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Wide-eyed & Wild-eyed in Writing & Submissions

MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAIn one of the last days before the regular job really kicked into gear, I sat manic and crazed in front of my computer revising a short story and posting a fellowship application and slamming a 300-word essay together in 45 minutes flat.

Maybe it was an hour, and maybe this wasn’t my very best work, but it was definitely a wide-eyed, wild-eyed attack on writing and submitting.

These last-minute attempts at literary scholarship don’t always produce prize-winning material (…wait, do they ever?), but they do produce. In that strange and stubborn moment, when I can do anything but sit one more day on a story, I find a tiny bit of hope and possibility and a fire rekindled, which for me was relief after a very quiet summer.

Sure, I anticipate the usual No’s, No thank you’s, and “Really…No” to hit my inbox in the next several months. Still, I don’t regret hitting SEND. After all, as Sherman Alexie says in this podcast with Jess Walter, submitting, acceptances, and rejections are all part of the “entire process of becoming a writer.”

Mantras help me push that process, phrases like “Why not?” and “Fearless writing” and (more recently) “Do the foot work.”

IMG_0424What that means is that one day in doing the foot work to get your portfolio together for the submission to that literary journal so far out of your league it’s laughable, you will sift through all those old stories and rejections (because who are we kidding, you save every one), and you will discover that half of the stories you sent out, which bounced back time and again, eventually did find a home.

It took countless tries, but they made it to publication, all because you sat crazed at the computer that one Monday afternoon and hit SUBMIT again and again.

What are you waiting for?

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Quotables from dog-eared pages

This one from the Winter 2015, Lost Truths & Family Legends issue of Creative Nonfiction, which I (for some odd reason) kept under piles of papers for two seasons. No one knows why, but we discover (or rediscover) what we need when the time is right.

PicsArt

Like poetry. #AmWriting

Read Doyle’s entire essay HERE on Creative Nonfiction. Better yet, buy the issue; after all, it’s about holding the paper in hand, reading the words out loud, underlining your own favorite parts.

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A review of Evergreen, a novel rich in character & place.

The way Eveline would remember it, there was a moment of absolute stillness when the future was still theirs before the wind blew up from the river and the first of spring’s leaves shook as if they were afraid.
~from EVERGREEN by Rebecca Rasmussen

I have loved Rebecca Rasmussen’s writing since her first novel, The Bird Sisters. Landscape plays an important role in the story of two sisters, Milly and Twiss, who “have spent their lives nursing people and birds back to health;” readers become rooted in place and character easily from the first few pages. Rasmussen’s second novel, Evergreen (released in paperback in June), is just as rich, if not more, in setting. The opening paragraph tells all:

19027_10155757242600296_7662015040815369733_nEveline LeMay came after the water. She arrived on a cool morning in early September, asleep in a rowboat without paddles as if she knew the river currents would carry her past the tamarack and black-spruce forest, around Bone Island, a fen, and a bog, all the way to Evergreen and her new husband, Emil, who was waiting for her on the rocky shore.

A young woman ferried into new territory under the shadows of a spiny northern wood and past an island whose name alone hints at desperation, Evergreen opens with the reunion of Eveline and her husband Emil, who has been carefully transforming a broken-down and abandoned cabin into a newlyweds’ safehold.

But Eveline is not safe. When Emil returns overseas to his ailing father, she falls victim to a stranger’s hand and finds herself caught in the turbulence of a backwoods spring, a secret child, and a decision that tears her apart. The companionship of her strange neighbor Lulu helps her survive the harsh living and a broken heart, and later, on her deathbed, she reveals the truth of her secret to her son, Hux: a baby, his sister, given away but never forgotten.

Evergreen is a quiet novel in which landscape not only paints the picture but sets the tone of this generational story about a young wife and mother, about the broken soul of a daughter, and about a brother’s love, devotion, and healing. Rebecca Rasmussen is an author to follow if you’re a reader and one to emulate if you’re a writer.

Click HERE for more about Evergreen, including an excerpt, reviews, and a reading guide.