May 2008 Archives
Bread Loaf angst
As rejection letters go, the one mailed out by Noreen Cargill, the Administrative Manager of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, is extremely nice.
I’d been so hopeful, so excited. I’d thought I had every reasonable chance; I’d twice been nominated by Bread Loaf Fellows, and my reference was a Bread Loaf faculty member--I was as much of an insider as an outsider could be. I’d actually been there before, too, once as a paying contributor and once as a scholar, so I knew the ropes well enough to write a reasonably well-informed application, which I kissed it for luck when I sent it off—early.
Every night before I fell asleep, I thought about reading my work in the Little Theater, sharing a room in one of the cabins with a cool new writer, walking through the Vermont woods during breaks. I planned the craft class I would teach. Positive visualization.
I also planned the nonchalant way I’d spin it aloud to my husband and best friends if I weren’t chosen: I’d have a less chaotic August. I’d have more time to write, more time to be at home, to work on preparing my fall classes. I rehearsed my concession speech, but my heart wasn’t really in it. In my veins, I knew, ran the unstoppable blood of champions.
When the letter came, so thin and anonymous, I turned my back to my husband and opened it, hiding my face just in case. When I read its kind, logical refusal, I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Half-heartedly, I tried a few phrases from my concession speech, but the nonchalance was nowhere to be found. When he tried to hug me, I was stiff. He tried to put his arms around me. I shrugged him off.
“I just can’t right now,” I said.
He moved off down the hall. I phoned the writer who nominated me, who was driving and couldn’t talk. So we hung up. I didn’t mention the letter. She said she’d call back.
I went to the little corner of the living room where my desk stands. I sat down and looked at the manuscript of the novel I’d been working on before the mail came. And then, to my chagrin, as my husband’s shadow hovered in the hall, I felt my face begin to crumple.
My husband is an extremely kind man. He is not a writer.
He came back, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of me. “It must be a blow,” he said kindly, and then I began to sob. Quietly, miserably. The thought of Bread Loaf had lit my immediate future with a gold and glorious glow. Now the lights were out.
I’d imagined reading in front of the audience of luminaries, the way I’d seen Jhumpa Lahiri and Samantha Chang dazzle us when they were Fellows. I’d hoped to impress my agent, who’d be there this summer, and make him believe that signing me would eventually turn out to be a shrewd literary choice, if perhaps never a lucrative one. I’d dreamed of my well reviewed, commercially ignored book on the shelves at the little Bread Loaf bookstore, getting a second chance.
“I had everything lined up,” I told my husband. “Which means it’s about the work. The work’s just not good enough.”
My husband is a practical man. “The odds were pretty rough,” he said.
Only 6% of more than 1100 applicants for merit-based financial aid received awards, said the letter. 66 people. And only two of them, if things go as they have in years past, will be Fellows in creative nonfiction, the award for which I applied.
“It said you made the final round. You could have been number three.”
“Or number thirty. The letter doesn’t say how big the final round was.” Or number a hundred and thirty. Or maybe they put that on everyone's letter, to soften the blow. My pessimism is one of my less appealing qualities, and it flares up wildly in the midst of disappointment. I also possess an unpleasantly staunch resistance to consolation. “It’s not that I think there aren’t any writers more brilliant than I am out there. I know there are. I just thought I had a chance." My moaning goes global. "I just want to win something. Just one thing. One definite thing that says my work is good.”
“You know your work is good.” He nods out our window toward the university campus. “It got you your job here.”
“But you know how I’m always nervous, always worried that I’m lesser than.” My colleagues are heavy hitters, Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, Poet Laureates, Famous Editors. “And it would have been so affirming if Bread Loaf’s answer had been otherwise.”
“Well, this isn’t the end. There will be other conferences,” said my sweet, patient, hopelessly out-of-the-loop husband. He brightened. “What’s the best conference?”
“Duh,” I wailed through my tears. “Bread Loaf is the oldest and most prestigious writing conference in the country. In the world! Everyone knows that.” All you have to do is read the brochure copy.
“Well, but you have a long career ahead of you. You’re still young,” he said. In point of fact, I had just returned from Walgreen’s, where I’d purchased my usual box of Clairol Dark Brown Root Touch-Up.
“I’ve been publishing in national journals since I was twenty-two.” I’m forty, practically antique for a Bread Loaf Fellow. They’re usually young, hip, and inclined toward gorgeousness, like Danzy Senna and Amy Benson, the writers who’d been the Fellows in the two workshops I’d attended. Like Michael Lowenthal and Tayari Jones and Ben Percy, with his unlined face and impossibly deep voice, and Camille Dungy, who has no pores. “When is it going to happen for me?" I whined. "There are so many awards out there—dozens and dozens of awards.” Reading the “Grants & Awards” section of Poets & Writers is a special kind of self-torment, an acquired taste. “Can’t I win just one?”
“You’ll win something.”
“I should have gone in 2006, when I first got nominated, when the book first came out.” He nodded sympathetically. I thought back. Why hadn’t I? “But I really wanted to take Grey to college.” Bread Loaf’s August dates that year had conflicted with the drop-off dates at our son’s school. It was his freshman year, a mythical rite of passage, when boy becomes man, all that. At the time, it seemed I couldn’t possibly miss it. Now, examining it in the harsh light of Bread Loaf’s rejection, it seemed like a pathetically unmemorable experience. We unloaded a million boxes in the rain, hugged, and said good-bye. Big wow. Our son, who seemed unmoved at the time, hasn’t mentioned it since. Family, schmamily.
“I should have gone to Bread Loaf,” I moaned piteously.
I flashed back to the time in my early twenties when my graduate professor, who’d written a paper about my first story, had wanted me to go with him to AWP, to stand there as Exhibit A and look full of promise while he delivered “How Minimal Is Minimalism?”
At the time, I had no clue what AWP was. I didn’t have the money to travel, and I didn’t want to leave my pre-schooler alone for that long. My professor asked me where my priorities were. I didn’t know.
“You’ve been doing other things,” said my husband, trying to console.
“I feel like Mr. f**king Holland.” Mr. Holland’s Opus, a feel-good movie that warmed the hearts of millions, hadn’t warmed mine. It had scared me. A music teacher who foregoes his true love, composing, on behalf of his
students and other responsibilities is finally rewarded at the end of the movie—when he’s old and gray—by his devoted students’ performance of the one decent work he’s managed to complete. Light bulb! They were his opus, all those students whose lives he touched over the years, blah blah.
F**k that, I thought when I saw the movie. The poor man should have followed his art, his heart. But when push came to shove, I graded papers, pinched pennies, prepared for classes. It was clear: I was a small, small person. I lacked courage and drive, as well as talent.
And here I was, a thin piece of paper in my hands, with my husband’s kind eyes gazing at me hopefully, willing me to cheer up.
“This is such a lousy business,” I said, speaking of writing. “There’s so much insecurity. So much self-doubt.” He nodded again.
“I know.” It may have been something he’d heard before. He may have wanted to add a few other nouns.
But my lovely, patient husband held my hands, brushed away a few more tears, and finally got me to smile a weak, grateful, co-dependent smile. We hugged, and he headed down the hall to his office.
I sat at my desk. “We do appreciate your interest in the Conference and only wish there enough awards for all of the deserving writers,” ends the letter from Bread Loaf. Yeah, you and me both.
The letter is immaculately professional, immaculately kind. The Bread Loaf folks probably sit around a table and analyze the text from every angle before they send it out, knowing that sad, embittered rejects will parse it, blast it, blog endlessly about it. “Good luck with your work.”
I sighed and set it aside. I turned back to my novel manuscript, not at all sure of its worth.
But, as Pushkin would say, there’s nothing for it. My confidence dented, my compass wobbling, I got back to work.
----
Epilogue: The next day, this appeared--complete with get-back-out-there playlist--on Tayari's blog. She's the best.
I’d been so hopeful, so excited. I’d thought I had every reasonable chance; I’d twice been nominated by Bread Loaf Fellows, and my reference was a Bread Loaf faculty member--I was as much of an insider as an outsider could be. I’d actually been there before, too, once as a paying contributor and once as a scholar, so I knew the ropes well enough to write a reasonably well-informed application, which I kissed it for luck when I sent it off—early.
Every night before I fell asleep, I thought about reading my work in the Little Theater, sharing a room in one of the cabins with a cool new writer, walking through the Vermont woods during breaks. I planned the craft class I would teach. Positive visualization.
I also planned the nonchalant way I’d spin it aloud to my husband and best friends if I weren’t chosen: I’d have a less chaotic August. I’d have more time to write, more time to be at home, to work on preparing my fall classes. I rehearsed my concession speech, but my heart wasn’t really in it. In my veins, I knew, ran the unstoppable blood of champions.
When the letter came, so thin and anonymous, I turned my back to my husband and opened it, hiding my face just in case. When I read its kind, logical refusal, I couldn’t speak. I just shook my head. Half-heartedly, I tried a few phrases from my concession speech, but the nonchalance was nowhere to be found. When he tried to hug me, I was stiff. He tried to put his arms around me. I shrugged him off.
“I just can’t right now,” I said.
He moved off down the hall. I phoned the writer who nominated me, who was driving and couldn’t talk. So we hung up. I didn’t mention the letter. She said she’d call back.
I went to the little corner of the living room where my desk stands. I sat down and looked at the manuscript of the novel I’d been working on before the mail came. And then, to my chagrin, as my husband’s shadow hovered in the hall, I felt my face begin to crumple.
My husband is an extremely kind man. He is not a writer.
He came back, pulled up a chair, and sat down in front of me. “It must be a blow,” he said kindly, and then I began to sob. Quietly, miserably. The thought of Bread Loaf had lit my immediate future with a gold and glorious glow. Now the lights were out.
I’d imagined reading in front of the audience of luminaries, the way I’d seen Jhumpa Lahiri and Samantha Chang dazzle us when they were Fellows. I’d hoped to impress my agent, who’d be there this summer, and make him believe that signing me would eventually turn out to be a shrewd literary choice, if perhaps never a lucrative one. I’d dreamed of my well reviewed, commercially ignored book on the shelves at the little Bread Loaf bookstore, getting a second chance.
“I had everything lined up,” I told my husband. “Which means it’s about the work. The work’s just not good enough.”
My husband is a practical man. “The odds were pretty rough,” he said.
Only 6% of more than 1100 applicants for merit-based financial aid received awards, said the letter. 66 people. And only two of them, if things go as they have in years past, will be Fellows in creative nonfiction, the award for which I applied.
“It said you made the final round. You could have been number three.”
“Or number thirty. The letter doesn’t say how big the final round was.” Or number a hundred and thirty. Or maybe they put that on everyone's letter, to soften the blow. My pessimism is one of my less appealing qualities, and it flares up wildly in the midst of disappointment. I also possess an unpleasantly staunch resistance to consolation. “It’s not that I think there aren’t any writers more brilliant than I am out there. I know there are. I just thought I had a chance." My moaning goes global. "I just want to win something. Just one thing. One definite thing that says my work is good.”
“You know your work is good.” He nods out our window toward the university campus. “It got you your job here.”
“But you know how I’m always nervous, always worried that I’m lesser than.” My colleagues are heavy hitters, Book-of-the-Month Clubbers, Poet Laureates, Famous Editors. “And it would have been so affirming if Bread Loaf’s answer had been otherwise.”
“Well, this isn’t the end. There will be other conferences,” said my sweet, patient, hopelessly out-of-the-loop husband. He brightened. “What’s the best conference?”
“Duh,” I wailed through my tears. “Bread Loaf is the oldest and most prestigious writing conference in the country. In the world! Everyone knows that.” All you have to do is read the brochure copy.
“Well, but you have a long career ahead of you. You’re still young,” he said. In point of fact, I had just returned from Walgreen’s, where I’d purchased my usual box of Clairol Dark Brown Root Touch-Up.
“I’ve been publishing in national journals since I was twenty-two.” I’m forty, practically antique for a Bread Loaf Fellow. They’re usually young, hip, and inclined toward gorgeousness, like Danzy Senna and Amy Benson, the writers who’d been the Fellows in the two workshops I’d attended. Like Michael Lowenthal and Tayari Jones and Ben Percy, with his unlined face and impossibly deep voice, and Camille Dungy, who has no pores. “When is it going to happen for me?" I whined. "There are so many awards out there—dozens and dozens of awards.” Reading the “Grants & Awards” section of Poets & Writers is a special kind of self-torment, an acquired taste. “Can’t I win just one?”
“You’ll win something.”
“I should have gone in 2006, when I first got nominated, when the book first came out.” He nodded sympathetically. I thought back. Why hadn’t I? “But I really wanted to take Grey to college.” Bread Loaf’s August dates that year had conflicted with the drop-off dates at our son’s school. It was his freshman year, a mythical rite of passage, when boy becomes man, all that. At the time, it seemed I couldn’t possibly miss it. Now, examining it in the harsh light of Bread Loaf’s rejection, it seemed like a pathetically unmemorable experience. We unloaded a million boxes in the rain, hugged, and said good-bye. Big wow. Our son, who seemed unmoved at the time, hasn’t mentioned it since. Family, schmamily.
“I should have gone to Bread Loaf,” I moaned piteously.
I flashed back to the time in my early twenties when my graduate professor, who’d written a paper about my first story, had wanted me to go with him to AWP, to stand there as Exhibit A and look full of promise while he delivered “How Minimal Is Minimalism?”
At the time, I had no clue what AWP was. I didn’t have the money to travel, and I didn’t want to leave my pre-schooler alone for that long. My professor asked me where my priorities were. I didn’t know.
“You’ve been doing other things,” said my husband, trying to console.
“I feel like Mr. f**king Holland.” Mr. Holland’s Opus, a feel-good movie that warmed the hearts of millions, hadn’t warmed mine. It had scared me. A music teacher who foregoes his true love, composing, on behalf of his
students and other responsibilities is finally rewarded at the end of the movie—when he’s old and gray—by his devoted students’ performance of the one decent work he’s managed to complete. Light bulb! They were his opus, all those students whose lives he touched over the years, blah blah.
F**k that, I thought when I saw the movie. The poor man should have followed his art, his heart. But when push came to shove, I graded papers, pinched pennies, prepared for classes. It was clear: I was a small, small person. I lacked courage and drive, as well as talent.
And here I was, a thin piece of paper in my hands, with my husband’s kind eyes gazing at me hopefully, willing me to cheer up.
“This is such a lousy business,” I said, speaking of writing. “There’s so much insecurity. So much self-doubt.” He nodded again.
“I know.” It may have been something he’d heard before. He may have wanted to add a few other nouns.
But my lovely, patient husband held my hands, brushed away a few more tears, and finally got me to smile a weak, grateful, co-dependent smile. We hugged, and he headed down the hall to his office.
I sat at my desk. “We do appreciate your interest in the Conference and only wish there enough awards for all of the deserving writers,” ends the letter from Bread Loaf. Yeah, you and me both.
The letter is immaculately professional, immaculately kind. The Bread Loaf folks probably sit around a table and analyze the text from every angle before they send it out, knowing that sad, embittered rejects will parse it, blast it, blog endlessly about it. “Good luck with your work.”
I sighed and set it aside. I turned back to my novel manuscript, not at all sure of its worth.
But, as Pushkin would say, there’s nothing for it. My confidence dented, my compass wobbling, I got back to work.
----
Epilogue: The next day, this appeared--complete with get-back-out-there playlist--on Tayari's blog. She's the best.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Tongue & Groove
My friend Laban thought I would love this book. He gave me a copy ages ago, and I've only just gotten to it over the holiday weekend. He was right. I do love it. It's so exciting to find a new writer you like. In this book, I love the lush language, the precise verbs, the way the stanzas build and push and gesture toward something beyond themselves. It's a beautiful book, and for me, it was refreshing. After drafting a chapter a day on this forward-rushing novel I'm writing, I loved the chance to slow down and linger on language that's so rich, dense with image, and thoughtfully selected.
I'll confide: I even did this weird thing I do sometimes with work I really like. I got out my notebook and pen and went through the whole book, copying down all the words and phrases that really grabbed me, arranging them in columns and loops on the page. It was a pleasant hour dedicated to nothing more and nothing less than the pure love of language.
(I once spent days copying out all the introductory paragraphs from Maeve Brennan's story collection The Rose Garden. And, as you'll see if you check out the first few pages of that book in the preview available on Amazon, that's a feat only a true fanatic would attempt.)
I don't know exactly where the compulsion comes from to feel the words of others unspooling under my own hand, but it's irresistible. And Stephen Cramer's moving poems have so much lovely, carefully chosen language, that to do so was pure self-indulgence.
Maybe because the book I'm working on is a kind of love-letter to New Orleans, cities have been on my mind lately, so this excerpt from "Wheels" caught my eye:
(& let's not pretend--oh yes,
it's coming: there's something out there
with our names on it): & we all
need a song that says mercy. Song
that says O veiled & fathomless
city, strangely bejeweled by such
sundered & dazzling creatures,
hear our simple pleas . . .
Cities have been on poet Judith Vollmer's mind lately, too, as she explained in a recent interview in The Writer's Chronicle. More soon on that.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
A Hard Row
Do feminist writers--and women writers generally--get shafted in the pages of the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review? Sarah Seltzer thinks so. Read her piece "Hard Times" in Bitch to see if you agree.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Happy Birthday, Malcolm!
Malcolm X would have have turned 83 yesterday. Melissa Harris-Lacewell writes at The Root:
To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.
And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining. You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness. With thanks to Tayari for the link.
. . . Malcolm's struggle to make his own authentic, political contribution reminds us that ideals are more important than personalities. Progressive political movements that engender lasting change are always bigger than the flawed human beings who lead them. . . . He criticized the powerful rather than the powerless. He pointed to the pathologies of the privileged instead of the failings of the oppressed. His own story of redemption was emblematic of the possibilities available to even the most disempowered, but when he pointed to solutions, they were consistently collective.To read the rest of Harris-Lacewell's essay, go here, and many thanks to Daniel Zeno, activist and law student at University of Iowa (and my lovely former student at Wabash) for the link.
To read Veronica Chambers' new essay on the sexual wound, suffering, and shame of fistula--and how to help--go here, and go here for the New York Times story that first broke my heart about this issue.
And for my women friends who write and doubt themselves--and especially all my women writing students, who work so hard and are so talented--go here to Kore Press's blog while Gisela Telis's essay is still headlining. You deserve to flourish with courage, confidence, and boldness. With thanks to Tayari for the link.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
The Silent Bob of gender-blind college housing
So Grey was whisked to Manhattan, chauffeured around in black sedans and SUVs, and put up in the "snazzy-ass" Hotel Mela, a four-star luxury boutique hotel on West 44th. With the other students slated to be on the show, he went to Times Square and took a carriage ride through Central Park.
But after prepping his rationale for opposite-sex dorm rooms so that it would sound articulate on national TV, he never got the chance to speak! LOL. Check it out: the mother, the future roommate Sam, and Disapproving Girl took up all the airtime.
C'est la vie. He got a wild behind-the-scenes glimpse at big media--on FOX News's dime, no less--and he's back on campus in time for finals.
Which is what, after all, a mother cares about most.
But after prepping his rationale for opposite-sex dorm rooms so that it would sound articulate on national TV, he never got the chance to speak! LOL. Check it out: the mother, the future roommate Sam, and Disapproving Girl took up all the airtime.
C'est la vie. He got a wild behind-the-scenes glimpse at big media--on FOX News's dime, no less--and he's back on campus in time for finals.
Which is what, after all, a mother cares about most.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
Our kiddo's on CNN!
We returned home from our Austin/New Orleans road trip late last night to learn that our sweet son Grey is in an AP story about co-ed dorm living that got nationwide exposure, including this spot on on CNN.com, where (I'm told) it was the second-most emailed story.
But it gets better. Apparently, the story on gender-blind college housing caught someone's attention, and as I type, he's being flown to New York! He and his future female roommate, Sam, were picked up at Oberlin, and they'll be interviewed (together with Sam's mother) tomorrow morning on a FOX News show, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet.
As soon as it's YouTubed, I'll put it up here. In the meantime, good luck to the kiddo! He says he plans to wear his cargo pants with the "I VOTE" patch hand-sewn on the butt. We'll see if that gets any airplay.
But it gets better. Apparently, the story on gender-blind college housing caught someone's attention, and as I type, he's being flown to New York! He and his future female roommate, Sam, were picked up at Oberlin, and they'll be interviewed (together with Sam's mother) tomorrow morning on a FOX News show, The Morning Show with Mike and Juliet.
As soon as it's YouTubed, I'll put it up here. In the meantime, good luck to the kiddo! He says he plans to wear his cargo pants with the "I VOTE" patch hand-sewn on the butt. We'll see if that gets any airplay.
| Tweet | ||
Categories:
