On blogging: Would it kill you people to 'like' and share?

You may as well know, since you’re feeding my habit right now, but I’m addicted to hits.

After I post to my blog each day, I obsessively refresh the page that tells me how many hits I have. I like it when one (mine) turns to two and ten and twenty, then one hundred, two hundred, more ….

I also analyze my stats. I try to figure out what themes and topics appeal to people, what time or day to post for the best results, and just who the heck is reading me in Jakarta.

My findings are highly unscientific, but what I think I’ve learned is that people like the inside-baseball stuff—tricks of the submitting trade, and a sense of how the editorial process works. Even readers who are themselves editors seem to enjoy a glimpse into other journals processes, other possibilities, or other governing philosophies.

I remember when I was starting out with submissions. I felt like there were secrets to the process. My bio seemed like an important element—and a deficient one. What I lacked in a publication record, I tried to make up for in trivia. Enjoys nature. Likes cats. And dammit, I do like nature and cats, which feels like it should matter, and cats in nature? An unbeatable combo. 

It seemed to me like I wouldn’t get published if I hadn’t been published, much like the conundrum of the never-employed feeling unemployable. And I think my readers either feel the same or have felt the same, and a post about that issue resonates. 

There is a lot of disagreement, actually. How helpful are previous publications? For me, decisions come down mostly to the work itself—but a record of publications can reinforce my judgment about bold or unusual work. I can’t be too far wrong if other editors have found work to their liking, right? (Of course, I’m quite middle-aged and very firmly in the who-cares-what-other-editors-do camp, but at one time, maybe, when I was younger, this sort of reinforcement mattered.)

And I’m digressing, and someone in Jakarta is beginning to reach for the remote.

I think a lot about the people who read my work. I’m interested in how my poems, stories, and essays are received, obviously, but that stuff doesn’t have a dashboard. The poems don’t come with comment sections, which I don’t mind—I don’t really want to know how to make $10,000 at home, or the ways in which my poems obliquely relate to the theme of MAKINGAMERICAGREATAGAIN.

On another side note, one thing that may surprise some readers is the poor response a book review receives. Most writers talk a lot about the literary community, and so I started publishing daily appreciations of poetry book titles. I devoted hours to each, and I tried to offer some insights into the work I was addressing—but the stats didn't follow. Writers like the idea of book reviews, but perhaps they are not terribly interested in reading them. I’m happy to add to the conversation, and I post the reviews on sites like Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Goodreads to help give writers a boost, but the posts themselves don’t get a whole lot of traction. This is one of the lessons I’ve learned from blogging.

I have to admit, even aside from overlooked book reviews, there are days when I’m convinced I posted a real winner—some groundbreaking stuff—and I get very few hits. And then there are days like yesterday, when a post expresses something encouraging but small (specifically, the value of writers sharing our good news with one another), and the post just takes off.

I write these posts because I’m hoping for connection. And I think people read them because they are, too. Writing is hard, and we just want a little company on our journey—not so much company that it stalls our journey, mind you, but a knowing glance in our direction, similar to that two-fingered steering-wheel wave on a sparsely traveled road.

Blogging for literary citizenship: An interview with Michael Czyzniejewski

I’m two days in to a blog project that has me writing a review of a poetry collection each day, but I’ve got nothing on my partner, fiction writer Michael Czyzniejewski, who spent the 366 days of 2016 writing daily reviews of fiction collections—an even more ambitious task.

I was impressed to see Czyzniejewski complete his task every day without fail, no matter what was going on in his life or who might be telling him, “You know, I really despise that damn blog.”

I recently (as in, today, right now, from the back seat of the car) had a chance to interview Czyzniejewski as he drove to Chicago in his typical style—stingy with bathroom stops, his hand resting on the seat back beside him and blocking my view. We were between public radio stations and I’d already read us some Emerson out loud, so I needed a distraction. I began (a few moments in the future from right now) to ask him some questions.

Me: What was your favorite aspect of the Story366 project?

MC: Oh, reading all the books—consuming all those voices, all those aesthetics, all those different perspectives, but mostly it was getting to read. Reading is the pleasure in itself, and that’s what I got to do the whole time, was just read good books.

Me: Were there any downsides? Like, did you miss having fun with your beautiful family?

MC: Even reading 366 collections, I put only a small dent in the number of collections I wanted to read. I still have a hundred collections at my house that I haven’t covered yet. Also, I made a rule that I couldn’t do a book that I’d read before, and I had to exclude a lot of my closest friends because I’d already read their books—people like Seth Fried, Al Heathcock. Aimee Bender, Karen Russell, Shannon Cain—it seems like they should be in the project, but they’re not, because I’d read their books, and I’d made the stupid rule.

Me: What about your beautiful family?

MC: What about them?

Me: Didn’t it take you away from them a whole bunch and make you feel crummy?

MC: Not only did the project take me away from my family, but with a deadline pressing, it affected my mood. I was stressed sometimes. But I think that’s how it is with any pursuit that you carry through. When you have pursuits like that, some kind of regimen, it has the potential to cause stress in your life.

Me: What is your chief writerly takeaway? And why are your windshield wipers still on?

MC: Because it was rainy and foggy. Wait, is that going on the blog?

Me: Yeah.

MC: I think I understand now more than ever that different writers do different things well. Writers find their voice and they do something really, really well, and they write a book and that book is published, and some of those ways of writing books I can’t do and I never will do—and that’s OK. I’m never going to be the same writer Lee Smith is, or David Gates, or Junot Diaz; they’re all really talented, and they have an aesthetic that’s completely different from mine, but I’ve come to admire them for that, and to respect the difference, more than I ever had before. Alice Munro’s probably the best example of that.

Me: Don’t you think you should turn on your headlights? It’s pretty drizzly.

MC: My headlights have been on this whole time. How about if I take care of the driving and you do backseat things.

Me: How about if you move your arm?

Also me: What writer most rewarded your close investigation?

MC: Oh, wow—one writer?

Me: You can give me a few.

MC: People who I’d never read before—Amber Dermont. I’d never read her before and I absolutely loved everything she wrote. I loved Katie Chase’s book. John Jodzio. Shane Hinton is somebody I liked a lot. Tara Ison.

Me: Who had you read some but didn’t really get until you encountered them within the confines of the project?

MC: Oh, OK. 

Me: Cop.

MC: I’m not doing anything wrong.

Also MC: A person I hadn’t read in fifteen years probably that I read and I said “Wow” after every paragraph was Lee K. Abbott. I really liked sitting down with Lee K. Abbott again after all that time. He’s truly a master storyteller. I appreciate him now more than ever. I just thought he wrote good stories, but now I see how he constructs them and how he tells them, and everything is just amazing.

Me: I won’t ask for a name. We’d be poor ambassadors if we talked smack about writers. But did you read any popular writers you found to be overrated? And in what way?

MC: I don’t like the term “overrated” because I think the idea of rating is kind of a misnomer,. Who’s rating them? Does that mean they sell a lot of books? Is their name bigger than the title on the cover? I don’t think there’s anyone like that in the project anyway. People in the world of short stories, when they become popular as a story writer, they have to earn that. This isn’t Hollywood. People don’t get put into literary magazines because they have the pretty face or the six-pack abs. They earn their way. I don’t think there’s anybody like that. They do have talent; maybe it’s not my own aesthetic, but they do what they do, and they do it really well.

Me: Look at that big Trump billboard.

MC: [Shakes head.]

Me: Tell me about the withdrawal you’re feeling.

MC: It was this morning at about 1:30 that it just hit me—wow, I didn’t do a post! I’d been doing all this stuff, and there was this feeling that I’d just forgot. I was thinking around 9 o’clock that I’d just do one, but I had to get off that path. If I’d done one last night, I would have done one today, and when would it end? … I kind of missed that I hadn’t read a new short story that day.

Me: This was an exercise in literary citizenship. Is that principle an important one to you?

MC: It’s the most important one to me. It’s very easy for this writing pursuit to be selfish—for it to be all about you, and you wanting other people to give you affirmation and publication and credit, and that’s an important part of it, but at the same time, if everyone was selfish, there would be no reason for us to exist. The only reason I have a publishing career is because people decided to start small presses, and they decided that they wanted to do this.

Wait, what is that? Whoa, it’s a dude with an umbrella. It looked like a mushroom walking across the highway. Where was I?

Me: [Reads back.]

MC: In any case, people decided that there weren’t enough presses and there were too many good authors who deserved to have books out. As a result, I have three collections of stories published. I think that’s true of a lot of the books I covered in my blog this year. Whether they’re small presses, or they’re the large ones, when I tagged all those presses in the post every day, I realized that—especially if you go to the Penguin site or the Knopf/Doubleday site—there’s a history to each press, and you read them, and it’s always about someone loving books and wanting to bring these voices to the masses. There’s never any notion of, “Oh, let’s start a big press because we want to make money selling books.” Maybe that’s an underlying motive, but there are always stories about pioneers starting presses because they loved books. We need to keep that going.

Me: Anything else you’d like to say?

MC: You know, I just saw the umbrella out of the corner of my eye, and it really did look like a giant mushroom walking across the overpass. And thinking about how we were going 72 miles per hour, I can’t say it wasn’t a giant mushroom walking across the highway. We’ll never know.

Digging in the Toolbox of Genre

            Today is the thirty-sixth day of my life as a daily blogger. It’s been a lot of fun so far, and I haven’t missed a post, with only minimal cheating. (When a journal rejects an essay I’ve written, it goes straight to the blog, and I reward myself with a day off from writing for public consumption. Ain’t nobody got time for rejection.)

            There is a time most mornings, shortly after waking, when I try to think of a subject. My blog posts—I consider them essays—are typically about the writing life, but these entries are interspersed with pieces about body image or family or anything else that commands my attention on a given day. The common denominator is my consciousness. Since the essays are a product of my thinking and they are written in my voice, I suspect they end up feeling unified.

            Despite my openness to subject matter for my blog posts, not every topic is fair game. Sometimes an idea I have in mind can feel as though it is intended to be a poem, and if I write an essay about it, I lose the chance to ruminate and make a different kind of sense of the topic—a poetic sense. The logic of a poem, or at least of my poems, is markedly different from the logic of an essay. For me, one of those forms, the poem, dwells in and embraces mystery, while the other tries to figure things out and make sense of the world. I can’t make sense of a subject and then return to it with any hope of dwelling in mystery. Mystery solved, Nancy Drew—and I’m on to the next case.

            Since I’ve become a blogger, it’s been a challenge to think of both an essay topic and a poem topic each day, and it’s important to me to keep working in both genres on a daily basis. I went for a long time—years—without writing poems at all, and I do fear that if a day goes by and I don’t try my hand at poetry, one day could stretch into two, and then a week, a month, a decade. It has happened.

            I suppose I could economize by writing a poem and then using that topic for an essay, but that doesn’t feel right for me, either. Sometimes a day’s poem ends up in a blog post (and it’s a habit I’m trying to curb—I can’t very well publish a poem in a journal if I’ve included it on my blog). When this happens, though, I’m typically going at a topic from a wider angle, and the poem can serve as an illustration or elaboration of a point. The poem is incidental in the blog post, and is a way of adding interest or color, or even of breaking up thick chunks of text.

            So one part of each of my days is devoted to thinking and sorting and solving a problem in essay form, and another part is devoted to sitting amid the chaos and mess of a poem. Maybe I should take up fiction, which, from the outside, seems to involve just making stuff up.

As a matter of fact, the fiction writers I know and like best sort of revel in the making-stuff-up element of composing—they ask questions like, “What would happen if I added X or Y or Z?” Or “What would happen if this character suddenly did A or B or C?” I suspect fiction writers have a lot more fun than poets or essayists do, as a result of the control element and the sense of play. Poems and essays deal with real things—they deal, mostly, with me. Fiction is a sandbox, where you are permitted to create anything that you can get to hold together. And it’s probably no accident that fiction is what I most enjoy reading in my free time.

If we look at writing as a fix-it project and genre as a toolbox, essays are something like a wrench that can disassemble things and then put them together, cleaner and tighter. Poetry is one of those razor-sharp scrapers that can get up under a thing and reveal what’s beneath it, or detach it so that it can be turned in the hand. Fiction, though, is a rubber clown nose that has somehow made its way to the toolbox, and you pick it up and put it on and wonder what kind of trouble a guy in a rubber clown nose can get into. You forget about the stuff that requires repair, dump the toolbox, and set off on an adventure.

I suppose I should wrap this up now. It’s nearly midday and I haven’t dwelled in any mystery yet. There are great problems and puzzles and messes all around me, and they’re not likely to sort themselves out. Or I could jump into that tiny car that just pulled up in the drive, a dozen people in rainbow wigs waving me in. I’ve never really considered taking a trip like that, but it looks like it might be fun.

Moon Landings: Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies

I'm pleased to point you toward a favorite journal of mine, Assay: A Journal of Nonfiction Studies. Karen Babine is the founder and editor of this very necessary nonfiction resource. I'm honored to serve as a consulting editor. Please do check it out!

Moon Landings: Fear of a Ghost Planet

My pal Paul Arrand Rodgers provides blogspiration at Fear of a Ghost Planet, where he deals with movies and wrestling and video games—but I mostly go there to get to his wonderful Tumblrs Date With a Wrestler and Heathcliff Explained, which are ... well, you just have to see.

Moon Landings: Professor Mondo

My pal Warren Moore is a medievalist, a curmudgeon, and a guy who calls me "kiddo," even though we're the same age. I like all of those things about him, and I like his blog, Professor Mondo, where he offers insights on family, music, writing, and more. Check him out!