A journal I’ve heard of through Twitter opened their submissions for a 48-hour window. I had until 11:59 pm on Monday to get something in. This seems to be a thing some journals do – open for brief windows. I don’t know much about the journal other than some writers I’ve followed seem to mention it from time to time. Because Twitter can be this weird echo chamber, it’s hard to know how things stack up. If a group of people I follow are talking about something (because they’re also connected to each other) it can begin to seem like everybody is talking about it. None of this really matters other than to say I saw a few people mention this journal is open for submission and I thought maybe I should try.
To date, I’ve sent my work out to a select group of journals. If you’re unaware, these things (journals) are a lot like colleges with varying levels of prestige. There are the ivy league journals, the public ivies, the good state schools, etc. etc. and somewhere towards the bottom are the not-so-exclusive online schools and worse, the for-profit colleges and universities and the outright scams (Trump University). I drew that example out way longer than I needed to, but you get the point. I’ve been submitting to (and getting rejected by) the good state schools and the ivies. I’m not sure where this journal lands in that hierarchy, but I suspect it’s a little lower than I’ve been aiming… and that was part of the appeal. To some degree, I think I might need to get a publication or two under my belt.
Unfortunately, securing a publication for the sake of securing a publication doesn’t fit well with my personality or my approach to life and writing. Which makes me feel arrogant – as if I’m saying that I’m too good for that. And I don’t think that’s where my hesitation on pursuing publications comes from. Submitting work is a pain in the ass. For me, it takes time, and it takes overcoming a whole lot of self-doubt. I begin by researching the publication. I read through some things they’ve published to see if my work is a good fit. I look at who else they’ve published – do I know and respect the writers they’ve published? Then comes the hard part of deciding what I’d want to send. I look at what I have subitted at other places, what’s been rejected, and what’s just sitting in my folder on my computer. On good days, I either think my writing is decent enough to submit, or I don’t care if it’s good and submit anyway. On less than good days, this part of the process is where I grind to a halt. I re-read my work and am either so bored with it or so turned off by it that I can’t find anything to send out. This is what happened when I tried to submit work to this journal. I disliked everything.
Some famous writer (I can’t remember who) said something about writing (I can’t remember what) that I can’t seem to find but was along the lines of: practice your craft, blah blah blah, and find a nemesis. The other day I was writing about how my stack of nightstand books is sometimes divided into two categories: books that inspire and books that I feel I could have written, but better. If I have a nemesis (and I kinda do) – he’s in that second stack of books. I’m one of his 15k followers on Twitter. By Twitter standards, 15k isn’t a lot, but by poet standards, it’s more than a solid showing. I don’t think I’ve enjoyed any of the many poems he’s written or published. Every time I read one of his poems, I feel like I just read a Dick and Jane book. Yet, he’s gotten into to some ivy league publications and had an NEA (National Endowment of the Arts) fellowship. I can’t understand it. Following his account, I sense hints of narcissism and insecurity in his personality – which is even more of a turn-off. He’s called people out who have rejected or criticized his writing by suggesting it’s because he’s brown and maybe they’re racist or they’re just jealous. I went looking for an example of this behavior, but couldn’t find one – the dude tweets multiple times a day (mostly about his success) and I really don’t feel like wading through it for the sake of this post. It’s the type of thing where I’m trying to figure out what I’m missing in his writing. I want to direct message other writers and followers just to see what they see in it.
I’ve been hoping that having a nemesis would help with the writing, but it hasn’t. Instead of motivating me, it makes me feel petty and like I’m a slacker when it comes to the “business” of writing. My nemesis submits constantly (or at least he claims to). He posts enough tweets about submitting and being accepted that I begin to wonder when he has time to write. I probably shouldn’t knock his approach given that my approach of not submitting and not writing isn’t getting me places…. And that’s really the burning question. What does “getting places” look like for me? Do I have a destination? There’s another account I follow on Twitter. It’s the account of a woman who writes and has had a few publications. She frequently posts complaints about how the big publishers and awards never take chances on small writers or emerging writers (by which I assume she means her – they need to take a chance on her). She clearly has a place she’d like to arrive at through this whole process. I wouldn’t consider her a nemesis (I know nothing about her work), but I sometimes want to write to her and say trust the process or something dumb like that (by which I’d be suggesting – perhaps you’re focused on the wrong thing). There are hundreds of thousands of people writing for hundreds of thousands of reasons. There’s no right or wrong approach – but the math suggests that very few of them (us) will ever get the recognition they (we) want (and maybe deserve). It feels presumptuous to assume one is being overlooked in a sea of people being overlooked. “You look like a god sitting there, why don’t you try writing something?”
I never got around to submitting to that journal. I’m a little stuck between not liking anything I’ve written and not producing anything new. The ideas I had last week now feel stale, or dumb, or lacking spark. It’s easier, in this moment, to write a long-winded mini-exploration of how I don’t know how to do any of this. And if I’m being honest – even this feels like a failure. Over the weekend I read an interview with the poet Diane Seuss and then read one of her essays, “On Not Belonging.” The essay appealed to me because it uses language and images in ways that seldom occur to me. She winds through her time at a writing colony while weaving and making big and also shrinking her personality throughout her essay. She jumps between childhood and her time at the colony in ways that are funny and raw and hold the reader’s interest. By comparison, I feel my writing is far too straight forward. This is what I did, this is how I felt about it… there’s nothing (in my opinion) to keep you interested. I’m sorry for that and if I knew how to do better I would.
When I sat down to write this, I had intended to spend more time writing about my nemesis. By the time I had gotten to him, I didn’t care enough to really get into it. In a post the other day I mentioned that I’m reading Atlas of the Heart. I’m early in the book and the author, Brown, is writing about comparisons – mostly about how they are both unavoidable and not very helpful. When presented with people who are either worse off or better off than we are, we can have a range of reactions. She quotes the researcher Frank Fujita, “Social comparisons can make us happy or unhappy. Upward comparisons can inspire or demoralize us, whereas downward comparisons can make us feel superior or depress us. In general, however, frequent social comparisons are not associated with life satisfaction or the positive emotions of love and joy but are associated with the negative emotions of fear, anger, shame and sadness.” Intuitively, I think I, and many of us, know this.
Really, what’s going on in my head is that in the span of a few days I’ve come across multiple quotes and pieces that all seem to pull at the same stray thread on an ratty sweater that’s wearing thin. Perhaps because I’m looking for it, everywhere I turn, I read or hear or see something related to this notion of writing and comparison and needing to belong, but also needing solitude and being fearless enough to work without expectation or hope. Gore Vidal wrote, “In America, the race goes to the loud, the solemn, the hustler. If you think you’re a great writer, you must say that you are.” That feels too bold for my taste, yet I suspect I could use a little more of that swagger… and maybe more than anything that’s why I should spend more time pursuing some publications – because it might be a key to unlocking other opportunities and other experiences. It might be another piece in the puzzle of becoming.