Being and Formulating

I have created a page to include all my publications and other writing successes. I always keep my resume updated with my professional publications, but I also want a place to include my creative publications.

My success as a writer has been fairly modest. My poetry publications have been appeared in very small literary magazines. The copy of Superior Poetry News, in which my poem “Fair Warning” appears, is photocopied pages stapled together with a construction paper cover on which the title is handwritten. So, yes, rather modest. But success, nonetheless.

My short story, “Drunk Monkeys,” received an honorable mention in a Writer’s Digest contest. Me and 100 other people. Not the most exclusive of awards, but I’ll take it.

Of course, I am hoping to build on this modest success, so we’ll see what happens. I would like to post more here about my writing thoughts and projects as I have sporadically in the past. We’ll see what happens with that as well.

I enjoy reading literary magazines and keeping up on new writing. There are so many out there that chosing ones to subscribe to is difficult. I prefer to read a variety of literary magazines, which is easy to do if you are submitting to writing contests. Often, the entry fee includes a year’s subscription. By submitting to a variety of contests, I have a nice flow of different reading materials coming to my door.

Of course, the upside for the publisher in including a year’s subscription is that people may opt to continue their subscriptions beyond the year. I usually fight the urge knowing if I subscribed to a lot of magazines, I would be overwhelmed. I already feel overwhelmed by all I want to read.

That said, I have been a long-time subscriber to Ploughshares. Despite having rotating editors, I find a consistent quality to what they publish. Recently, I have subscribed to Rattle: Poetry for the 21st Century. I like that they balance a variety of contemporary poetry, interviews, and a section with a particular theme. The issue I just finished included a section about Cowboy Poetry, which, being relatively new to the southwest, I found intriguing.

What I also like about Rattle is that they offer a lot of their poetry online through their site and their blog. Interesting how putting up content for free is part of what enticed me to subscribe to the print. But that’s a whole other line of thought.

Also, by having their poetry online, Rattle gives me the opportunity to link to some of my favorite poems from the Winter 2008 issue (see, too overwhelmed to keep up):

• Scarlet, by Sherman Alexie
• Considering the Trebonites, by Dick Allen
• On the Poverty of My Imagination, by Tiffany Beechy
• Dear Internal Revenue Service, by John Brehm
• Nameless Boy, by Douglas Goetsch

Discovering a new writer is such a joyful and annoying prospect. Joyful, of course, because I love to read. Annoying because I discover them faster than I can read them.

I had heard of For the Relief of Unbearable Urges before but couldn’t tell you anything about it, not even the name of its author. But I just read a short essay by and an interview with Nathan Englander in New Letters (74:3 2008). In addition to Urges, Englander also wrote The Ministry of Special Cases and the interview focuses on this latter work.

Of course, the short essay, “The Quick and the Dead” (about his visit to Argentina to visit cemeteries) and the interview made me want to read his books, so onto the pile they go.

Although the interview focuses on The Ministry of Special Cases, he does make some interesting observations about novel writing in general. Since part of my hope for this blog is to chronicle interesting and helpful quotes about writing, I’ll pass along a couple from Englander:

On plot:

“From reading the book it would seem that one outcome is much more likely fated, but I like to think that, as in a haiku, if a novel is functioning, there’s a momentum to the ending.”

On getting the details right:

“Because fiction has to be this unbroken dream. If a reader says to himself that street doesn’t go that way, or you wouldn’t hear the airport from there, he isn’t in the dream. To me that’s a failure, because it’s a question of effort.”

And since it’s November:

“Some people write a book just because they can, and those people are scary to me.” (The connection of this quote to nanowrimo is mine not Englander’s but it seems apropos.)