NEA funding wee for nation, gigantic for writers

Photo by U.S. Air Force

I hit “submit” on an NEA grant application this week—an annual exercise in optimism. 

I like to picture myself with a big wad of cash—specifically that $25,000 literature fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. What would I do with it? I vacillate. It’s roughly what I make as an adjunct, so maybe I’d just take a year off from teaching. Or maybe instead I’d pay off my bills—a move that would be joylessly practical. Or maybe I’d go to Europe, buy a boat, remodel the bathroom, learn to fly. The practical ideas are satisfying; the impractical dreams are sustaining.

It was hard to do the work of submitting this year, for a couple of reasons. 

First, the website for applying, grants.gov, has implemented a new system called Workbench, and most writers I’ve talked to found it less than intuitive. Workbench is used for grants all across the federal government, and it exists mainly for those organizations that have multiple people working on a complex application. So your average poet—the most solitary of solitaries—is not the user they had in mind.

The collaboration features of Workbench are ill suited for NEA literature fellowship applicants, as I discovered after mucking around in it. But then I noticed that for this transitional grant year, the NEA offered its classic environment as an option—the same platform that was available in years past. The old, familiar version was easy for me to fill out, although it still took a couple of hours to get everything just right—the right sample, an updated publication record, an accurate cover page, the required supplemental info, all formatted as required.

It was also hard to submit because of the gloomy future prospects of the NEA under President ICANTBRINGMYSELFTOWRITEHISNAME. This figure has proposed cutting the budget entirely, perhaps to begin to cover the staggering costs of his weekly Florida golf vacations. 

The NEA’s 2016 budget was $148 million—a quarter of the cost of manufacturing a B-21 bomber. (Northrup Grumman is currently at work manufacturing a hundred of those for the Department of Defense, which had a $1.1 trillion budget in 2016.)

But the pen remains both cheaper and mightier than the bomber. After all, it was a bunch of writers who founded our nation—they stood up for liberty and even happiness as our enduring values, and they penned a system of government that is a model (on paper) for the world. The U.S. wouldn’t exist without writers, and what our founders put down with quill on paper remains one of the greatest contributions ever offered to humanity.

The amount of money given to writers by the NEA is grand to someone like me, but it is a pittance to the federal government. I think the way conservatives sway us against essential programs like arts funding is by throwing large numbers at us—and $148 million is a very big number to me. But I’m used to dealing with a household budget: a $425 car payment, a $1,200 house payment, a few monthly credit card bills. As staggering as the NEA funding amount seems, it’s only .012 percent of federal discretionary spending. The amount of money it takes to run the ship of stage is immense, and people who make $40K per year have a very hard time wrapping their minds around it.

“And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, / Slouches toward Washington to be born?” That would be my grant application—a study in hope not just for me, but for our nation, which ought to be about higher values than raining down destruction from the sky.

Wednesday, March 8: A Day Without a Woman

Good news for the irredeemable: There is no naughty list

Let me just say this up front: Editors do not share a blacklist.

I’ve heard writers worry about this when they’ve made a particularly egregious misstep. Poor record-keeping can result in publishing the same piece in more than one outlet. We can forget to include a journal in a book’s acknowledgements. We can include a quote from another writer in our work and forget to include attribution. These are serious mistakes, and nothing to be proud of.

But the thinking among a lot of submitters is that editors share names of people who commit infractions, and this really isn’t the case. The fact is that the mistakes I mentioned are very common ones, and they are easily attributable to error instead of malice. Editors are in the practice of overlooking these issues. Most don’t even maintain their own blacklist, much less a common one.

Oh, sure, there are those submitters make missteps, and we remember them. I can think of one person who writes in three genres and always has a half-dozen active submissions at any one time. And I can think of another who used to stuff up to twenty dog-eared poems into an envelope—some of those duplicates, or the exact same copy, of poems sent before.

If editors had their druthers, submissions would be targeted with some care, and writers wouldn’t flood them with multiple submissions at one time. But that’s merely vexatious; it’s not sinful. 

Some of the things writers do are kind of charming, even if they undermine the work. One writer I can think of would always send a picture of herself astride an exotic animal (I’m being deliberately vague, since maybe I’m talking about you), and another who would take this a step further and include a signed, glossy eight-by-ten photograph with his work. Like most editors, I read the stuff, but it’s not propitious to elicit an eyeroll before the first “Roses are red.”

The secret lives of editors are not significantly different than the public lives of editors. I’m guessing most work harder than a lot of submitters realize, but the work itself is pretty transparent, thanks to Duotrope, Rejection Wiki, and social media. This is as it should be.

But editors do talk, especially when submitters behave badly. And our favorite topic is the angry rejectee.

On occasion, writers respond angrily, or even threateningly, to rejections. Over the years, I’ve read plenty of correspondence that asks me what the view is like with my head up my own ass, or why in the world I consider myself qualified to judge a poet’s brilliant response to a dead Turkish mystic, or what I have against [insert literary style or school here], or why I foolishly passed up work that [insert name of minor journal] just accepted.

I get it. I’m dumb. <shrugs>

Editors like to laugh about this stuff, but very often we do so without naming the writer. It’s hard to keep track of several thousand names, and not worth it anyway. To be honest, very few writers do anything new, on the page or with their behavior. I’m more frequently surprised by the work than by correspondence, even the most vile sort. It may feel like people are always coming up with new ways to be terrible to one another, but the categories tend to be predictable, and the ways the specifics vary aren’t significant. Whether insult, undermine, or guilt, the source of offense is seldom a source of surprise.

Exciting work is a source of surprise, and that’s the thing we’re hungry for. Even in a literary journal full of excellent writing, it’s only the rarest piece that actually offers something brand new. Believe me, we talk about these writers.

The closest a writer can come to landing on a blacklist is through true harassment, such as threats, unwelcome sexual advances, misogyny, or racism. There’s not a literal list—we’re not updating Google Docs with the names of jerks—but if a writer dares to threaten an editor, online or in person, word gets out—and not just among editors. Bullying is not afforded secrecy in the literary field. Those who would try to harm others through their power or influence can face a dire and deserved reward.

The writing world is a small one. This, though, is not the reason that submitters and editors alike ought to conduct themselves with courtesy and respect—attitudes that should extend both ways. The fact is that our small world is also, frequently, a mean one. And sometimes kindness is the only true surprise.

On revision: When enough is enough

Gustave Flaubert, nearly done

“A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.” Poet and essayist Paul Valéry wrote this, and it’s often quoted—but I don’t buy it.

I’ve finished hundreds of poems. A whole bunch of them, maybe most of them, stink up the joint and aren’t worth reading, but they’re done, and I’m fine with that. They’ve been fully worked over to the best of my ability. 

I have some good poems, too, and I’m pretty sure my poetic failures were part of the cost of those. A lot of being a poet is just showing up at the desk—working the seemingly malfunctioning pen until the ink starts to flow. 

There are days the idea never gels and the inspiration never strikes. Poetry is made of both of these—an intellect that puzzles and proposes, and a genial spirit that visits with gifts. I’m of the opinion that fascinating poems can come from either source—the thoughtful mind or the flash of inspiration. But my favorite poems are a true mix. There are long stretches of days where I labor over my writing and try to get the ideas down just right, and then, finally, I take a look back and see … something other, something I didn’t put there.

I don’t think it’s magic. It’s not the automatic writing or psychography of nineteenth century spiritualists. I’m not channeling spirits; my page has not turned Ouija. What I think might happen is that total concentration on my rhetoric distracted me from something fascinating that happened with the much more basic interplay of words. The brain is wired to make connections, and while I’m shoring up a irrefutable rebuttal with my conscious mind, another part of me is building something beautiful.

Nevertheless, on the page, it looks a lot like grace.

I’m having a hard time tracking down the definitive word on this—I don’t think it exists—but I’ve  read that something like 70 percent of pregnancies end in miscarriages, most before the pregnancy is even detected. That’s a wiggly statistic, but a good comparison to what happens in poetry. A zygote could divide and grow and manifest and save us all, or we could flush it down the drain, never knowing it was there. All the potential in the world may go unrealized.

In that same way, I’ve had some really wonderful ideas for poems while buying apples, or in a student conference, or while stuck in the car line at school. Sometimes there’s a scrap of paper to save it on, but so often we return to our desks and don’t even remember we have a purse full of scraps. Should we pull one out, it probably wouldn’t make sense to us anyway. That handful of quick words wasn’t the idea—that wasn’t the gift. When ideas come to us and we’re not in the receiving position, often, they fly onward. They tend not to revisit us after they found us unready.

A friend asked me how to tell when a piece has been over-revised. I think we have to gauge its energy. Have we sanded every corner of it? I hope not, because a poem or essay or story needs some splinters, doesn’t it? We even talk about how a particular writer might get under our skin—how her words might needle us.

A piece is overworked when it lacks danger. There is a difference between offering all the information a piece needs and in shutting down every potential question. I find it useful to remember that a poem is only partly mine. It belongs, too, to the reader, who can’t half-create a fully finished piece.

Work is over-revised when it lacks an edge. There really does come a time when a poem (or any other literary work) is finished. Ideally, this time is just before the time when the next one is to begin.

A Writer's Spirit: Fir gives way to forsythia

I took my Christmas tree down Thursday. And yes, by “Thursday,” I mean three days ago—March 2, second day of Lent.

I had briefly considered replacing the Christmas ornaments with Easter eggs. I grew up in a place where people decorate the trees in their yard with eggs for the Easter holiday—a practice I understand to be somewhat regional and maybe a little odd to people from the outside. But let’s be honest; the Valentine tree never materialized, and the twin impulses that led me to keep the tree up (laziness and busyness) kept me from cutting out hearts, pasting them to paper doilies, and re-decking the tree.

If there’s time to re-deck, there’s time to de-deck.

I’m a little torn as I analyze my tardy removal of the artificial tree. Is this a marker of mental health, or might it be a symbol or metaphor? Like everything we have a hand in, it’s probably both.

Truth is, I have all of the usual associations with the Christmas holiday. It represents family and childhood and promise. The tree sparkles. It’s lit. That wrapped gift could be the thing I’ve been waiting for. The few minutes we spend tearing into boxes could become my child’s favorite memory. It could happen.

And in fact it can happen. I think of that lovely monologue by Bill Murray as Frank Cross at the end of the movie Scrooged:

It can happen every day, you've just got to want that feeling. And if you like it and you want it, you'll get greedy for it! You'll want it every day of your life and it can happen to you. I believe in it now! I believe it's going to happen to me now! I'm ready for it! And it's great! It's a good feeling, it's really better than I've felt in a long time. I'm ready.

I guess I wanted that feeling. My friends know my situation; I don’t really have a regular workplace, and I’m a little isolated in the city where I live. I turn a lot of my attention toward home and family—well, toward family anyway. I’m always forced to take a triage approach to life, and housework consistently falls at the end of my list, as the Christmas tree probably hinted at.

Initially, the tree was beautiful. The cat liked to climb it. I liked to sit in the grace of its gentle colors at night when the rest of the room was dark. It served its actual purpose, which, I guess, is draping its bulk protectively over our gifts like a piny mother hen.

Even after Christmas—even a month or two months after Christmas—I enjoyed it, a fact which makes it far less depressing. I liked turning on those lights and sitting near it to read or write. I liked the rustle of the ginger tabby hidden inside. I even looked being able to throw a little clutter behind it when there was an unexpected knock at the door.

I would be perfectly happy to have a lighted tree in my house all the time, were it not for those sad Santa ornaments everywhere—the arboreal equivalent of green fuzz in the fridge, announcing its own outdatedness.

And I am prone to mild depression, which is lucky—I’ve had the serious kind, too, and I’ll take a case of the bluey-blues any day over the bedbound anguish of deeper sadness. It’s a more pleasing symbol of my inner state than a sweaty, rumpled bed.

But I’ve thought about it, and I don’t think it’s sadness that kept my tree up. I think I wanted the same thing that was desired by the first person to pull a fir tree into the house and append some candles to it.

Winter can be hard. Not even the sun can stick it out—and so there we are, a sweater not enough to keep out the cold, a lamp no substitute for the afternoon sun. A mild winter, the sort we just had where I live, is not much better; it lacks the grace of snow to cover our errors and muffle our noise. All it offers is the dark and chill.

But there are buds on the lilac bush outside my window, and a few daffodils have popped up in the lawn. A few days of fine weather—sunny weather, shorts weather—have broken through the gray scrim. They’ve made me brave. Forsythia is happening, and even when I’m in my home, it casts its own remembered light.

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Do you review?

What if you threw a party and no one came?

Or what if you published a book and no one read it?

Some of us try for years before finding a publisher for our book, and when we finally succeed, we may think the hard work is over. But the truth is that if we publish with a small or university press, a whole lot of work is just beginning, as we try to make the larger world notice a book’s existence.

Some presses do a better job with promotion than others do. There was a time I contemplated starting a press myself, but I made a decision: Unless I could guarantee strong distribution and promotion, I had no business taking on the sacred trust of publishing a writer’s work.

Truth is, anyone can print up a book. It’s publishing that’s the real trick—a word that means “making public.” The most beautifully produced book is of little worth if it fails to end up in the hands of readers, and every ethical publisher must understand that a book isn’t published until the public knows about it.

One way we try to find readers is to have a book reviewed. Better publishers send out ARCs, advance review copies, either in print or electronically, to people who might be willing to weigh in on a new collection. It’s hard to get the attention of reviewers, and there are a lot of ways to try. 

Here are some ways publishers attempt to get attention for their writers:

• Craft a news release and media packet to send to electronic and print media outlets associated with the writer’s hometown, current city, alma mater, etc.
• Send copies to people who are known to review books regularly.
• Send copies to litmags that review books.
• Contact national media outlets that feature writers and writing.
• Send copies with suggested pages marked to places that feature daily poems—e.g., The Writer’s Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, etc.

But then again, publishers may choose not to do any of these things—and then writers are left to their own devices to drum up interest.

I recently had a discussion with some writer friends about how to get reviews for books. A suggestion that came up—and it is one I hear rather commonly—was to exchange reviews in a you-do-me-I’ll-do-you kind of way. 

As a former journalist, with a degree in the subject, I just can’t sign off on this plan, which sounds perfectly practical and solves a problem, because from a journalistic perspective, it is inherently flawed.

Reviewers don’t answer to the people they’re reviewing. Instead, as journalists of sorts, they are fully responsive to their readers. The expectation in doing a review is that the reviewer is unbiased and truthful—and a tit-for-tat interview is simply not trustworthy.

The poetry world is different than, say, the restaurant world. When a reviewer enters the hot new bistro to write an assessment of it, that reviewer is almost never a restaurateur, and the readers of the reviewer’s outlet likewise don’t own restaurants. The reviewer is supposed to have some expertise or understanding in the field, from restaurants to movies to books, being reviewed. But impartiality is presumed, in any field that is subject to review besides small-press literature.

When we read the “Tables for Two” feature in The New Yorker, we trust that the person who finds the ceviche to be zingy isn’t besties with the chef, or that the person who loves the latest Star Wars incarnation isn’t Felicity Jones’ dad.

When we read a review of a poetry collection, we understand that about half the time, the reviewer is pals with the author and is awaiting a review in return.

I’m not sure what the key is to finding audiences for new literary titles. What I do know is that one has to either work hard or be incredibly lucky. It’s not even enough to be talented. Excellent books are ignored all the time. We’re ignoring countless excellent books right this minute.

A lot of creative work vies constantly for our attention. If we love the arts, maybe the kindest thing we can do is share what we love. With literary arts, it may be as simple as a Goodreads review, a social media recommendation, or, the kindest gesture of all, prolonged attention—positive or otherwise—in a careful, detailed review.

Getting with the times: On not republishing old work

My perm, 1985

Writers at all levels often ask the same question about their older publications. Why can’t they publish the work again?

It’s a reasonable question, and it’s doubtful that the larger literary world would ever know if work a writer published in a tiny campus publication or on a now-defunct small web journal is republished in another venue—almost certainly a small venue itself.

But published work is published work—and I think it’s much healthier to move on than to try to wrong a second life out of a piece of writing. I’ll explain this momentarily.

It’s the rare journal that publishes reprints, although I’m sure a lot of magazines unwittingly do so when writers take a may-as-well attitude about the matter. It can be extremely difficult to take an honest route toward second publication—unless that is via a method everyone approves of, which is through the publication of a writer’s collected works.

If that hypothetical campus publication I mentioned had a print run of fifty copies, of which thirty were picked up for free from a table in the English Department and twenty are slated to sit on a shelf for a dozen years and then be recycled by an unsentimental assistant professor on a cleaning tear, then surely no harm can be done by sending them to a print journal, right? After all, the typical print journal has a press run of a few hundred, selections of which may be featured on a seldom-visited website. Overlapping audiences could not be less likely.

There is a very common way that published work disappears, too, and becomes, for all effects, unpublished. Sometimes on social media, I see writers complaining that the online journal that accepted their work just disappeared one day. Maybe the editors were dilettantes who only had a year or two of effort and commitment to offer. Maybe someone forgot to pay for web hosting. The writers probably presumed that their work would always be there, and in their disappointment with finding the work has disappeared, their thoughts turn to finding a new home for it.

I understand the disappointment when a good poem, story, or essay doesn’t get maximum reach. Disappearing web publications feel especially sad, since there remains no artifact that the work was ever published at all.

I do hate it when writers lament publishing in small venues, like a local zine or a printed campus litmag. After all, publishing in a venue like that is a nod toward community—a way to participate and bond with other writers who share a ZIP code or an alma mater. I have participated in a lot of local ventures like this, always with my best available work, and I have never regretted “wasting” good work on a  small audience. Instead, I’ve been proud of each publication, and each trip to a mic at a release party. Publishing a poem is nice. Publishing a poem and getting some free cheese and cocktail sausages in the company of like-minded people? That’s even better.

There is nothing inherently wrong with trying to get a larger audience for a piece of writing, provided a submitter is honest. A cover letter can just admit that the work was in a local zine with a print run of twenty. The average editor won’t bat an eye at considering the work—but as an editor myself, I have to admit: I would.

The joy of publishing writers’ work is in the unveiling of it. As an editor, I have always loved the pure glee of introducing new writers to the world, or of pulling back the curtain on bold new work that no one has ever seen before. This is the big payoff—the reward of being involved in publishing.

I’ll admit up front that I’ve made practically no money in my life from editing literary journals. Oh, occasionally I was able to take home the cheese and sausage from a public event if I perfectly timed the pulling of plasticware from my tote bag in the moments after the crowd left and before the catering staff came to clear the platters. And I love cheese. But as payment goes, that’s not really sufficient for the effort.

What is sufficient is the feeling I get from helping to propel the ship of American letters. And republishing some old poem, essay, or story? Well, that’s a poor propeller—and choosing to reprint work from among a submission pool of hundreds upon hundreds of unpublished pieces is an activity that holds little appeal to me. The unveiling is the thing. The re-unveiling? That’s kind of meh.

I repeat myself a lot in this blog I think, but that’s because I repeat myself frequently in my thinking about what it means to be a writer and publisher. And I know I’ve mentioned this before, and recently—but writers should focus on writing. If I won’t print your essay from when you were a junior in college (and I won’t), I hope that compels you to write something brand new.

An acquaintance of mine is always trotting out the same essay. She is a wonderful writer, and she has sent this short-form essay to dozens of outlets. No one has snatched it up, and so she keeps revising it, and keeps asking people like me to read the latest version and weigh in.

I’m tired of that essay. My friend is too talented to stop at just one, and I feel a little vexed to see it again and again. What’s more, it’s probably over-revised—I believe it’s possible to polish the spark away. I’m hardly the first to note that there is an energy to rawness—like in the beginning of “Comfortably Numb” by Pink Floyd, when it’s possible to hear David Gilmour’s finger rub across the string to produce an involuntary enharmonic tone, and to hear another person, I’m not sure who, cough once in the background. I know it’s possible to attain a cleaner version, but I listen for the rub and the cough. They’re my favorite parts.

Work a piece too hard and we lose the edge. I believe this. But I also believe that if we work a piece too hard and too long, we’re ignoring all of the work that waits to be written. And that’s the real tragedy of doting on our past publications.

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