Publicize that Book!

Over at January's blog, Deb recommended this site, which has lots of ideas for how to promote a book. I suspect that many of us who have been following publishing can be surprised at how much we'll need to do to support our books. Still, it's always good to have some fresh ideas.

I'd also recommend this page of the 52 Projects website. Lots of great ideas here.

A book I return to again and again is 101 Ways to Make Poems Sell: The Salt Guide to Getting and Staying Published by Chris Hamilton-Emery. Go here to read the first chapter. If you've been submitting to journals for any length of time, the 50 Dos and Don'ts at the end of the chapter will probably seem self-evident to you. But the rest of the book is full of good ideas to help you build your profile and sell your book.

Cool Teaching Idea

When I was in grad school, one of my friends who focused on Composition and Rhetoric told me that until very recently, students learned to write expository essays by copying, word for word, essays from great masters, usually Greeks and Romans. There was no talk of pre-writing techniques, no discussion of revision. No, you copied out Cicero, in your own handwriting, day after day. Eventually, you might be allowed to write an essay that had your own original thought.

I saw a posting on Leslie Pietrzyk's blog that made me think of this technique of teaching Comp-Rhet, except it's a poetry technique. Guest blogger Judy Leaver describes a technique that Billy Collins used in a workshop that he led in Key West, where students used a William Carlos Williams poem, "This Is Just to Say": "Our homework was to ‘copy’ the exact form—same title, exact line length, same punctuation or lack of, and number of syllables/per line . . . ." Go here for more details about the assignment and to see the results.

Those of us who teach are getting to the point in the term where we often find ourselves saying, "Are you sure the term isn't over yet? We still have to keep going? For weeks? Months even?" Our initial enthusiasm has waned. We know we had good ideas at one time, but we can't remember what they were.

It's good to have an assignment like this one, one that would work in a Creative Writing class, in an Intro to Lit class, and even perhaps in a Lit Survey class. And it's a change from the analytical assignments that have begun to get so tedious. Why write about literature, when you can get right in there and wrestle with the literature itself?

A Poem for Ash Wednesday

Soon I leave for church. No longer do churches have a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper and then the next day, an Ash Wednesday service, at least not down here. We'll have a pancake supper and move into Ash Wednesday. We'll get our foreheads smudged with ash and be reminded that we're made from dust and all to soon, we'll return to dust. If you want to read more of my theological thoughts on Ash Wednesday and the season of Lent (and other topics), head over to my other blog.

I've written several poems that I really love that focus on Ash Wednesday, but so far they haven't been published, so I don't want to post them here.

But when looking through my files, this poem seemed appropriate. I wrote it during my adjunct years, when I drove across three counties, filling my gas tank several times a week, teaching Composition here (and there and everywhere!), Literature survey classes there, Victorian and Romantic Lit classes in yet a different location.

I had just taught Julian of Norwich, and I was thinking of her days as an anchoress, when this poem came to me. It was published in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard.

My Habit, My Hairshirt


A modern day anchoress, I commit
myself to my car. In my moving cell,
I sing constantly and pray without ceasing.

I dedicate myself to our modern religion
of hectic pace. I rush from one location to another,
showing my devotion in twelve hour increments.

No time for contemplation, the anathema
to the modern ascetic. I flog
myself with my cell phone and briefcase.

Occasionally, a heretical urge lures
me, a siren song urging me to slow down,
tempting me to tame my frantic schedule.

But no Gnostic visions for me. I race
through another week in the grip of my Daytimer,
my habit, my hairshirt.

The Freelancer's Economy (and we're all freelancers now!)

As we got settled the other night in the theatre, I watched the ushers and remembered my own ushering gig at the Koger Center, during graduate school. I said to my husband, "That was a great job, except for having to deal with the public." But we got to see great shows and great performers for free. I saw Sarah Vaughan in what would be one of her last performances, for example.

When economic bad news comes in waves, like yesterday's stock market drop, I fight off my panic by saying, "I can cope with a bad economy. I made it through grad school."

In a way, grad school was a bargain. I had a teaching assistantship, so I was paid a pittance and my tuition was only $200 a semester, which could be taken out of my paycheck. I made it through a PhD program without taking out any loans. I lived on very little. There was always that edge of financial terror, but we learned to live with very little money.

Of course, it helped that all my friends were similarly situated. Instead of going out to eat, we cooked meals together, usually vegetarian because we couldn't afford meat and some of us had ethical concerns. When we weren't ushering, we played games or watched videos that we checked out of the library. We went on long walks and attended free festivals at local parks. If it hadn't been for the constant worry that I couldn't stretch my paycheck to cover my bills, I'd remember it as a great time.

I had a similar experience when we moved to Florida, and I strung together adjunct jobs while looking for a full-time job. The constant worry about money was exhausting, as was the need to always be working 6 months ahead to make sure I had enough classes lined up. But there was something exhilarating about setting myself free from some of the constraints of the capitalist system.

We may be moving towards an economy where more and more people feel that exhilaration and terror, that freedom from an ordinary full time job. NPR's Talk of the Nation recently ran a piece on the gig economy; go here to hear it.

Seeing "A Chorus Line" on Academy Award Night

When I was 12 years old, if you had asked me to envision my adult life, I would not have talked about poetry or teaching English. I'd have assured you that I was going to be an actress--on Broadway, thank you very much, none of that tacky movie or television work for me. No, my art would stay pure--and yes, I was so much of a budding drama geek that I probably would have used that language.

Clearly, my adult life has not gone as my teenage self would have planned.

Seeing A Chorus Line last night brought back a flood of memories. I find it fitting that I decided to go see a travelling Broadway show--one that's over 30 years old--instead of staying home to watch the Academy Awards. I loved seeing it, but I have no idea if I would have loved it so much if I didn't have that emotional connection. My sister and I memorized the whole album when my mom got it for Christmas in 1977, and in 1979, my fearless parents took us from Montgomery, Alabama to Atlanta to see the touring Broadway show (I was 13, and my sister was about to turn 9). This show has been part of my life for a very long time.

Would I love the show as much if I had been, say, an aspiring astronomer? If I had grown up to be an accountant or a marine biologist? My spouse, who went to the show with me, says no, I wouldn't love the show, that I'd see these dancers as silly dreamers who need to grow up and get real jobs.

As I watched the show, I thought about how preparing for the grown up life as that I thought I would have as an actor has prepared me in unique ways for the grown up life that I do have as a poet and an academic. For one thing, I've known from a young age that I need to have a tough skin when it comes to rejection. I'm not one of those poets who shrivels up and refuses to submit any poems for half a year when I get a rejection slip. Nope, I just send out the next batch of poems and keep hoping for the best. In the past, when I've applied for full-time teaching work, I've realized that the odds were stacked against me, and I haven't taken rejection personally. As in acting (and book publishing) there are only so many slots, and there are so many more qualified applicants than slots.

And my drama background has prepared me for a life in front of students. My classrooms are rarely boring. I have an amazing energy, and I have a wide range of techniques to keep people riveted. At the very least, I know enough to vary my vocal tone, which is something that so many faculty and other public speakers never seem to understand. I have read so many plays and poems and other types of literature out loud that I have no problems with cold readings.

I worry that we're about to see the same kind of contractions in higher education in the coming decade that Broadway saw in the 1970's onward. We've seen a lot of tenure track jobs evaporate, so that academics have a lot in common with dancers and actors--working gig by gig, stringing together enough work to pay the bills. Now I worry that we'll see a lot of schools and colleges close in the coming decade, and academics won't even be able to find adjunct jobs.

But I'll take a page out of the songbook: "Won't regret, can't forget, what I did for love." I'm lucky that I've been able to do what I love: college work in drama, journalism, radio; graduate work in British literature; a wide variety of teaching work; time to craft poems, stories, and a variety of types of writing. If I had a chance to do it all over again, I'd sign right up!

Creating a Book of Poems is like Quilting

Yesterday, I took a nap under a quilt that I made several years ago. I decided to leave it spread out across the bed for the evening. "That quilt is one of the most beautiful things I've ever made with my own two hands," I said to my husband. That started me thinking about whether or not that statement is true, the origin of the quilt, and the other creative projects which engage me.

I made the quilt because I had so many leftover pieces of fabric from other projects. I cut out long strips because I like sewing long seams, so much of the quilt is composed of foot long strips which are 3-5 inches wide. I decided early on to sew 5 strips together and then to work on a different batch of strips (perhaps later today or tomorrow, I'll post a picture--you can have fun seeing if it's what you visualized when you read my words, but I'm not sure I want to know how accurate my descriptive writing was in this paragraph).

When you look at the quilt, it looks planned. All the colors go together. You might think that I planned it all out from the beginning, but I didn't. I had certain colors in mind as I bought more fabric to go with the project, but I didn't have a firm plan. I didn't say, "This blue will go here, and this purple here, and I'll put this piece way over here away from them." Later, I laid the patches of 5 strips across my living room floor and moved this patch here and that patch there until I had the most pleasing pattern possible. And then began the long work of stitching them together. And then the long work of quilting.

Assembling a book of poems is much the same. We write individual poems, and often, most of us don't have a plan for a final book. Those of us who have been academically trained may sense themes and images that emerge, and maybe our academic training means we'll sense that earlier--or maybe it gets in the way.

Most people I've read about assemble a book of poems much the same way I assembled my quilt: they put poems beside each other and see how they interact. They move poems around until they have sections of the book that work best.

Like a quilter, we often don't understand the scope of the project when we begin to write our poems. We stitch our words together, and then we quilt our books together, and hopefully, at some point, we can look back and say, "How did I do that?" Hopefully we will be amazed by the beauty of our work, by the mystical strangeness that could have only come out of our heads and hands.

Postage Rates and the Mail (and Online Submissions)

Yesterday, I spent a small fortune mailing manuscripts to various publishers. My poetry manuscript and cover letter came to less than 80 pages, and I still paid $4.55 per envelope. For just a few dimes more, I could have upgraded to Priority Mail, but I was afraid that would look too needy.

And postage rates are going up in May. Again. Two more cents. I wish they'd just raise our rates 8 pennies to get us to an even 50 cents, and then quit raising the rates for a few years.

I know, I know, I should just get that stamp that will always be a first class stamp, no matter when you bought it. A few years ago, I thought about buying them, but I foolishly thought we were done with postage increases for awhile.

I'm glad that I turned my attention to poetry and away from my novel manuscript. How much must it cost to mail 300-400 pages?

With postage rates on the brain, I was happy to see Diane Lockward's latest post on journals that accept submissions via e-mail. I was slow to adjust to this submission method, but in some ways, I now prefer it.

However, I'm still one of those strange people who loves the minute she pulls the paper mail out of the mailbox. It's a thrill unmatched by e-mail or other ways of communicating. I love opening the envelope, hoping for good news. I know that the best news--book publication!--is likely to come by way of a phone call or e-mail, but I still love that moment in the day when the mail comes.

Unlike e-mail, it only comes once a day. I can get the mail and then get on with the day. E-mail requires constant checking, and perhaps that's why it doesn't have the same thrill.