I haven't written here since 2021. Looking back, I see a number of posts about Covid, or Covid diary writings, more than I remember having done. Lately I've thought about posting via substack, and then I thought, I'll come back to this blog and keep substack on the burner for now. That is all to say, I am always writing and 99.5% of it has not been and won't be published. Since Jan 2023 I've focused hard on getting back into submitting work for publication, I've organized my days with more time and discipline for writing, and I've accomplished a lot. At least in terms of words on the page, I've produced. In terms of publications though, very little has come out of the time and money spent on literary submissions (poems, flash and long creative NF essays). But because I spend so much time writing and thinking about writing, I want to do some of that here. I know that getting lots of rejections is supposed to be a kind of good news: "I must be submitting a lot to get so many rejections, yay me!" and that getting rejections that say they liked the writing, enjoyed reading the work, it went through many rounds of consideration.... but, we don't have a place for it, those are also supposed to be encouraging: keep sending! submit to those places again! it just takes perseverance! Sure, yes, I get all of that. And it's also in the end so discouraging.
I have a long essay I've been sending out and revising and sending since late 2022 or early 2023. I mentioned my frustration with feeling like I don't know what else to do with that essay during an online writing workshop class recently, and the instructor talked about putting work down for a few months and then coming back to it, re-seeing it. I say things like that to my own students. I do it myself. And it's still hard, it's been many more than a few months, now heading toward the end of 2024 and that essay seems completely over, or I'm over it. I thought it was the start of a whole book project, and all summer I've been distressed about what it means that I can't publish that one essay, that I won't be able to write or publish a whole book of essays.
But writing doesn't only mean publishing. Something else I've *learned* or more accurately been reminded of, during that same workshop class, is that writing takes a lot of time. A couple of the writers whose work we read came to talk to us during the class in zoom. They talked about how long it took from beginning to write the book--whether or not they realized it would be a book at that time--to when it finally was accepted for publication (and then finally in print). And, what's in the book may be different from earlier pieces published in journals. Although some collections of essays I've read include many that were previously published, some books may be written *as books* with less focus on publishing excerpts during the process. Which is to say, there are many paths.
My goal (one of my writing goals) for the summer was to have a *clear* idea about how to proceed with this book project. I'm not sure I've got that, but I was just listing/organizing the many short and long essays I've been working on over the past couple of years. I have (tentative, preliminary) ideas about how they might fit together as a book. I have ideas for continuing to write--expanding pieces already begun, beginning new ones--and trusting in the process. Writing takes time, and over time one might be able to *see* the writing coming together.
The long essay is about rivers and cottonwood forests in NM, about the ranch where we stay for a month in the spring, that we've traveled to for the past few years. Other essays in *the book* will be about MI, water, lakes, etc. and sometimes cherries. Here's a link to one short piece, "Linger Here," that did get published. Thanks for reading :)
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