped. I’ve barely written any short-form work since I graduated my MFA program.
I try to be kind to myself, because during the past five years I was finishing an MFA thesis, editing a story collection, editing a poetry collection, and seeing both to print. And then desperately trying to rally in the middle of the pandemic to see those two books into the world (this post is already longer than I imagined—so you’ll have to excuse me if I skip over all the oof-ness of the pandemic). Sometimes it’s hard to be kind to yourself inside a capitalist system when it feels like you’ve failed to advance, and that failure becomes your sense of self-worth.
I once had a writer tell me you should always be working on your next book while sending one to print. I’m distrustful of writing advice in general, but especially that of the “always” variety aimed at writers who can be so differently wired upstairs. Going to the grocery store was enough during the pandemic. For me, being alive was enough during a pandemic. I’m supposed to be…writing on top of trying to survive? Sending each book into the world was a full-time job on top of the full-time job I had to pay my bills.
Finishing two manuscripts was enough from someone who—for years—thought writing a full-length book was this unsolvable math problem. Then, I did it—twice—and editing and publishing and acting as my own publicist was more than enough (my god, trying to be my own publicist was more than enough—we’ll save that conversation for another time too).
For years, I wondered if I was a fraud because I hadn’t published a book, and now that I have, I wonder what it means to be a writer now. On some level, I feel very calm and at peace with what I have accomplished. The goal posts always move, but being able to say I had my book eased something in me that itched for so long. Although I am in no way alone. There are many of us “emerging”/“emerged” (which is it?) who have our debut books and are wondering how to proceed.
What does it mean to be a published writer who debuted and then slowed down instead of running toward that next goal post? Especially when there’s these expectations that go with being “emerged” and the next steps that one is expected to follow.
The unspoken (or maybe it’s spoken) rule for fiction writers is that you publish a short story collection, then follow up with a debut novel. It’s the respectable art form. Story collections are for beginners. Story collections are for publishing your MFA work. To be a real contender for American letters, you need to have your novel. You need to have your novel to get an important tenure-track teaching job too. So on and so forth.
There’s a lot of unfortunate signals that get sent out that overvalue the novel and undervalue short fiction. Which is a shame: since some of my favorite writers are creators and champions of short fiction—and short stories feel closest to my heart. Poets go through this too, it seems. I’ve noticed a trend where if you don’t succeed in your poetry, the next step is to turn to personal essay and become a memoirist. Prose is king, I suppose.
There’s a sort of paradox that many of us exist in, having published our books but not fully embarked on whatever a “writing career” is supposed to mean. There are so many opportunities for writers without books, but few for those who published and began to see themselves living in a type of lack. I know, I know. It sounds a little thankless to scrutinize the opportunities that published authors (of all people!) are missing out on. I remember when it felt like the end of the world because I was sitting on all these unpublished manuscripts.
Something we don’t talk about enough is not the unpublished writer—or the successful published writer—but all those writers who publish one book (maybe two), and then fall into the in-between. They get their book and they disappear. They’ve technically “debuted” but never quite emerged—could continue to use the support of fellowships they’re told they’re overqualified for. But the support isn’t always available. The clock is ticking. What do you do?
God save the midlist author.
Sometimes it feels like I’m standing in a valley and when so many of my peers who climbed the previous mountain with me have already began climbing the next one (I can see them in the distance—so high up and far ahead of me).
Although I have been writing. That’s the kicker. I talk about myself sometimes like I’m done. I talk about myself like I’ve done nothing since I finished my MFA program. I tend to beat myself up like this old me disappeared, but the truth was I was just changing. The writing practice changed, just in a messier, incomplete way. I’m still here, and I (hopefully) have a lot more to share with you.
I’ve been saying for years that the short story is closer to the poem as a unit than the novel. This is perhaps why it was so easy for me to transition into writing short-form vs. long-form fiction. The novelty of trying to figure out how to write a novel has been a lot trickier. It’s kept me going for the past five years, because in a way it has been an unsolvable math problem. I’m still toiling in the conjecture and the magnitude of mysterious numbers of 50k+ prose projects.
So what have I been doing these past five years?
I started a Southern Gothic literary horror novel about a haunted house; I started a literary novel about art-making and religious, childhood trauma and conversion therapy and everything-Florida; I started a middle-grade novel about cats and descents into underworlds; I started a couple of queer young-adult novels; I started a vignette-heavy poet’s novel about a cam boy in NYC & everything-NYC; I even started teaching myself Twine and Ren’Py and RPG Maker during certain points of the pandemic to make a choose-you-own-adventure game.
I’ve also been working on-and-off for five years writing a literary fantasy novel about teenagers with superpowers growing up in Florida. This is my “main” novel project, which I adore. I finished a draft (my first and only full novel draft) in the summer of 2019. It was ~185,000 words, which is…a lot of words. I’d like to finish a second draft of that this summer, although I think the world isn’t ready for that one and it’s going to go into a drawer for awhile. I have to be careful with giving all of my hearts away. The negotiations are constantly being renegotiated.
Novel-writing is strange (from the perspective of a poet) because you can toil and toil and toil and just end up with a mess of words that you aren’t sending out to literary journals, aren’t sharing, and aren’t publishing. Sisyphus, meet your new friend, Boulder.
I tend to be the type of woo-woo writer that just toils away at various things until one gets done. In the past I’ve compared it to trying to torrent a dozen different (totally legal in-the-public-domain!) movies at the same time. They’re all downloading hella slow, but one of them is bound to finish at some point. In the past week I’ve started to reevaluate this process, which is a tug-of-war between what I need and what I want.
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want more for my books. What does that look like? I don’t know? A nomination for a prestigious post-publication award? An A-list celebrity being caught in 4K on their private jet reading Moonflower…? A venerated poet declaring Mask for Mask was their favorite read of last year? A prestigious agent stumbling upon one of my stories in a magazine and rushing to sign me on? In all of these fictitious scenarios though, I’m not sure what the end-result is, besides more eyes on my work, and maybe more exciting advocates helping me to reach that next book-length publication. And perhaps a dream of economic security too.
The truth is: hindsight can only do so much for us. I published on two small university presses during a pandemic, and I did what I could to hold my books’ hands and guide them gently into a world with so many other books. One reason I may keep holding their hands is because I have a dozen scattershot novel projects, which also makes it hard to fully move on to whatever that next thing is. I didn’t get the dream agent or sell the half-a-million copies. What I did get is two peculiar books that are uniquely my voice & writing style. Two books I absolutely love and stand behind. Even if they’re difficult, asymmetrical, occult. I’m trying to not feel ashamed or like a loser for continuing to exist in the realms of my 2020 and 2021 books after they’ve begun to exist as “backlist titles” in 2022. Even if it might not sound like it, I’m very, very, very, very grateful that two publishers took risks on my manuscripts and helped my words exist in the world as published books. On some level, I’m also appreciative of how low the stakes were, debuting via the small press during a very chaotic past few years.
And for those of you reading this—I’m grateful for the eyes I do have on my words. I’m grateful for you for seeing something meaningful in all these combinations of letters I often quizzically put forward. Or, at least, I’m grateful for you liking me enough as a human to humor what I have to say.
I don’t think I’m going to be done with my longing (“grieving” and “mourning” sound too severe for an emotion that is intermixed with joy and pride) for my two books until that next book has been queued up for publication. My bloodforce bled, to tepid success. I envy those artist-writers who seem content on just publishing a book and immediately moving on to work on their next obsession(s). I envy the diligent artists more than the writers who seemingly get a big break and climb that next mountain because the artists are closer to my heart—the ones who don’t care about “writing careers” but just make because their bloodforces propel them to make.
Unfortunately, I’m an artist with student loan debt, so I dream of having a career too. I don’t know if it’s a realistic dream, but the hope affords me the movement to go on.
Speaking of dreams: one thing I have done in this past week is ask myself what I loved during those magic years of creation with my two books—back when they were literary zygotes. What felt good about not just the work—but all those early-day “being a writer” fantasies.
For me, the joy of creating short work was this rhythm of writing, polishing, editing, tidying up, and sending out to literary magazines. There is such a satisfaction to not having to toil for years on a novel—and see consistent, annual results via publication in magazines. Okay, maybe there’s a bit of an endorphin rush to all of that too, but hey, we all have to have something to keep us going, right?
I ended up subscribing to Duotrope this past week and making a calendar of deadlines, even though if you’d asked me a month ago I would have told you sending out to literary magazines felt like a past me activity, not a present one.
One novelty I never pursued when I first began sending out stories was those annual contests that literary magazines hold to publish a single story or a single poem. They used to sound like a waste of money (maybe they are), but for now they seem like a great way to set writing goals. I’m not saying I think my work actually has a shot, but when I made a calendar of deadlines I began to feel hope. That what-if-ness. The novelty is: setting goals. Beginning again. Working with what I have in my immediate surroundings. Working through what I know. If not climbing a mountain, at least imagining what that climb would feel like.
I will still be working on my novels this summer, but the truth is I enjoyed working on poems and stories more, and I need something to find my way back there, so I’m setting some deadlines to write toward and slowing down on some of the long-form fiction until I’m sitting on a pile of newly written stories that I can enjoy editing and sending out.
One of my friends once told me he would read issues of his dream journals and then use the existing poems as a writing prompt (trying to match their form/content/style/voice)—then he would send the generated poems to the journal they were inspired by. Often they got accepted. Whatever keeps you going, right?
For now, perhaps slowing down on ‘the rush to write a first novel’ is going to keep me going. Poems are still tricky (another post for another time), but I ache for dedicating myself to writing new short stories again. It’s OK to listen to your wants, because those are the hopes that propel us beyond our present. I need to remind myself not to neglect my needs too. For now, these needs feel like shifting my focus to—first-and-foremost—writing short fiction again.
Hmm. We’ll see how it goes.
This is a dispatch from the valley. I’ve tried to climb the next mountain, but something about the weather, the conditions, the lack of equipment, my sweaty hands, the grip. It’s too soon. I will be in the valley for a little while longer. You go ahead. I’m going to let myself enjoy these flowers—the ones that only grow here.
They’re moonflowers, which, as you know, I’m quite fond of.