First, a disclaimer: this is one lowly editor’s advice about how to understand and approach Submishmash/Submittable. Not all editors are the same in the ways they run their publications; while I am trying to give the most broad advice possible, I can’t speak for everyone in publishing. I also do not have complete and unending knowledge about the intricacies of Submishmash, as I do not work for them.

Okay. Are we good? Let’s talk about those little status indicators you see to the right of your submissions list. When you first send your work, you’ll see the stats marked at “received.” A submission marked received is simply one that has made its way through the submission process unscathed. Depending upon the editor’s Submishmash preferences, she may have received an email alerting her that you’ve submitted work. This status is the equivalent of an envelope’s having arrived in an editor’s mailbox; nobody’s opened the envelope yet, but your work has arrived safely.

“In Progress” is the next stage of a submission’s life cycle. As soon as an editor does something–anything–with your submission, your work is marked “in progress.” The editor may not have even opened your work yet–she may have only assigned it to a first reader. Or, perhaps she’s read your work thoroughly. She may have voted (yes, there’s a voting feature in Submishmash; editors can give your work a “yes,” a “no,” or a “maybe” vote as they read) or made notes to other readers about her thoughts on your work. The reading process can take quite a while, and there is no way for you to divine just how much progress your “in progress” submission has made, or how readers have voted on your work. Try not to read too much into this stage of the process. Patience, friends.

Once the editor has made a firm decision about your work, she will use Submishmash’s internal tool to generate either a letter of acceptance or a letter of rejection that Submishmash emails to you immediately. If you see your work marked with the bright green label “accepted” or the red label “declined,” a letter should be awaiting you in your email inbox.

There’s one more status you might see in Submishmash, and that’s “Withdrawn.” Let’s talk about withdrawing work.

There are two good reasons to withdraw work. One is that your material has been accepted elsewhere. If you get an acceptance from a venue, you should immediately withdraw your work from every other editor who’s considering it. The other is that you have realized this piece is horrific, that you have sent it out undercooked, and that you would rather die than have it viewed by the reading public. Hey, it happens. If these events transpire, you should click on the submission’s title in Submishmash to open the view of your file, then click the “Withdraw” link and type in your reason for having withdrawn work. If your writing was accepted elsewhere, it’s nice to tell the editor which publication will be printing it. It’s interesting for us to know, and we’ll be happy for you. If you’ve realized your work is undercooked, you don’t need to say anything at all.

Poetry presents a tricky problem when it comes to withdrawing work. Most journals ask writers to submit multiple poems in one submission file. If one poem among five is picked up for publication elsewhere, then what? When it comes to The Los Angeles Review, I prefer that writers send an email to me to say that work has been accepted elsewhere. I can then put a note in the submission that the reader should disregard the poem that’s no longer under consideration. If you withdraw the entire file, it’s possible that the editor could simply archive your entire submission (archiving submissions removes them from the editor’s view pretty much for good–the archive is a deep and spooky territory much like Limbo) as she would a rejected piece, and you may never see a response notice. Check individual publications’ guidelines before deciding how to withdraw a single poem from among many, but in general, email is your best bet.

It’s worth noting that when you use the withdraw link in Submishmash, the editor of the publication gets an email alerting her of your action. Bear in mind that if you’re a chronic withdawer of submissions, those emails are going to get a little old. The reality of the withdrawal email should also tell you that, once a piece is under consideration, it is not, I repeat, not the time to tinker with and revise your work. In the last submission cycle for LAR, I had a gentleman submit work, withdraw it immediately (I later learned he was revising it each time), then submit it again. He did this up to three times every day for over one week. At first, I thought he was attempting to be rude or to make some sort of bizarre statement with this behavior. Eventually, I emailed him and asked what on earth he was trying to do, and telling him that I’d had enough. He was chagrined to learn that we were alerted to every withdrawal and resubmission, and I was chagrined to learn that he wasn’t trying to be a jerk, as I’d thought, but just had the worst publication strategy of all time. Learn from this comedy of errors, friends.

I hope this public service announcement has been of help, writers. Go forth and submit well, often, and with, I hope, much success.

Let’s get the elephant in the room taken care of first: The Marriage Plot may just as well have been called Jonathan Franzen’s Plot. Eugenides essentially reconstructed Franzen’s Freedom–college-aged kid are all sleeping with one another, but they want to be sleeping with different people. None of the sleeping with turns out to be very satisfactory, and everyone is having crises about this sleeping-with situation. That’s all. Eugenides does toss in a little lightweight literary theory and cuts out the saggy middle-aged bits that Franzen includes, but we’re looking as the same, fundamental book.

But whereas there are authors–like Franzen–who put their characters through grave trouble and suffering of all kinds, then allow the characters to escape, grow, and triumph in some small way, there are also authors–like Eugenides–who put their characters through troubles, and then proceed to mock them; not only is The Marriage Plot a low-calorie version of Freedom, it’s also pretty snide.

In a plot about college kids outgrowing school life and moving toward adulthood, we can, and perhaps should, expect that hindsight will make both author and reader cringe a bit at the characters’ (and, by proxy, our own) childish antics. But for many who were lucky enough to attend college, the experience still holds a bit of sweetness. An honest rendering of the collegiate experience should, I believe, tread the line between recognizing silliness without wagging a withered finger at it. Julien Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending treats this same subject matter with remarkable maturity and grace, but Eugenides seems to sneer and leer and guffaw at young people’s lives in a way that seems tantamount to mocking an infant because it doesn’t yet know how to eat spaghetti. That kind of writing doesn’t enlighten us much about the subject scorned, nor does it say much for the humanity of the one doing the scorning.

However unwise the choice, Eugenides seems to openly loathe his characters. It’s not just that he puts difficulty in their way, as any good writers should, but that he seems to truly dislike them on a fundamental level. Of the three main characters, female lead Madeline gets the worst of Eugenides’s down-the-nose look. Her life path seems about as robust as that of Bella Swan of Twilight; Eugenides gives us a character who doesn’t think herself very bright or capable, relies heavily on a male characters to give her a sense of worth, and throws away her future to spend time with a boyfriend who’s a drain on her in every sense. Eugenides tells us that she smells bad. He tells us that she’s unintelligent. He tells us that she only has professional opportunities because of her father’s connections. And Eugenides seems to suggest a pathetic life of tying herself to unworthy boys is the best that Madeline deserves as a rich child of privilege who goes around calling her mother “mummy.”

Then there’s Leonard, a bipolar scientist. Leonard fares a bit better than Madeline on the scorn quotient, but Eugenides appears to take a great deal of pleasure in detailing Leonard’s dysfunctional childhood, manic break, and subsequent battle with lithium (rather than with his bipolar disorder). Poor Leonard is doomed to fail, apparently, because of his mental illness. It would probably come as a surprise to a lot of folks who suffer from bipolar disorder that they will never have healthy human relationships or be able to hold down jobs, but that’s the picture Eugenides paints for our man Leonard.

The only character Eugenides seems to hold any kindness for is the one who’s a thinly veiled version of himself–the Greek-American kid from Detroit who briefly considers a career in religious studies. This poor knucklehead, Mitchell, goes about the business of loving the unworthy Madeline from a distance, even from India where he serves in Mother Theresa’s home for the dying and destitute, where he is apparently so deep and complicated that he’s unable to help with any tasks more involved than the pushing of the medicine cart (and then going off to drink a weed smoothie). Eugenides is nicer to Mitchell than he is to anyone else; even though he may not get the girl in the end, he at least, unlike the other characters in the book, is allowed some personal agency and some freedom from cliched tropes of the rich girl or the handsome madman.

Add quite a few pointless, sweeping loops of backstory and some fairly inelegant expression throughout, and this book begins to seem more like an unfortunate draft than the great American novel. With so many chattering enthusiastically about this book, I’d really like someone to explain this to me: is this really the direction we’re going in literary fiction? If so, I think I want off this bus.

I was chatting with one such guy–who I’m fairly sure ended up a local Republican politician somewhere in Kansas or Iowa–one morning before a lecture we were about to hear on medieval monasticism. He told me that he had entertained the idea of becoming a monk, but sighed and said that “the monastery just isn’t what it used to be. It’s so service-oriented these days.” I had to chuckle. Of course, my KansIowan classmate wouldn’t be any Abelard, able to keep a lovely lady on hand in the back room while he philosophized the day away. He would have to work with the poor, with the indigent, with the sick. Not what it used to be indeed.

But if I’m honest, I’d have to admit that I too had had a fascination with cloistered life. In fact, I think many of the young women with whom I grew up in a highly religious community felt, at one time or another, that if there were some sort of Protestant version of nuns, we’d sign ourselves up. While I no longer align myself with any religious group, I still understand the draw of that sense of purpose, of contemplation, of service, and of love. Of a radical commitment to an ideal rather than to the proscriptive path of marriage and family.

It was with that sense of fascination with the cloistered life that I found Mary Johnson’s new memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. While I’m not generally a great reader of memoir, I practically gorged myself on this book. Johnson tells a fascinating story of growing from a young college student into a novice, a postulant, an avowed sister in the Missionaries of Charity–the order of nuns founded by Mother Theresa.

Johnson manages a nearly impossible feat in her book: balancing the incredible amount of detail and background information a reader will need to understand the nuances of the Catholic church and the lives of “the religious” (as avowed members of Catholic orders are called) with her own poignant life story of struggle, commitment, and growth. The particulars of life as a Missionary of Charity and as a Catholic nun would have made my classmate squirm–the MCs are committed to living under the same conditions as the poorest of the poor. For Johnson, this means bathing in buckets, foregoing necessary medical care, wearing the same sari until it is so full of holes that it cannot be mended. It’s a study in squalor that aims to bring the nuns closer to God and to the poor as they distance themselves from physical concerns.

Added to the nuns’ poverty are are the disciplines of self-flagellation (I, for one, thought the practice had largely died out in the dark ages, and was stunned to learn that there are still quite a number of young nuns whipping themselves across the legs as a method of penance for their own and others’ sins), total and unquestioning obedience to the dubious demands of superiors, and a complete lack of interpersonal physical contact and affection (at least in theory–the several romantic and sexual subplots in this memoir made me rethink my notion of what goes on behind the cloister’s walls).

But aside from the stark, frightening, and even scandalous details of religious life, Johnson tells a tale that is universal in its appeal and message. As she struggles to reconcile her belief in God’s love with the dominating personalities, pedantic attitudes, and seemingly needless austerities in her order, Johnson begins to question at what point a commitment to an ideal becomes a lost cause, at what point obedience becomes enabling of unhealthy power structures, and at what point selflessness becomes self-destructive.

These questions hit home for me as a reader–as I suspect they have for many others–though I have very few points of commonality with Johnson in terms of my life’s path. If we’re lucky people, we have what we feel are callings in our lives. We feel we’re supposed to climb the unending mountain toward being successful in our chosen pursuits, toward being good spouses or good parents. Good friends or good role models. But there are, this book seems to suggest, inevitable points at which we must look at our paths, make a brutally honest assessment about why we’re doing what we’re doing, and then find the resolve to change if we cannot live with what we find.

Find Mary Johnson’s An Unquenchable Thirst here. 

]]> http://kellydavio.com/2012/01/09/what-im-reading-mary-johnsons-an-unquenchable-thirst/feed/ 2 Kelly Davio 9780385527477 http://kellydavio.com/2012/01/02/lets-talk-about-books/ http://kellydavio.com/2012/01/02/lets-talk-about-books/#comments Mon, 02 Jan 2012 19:24:18 +0000 Kelly Davio http://kellydavio.com/?p=613 ]]> I’ve been thinking lately about how much time I and other writer-types spend yakking away about our writing and about our industry. Of course, we spend a huge amount of time working on our books and trying to bring them to market, so it makes sense that we would want to talk shop now and then. The problem, though, is that it sometimes seems that writers and readers exist as different species: one creates the work with a great deal of fanfare and bloggery, and then the nameless, faceless other devours it in some dark corner of the universe. But when we writers are doing our jobs properly, we’re also readers. Big readers. I’m a firm believer that a writer who doesn’t spend at least as much time reading as scribbling isn’t serious about the work. If you want to make good books, you have to experience books.

In 2012, then, I’m planning to talk more about what I’m reading–to look at the publishing world from the other side of the fence. That’s not to say I’m going to quit documenting the thrilling–okay, maybe only thrilling to me–world of managing a literary magazine, or giving some helpful writing world hints (according to my search statistics on this blog, a lot of you have questions about Submishmash! I’m planning some future blog pieces to help you out). But I think it’d be nice to strike a balance between looking at the world as a producer and as a receiver of books.

If you’d like to join me in the endeavor of talking about and engaging others in the books you read, here are some great resources for getting started with cataloguing and reviewing your reads:

Library Thing (www.librarything.com)–this is a simple, easy to use tool that helps readers catalogue their books online, find other readers with common interests, and receive recommendations based on readerly interests.

Goodreads (www.goodreads.com)–a social media website for book lovers, Goodreads allows users to rate and review books, to track their reading progress, and event to interact with their favorite authors (a recent live streaming interview with Jennifer Egan really sold me on the Goodreads experience!).

Shelfari (www.shelfari.com)–this site describes itself as a community-powered encyclopedia for book lovers. While readers can create virtual bookshelves here as they would on Library Thing or Goodreads, Shelfari also allows users to create “book extras,” from character descriptions to lists of book factoids. (Fair warning: Shelfari is an Amazon.com creation, so those who prefer less corporate options for virtual bookshelves will likely be better served by Goodreads or Library Thing.)

This year, I thought I’d make a list for myself. This list is titled “Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year.” Okay, it’s not as catchy as “The Only 10 Relevant and Worthy Books of ALL TIME,” but I rather like a small gesture, don’t you?

A few statements before I get into this list:

1. I do not possess complete world knowledge, so this list is a limited endeavor. These are just books I read and enjoyed. Not all of them, not the most important of them, just good books.

2. This list is based solely on what I read this year, not on what was published this year. Some of these books are a bit older than others.

3. While it’s awesome for reader/writers to encourage one another, it makes me nauseated when I see lists in which reader/writers simply mention everything their friends published in a year. So, while I’ve met some of these writers, I do not personally know any of them, and I listed their books for no back-scratching purpose.

4. Yes, this list is all fiction, this time. I have a number of reviews of poetry forthcoming, so I’ll let those reviews speak for themselves.

Some of the Fiction that I Read and Enjoyed this Year

Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro

I’ve been a fan of Ishiguro since I read The Remains of the Day when in high school. (I’ve also made it a project to introduce my high school students to Ishiguro. Yesterday, one of my kids told me that he thinks A Pale View of the Hills is the best book of all time. Mission accomplished.)  I’ve been eagerly anticipating another novel from Ishiguro, and read this collection of short stories simply to patch the gap between longer works. And then I felt like an idiot for not having picked it up sooner. Nocturnes is built on the same deliciously quiet sensibility that makes works like Never Let Me Go tick, but in these short stories, Ishiguro also reveals a smart, quirky sense of humor that makes these stories some of his most lively, if some of the least heartbreaking.

The Signal, by Ron Carlson

The Signal is not a book I’d normally pick up. I’m known to some of my more outdoorsy friends as “rurally challenged.” Give me pavement, wifi, espresso, and tall shoes, and you can have your cliffsides, your wide open spaces, your iodine pills, and your hiking boots. I’d only stub my toe on a big rock anyway. I’m a big fan of Ron Carlson’s shorter fiction, especially his gut-busting stories like “What We Wanted to Do,” though, so I thought I’d give this serious, backcountry story a try. I’m glad I did. The Signal isn’t some self-congratulatory meditation on The Land (can you tell I have strong feelings about nature writing?), but a gritty, muscular narrative with a quick pulse. Carlson is smart with his storytelling, describing neither too much nor too little of his natural setting, but giving us terse but revealing inner landscapes of his characters. It’s a book that the writers side of myself will look back to in order to see just how he pulls of such a fluid, fast-paced narrative that’s quiet and cinematic at the same time.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami

It’s not secret that I eagerly counted down the days until this meganovel from Murakami hit the shelves in the US. I practically gnawed my own arm off while waiting for my preordered copy to arrive. And while 1Q84 doesn’t quite stand up to the pacing of some of Murakami’s other novels, like The Windup Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore, it does bring us the first truly powerful female character–and, to my knowledge, the only female protagonist–of Murakami’s entire repertoire. Yes, Murakami does have to meditate on Aomame’s ears a good deal, as he must dwell on all women’s ears, but Aomame’s also an assassin who could kick any ear-meditator’s behind. And while I do speculate that some of 1Q84′s extreme length (the book is 900-plus pages) is included to play with the reader, this is a work that opens up new territory for an already prolific writer.

The Keep, by Jennifer Egan

I cannot lie: the first half of this book made me want to punch myself in the face. I keep checking to see whether I’d bought a book by the much-hailed Jennifer Egan, or whether I’d been scammed by off-brand book also called The Keep. The protagonist was thoroughly unlikable. The prose was deeply flawed. The premise was shaky. I was tempted to give up on this novel entirely, but I have a rule against giving up on books. So, I stuck it out to the end. And I have to say, the magic that Egan pulled off in the second half of the book was sheer brilliance. Every terrible turn of phrase came to make sense, and every shoddy detail of setting proved itself an ingenious trick on Egan’s part. I won’t give away Egan’s brilliant plot twist and ruin the surprise for you, but this quirky book is well worth the journey.

Please Look After Mom, Kyung-Sook Shin

A student of mine gave me this novel by an established Korean author whose work was being translated into English for the first time, and I’m glad she did, because I might never have picked it up on my own. This isn’t a fun read in any sense. The prevalent second-person point of view is disconcerting, and I absolutely missed some cultural indicators that would have helped me understand the dramatic situation. But the brutal and beautiful core story of one family’s move from rural poverty to urban modernity, and the way in which such a transition affects a family who love but inevitably break one another, is one that I won’t soon forget.

The Likeness, Tana French

Genre fiction, you say? Well, yes. Yes and no. The Irish author Tana French burst onto the American scene with her In The Woods, and The Likeness, her followup title, solidifies her standing as a new voice in–dare I say it?–procedural fiction. But it’s not the whodunit factor that interests me about French’s work. It’s her characters that really sing. Most literary fiction writers could get quite an education by reading French’s characterization, which is better realized and more compelling than the vast majority of what passes for “literary.” The Likeness is indeed a page-turner, but stay on that page a little longer and marvel at this writer’s ability to show you real people moving on the page, not sad shadows bungling in the dark.

This year, I had one major goal: finish the current novel-in-progress. Obviously, I also needed to meet the goals of being a good editor at LAR, a good teacher to my students, a good partner to my husband, and a good friend to those I care about. But in terms of goals that were purely for my own sake–my totally selfish goals–I just wanted to finish this damn book.

Unlike the manuscript for my book Jacob Wrestling, which I completed in four exciting, inspired months, this book has been creeping along so slowly that it has begun resembling a three-toed sloth. I’d set myself a deadline of late June for finishing a full first draft of this novel, knowing that my heavy teaching schedule over the summer would prevent me from doing much writing. So I launched ahead, writing several thousand words each day, feeling pretty chuffed about my progress.

Soon, though, the process of running LAR intervened. Literary publishing is a tricky business. You’re not just reading and picking submissions. You’re copyediting them. Formatting them. Collecting contracts for them. You’re selling and fundraising, taking your journal to conferences and teaching workshops. You’re making presentations to boards and compiling Excel spreadsheets beyond believing. You’re scraping up your knuckles in the pouring rain while unloading boxes of books from shipping palettes. Is it worth every bit of effort? Yes. Yes, yes, yes. I’m honored every day that I get to edit LAR. But just when does the writing happen?

Then there’s teaching. I love teaching, and I love my students. It’s a pleasure to see my high schoolers become readers and thinkers. But teaching year-round, without the types of breaks in the public school system, underscores the question: when does the writing happen?

Certainly, other people–friends, coworkers–also need a good chunk of time. Someone needs help moving. Someone needs help editing. Someone needs you to meet an obligation for him or her, for good reasons or for frustrating ones. It’s important to me to be a caring person who will drop what I’m doing to help others when I’m needed, but when does the writing happen?

The writing didn’t happen. My manuscript sat untouched on my desk for four months. I don’t love looking back on my year and seeing that I failed to meet the goal of having the novel drafted in full because I didn’t manage my time well enough to accomplish my own work. But I’ve realized something (something that probably should have been obvious to me): no one else is going to make my writing a priority. Much as I would love others to lavish space and time on me to complete my work, it’s unreasonable to expect it. I am the one who has to say a firm no to extra obligations, and get this book written.

So I’m giving myself a birthday gift this year: time to finish this novel. I have set myself a word count goal for each day of November and December, and for the past 18 days, I’ve met my goals. I plan to keep meeting those goals regardless of obligations or requests that may creep up, and I will hit 80,000 words (and the end of the book) by New Year’s Eve. My house may be a mess. I may not exercise a bit in the next two months. I may not be able to help every person in my life in every way they might desire. But the writing? It’s going to happen.

This fall, it’s our 10th issue. That’s right: we’re in the double-digits, folks! And while I know I have a habit of declaring favorites among our editions, I really do think that Issue 10 is a standout among our publications over these past few years.

Because I co-edit poetry for LAR, I’m particularly pleased with the wide array of poetic voices we have in this issue. We have ekphrastic work from Terrance Hayes, beautiful formal pieces from Jennifer Givhan and Nick DePascal, knock-the-wind-outta-you poems from Benjamin Sutton and Colin Pope, impressive long poems from LaTasha Diggs and James Allman Jr., and quiet and tender poems from Brandon Courtney, Todd Kaneko, and David Wagoner. And that’s just the beginning. (I’m tempted to name every poet in the issue, but I’ll show some restraint.)

Perhaps my favorite part of putting together this issue was getting to know the issue’s honoree, Ishmael Reed. Mr. Reed is a lightning rod in the literary world not only for his writings but also for his incendiary, no-holds-barred political opinions, and I have to admit that, in the weeks and days leading up to my interview with Mr. Reed (which would become the foundation for the profile of him in Issue 10), I was intimidated. And given the high demand for his time and attention, I half-expected him to forget about our appointment–right in the middle of the AWP conference in Washington, DC–entirely. But he arrived to meet me, he was unfailingly gracious both to me and to everyone who happened to walk by the hotel sitting room where we sat to talk. Whether it was a writer who was walking off the hotel’s elevator or a hotel employee vacuuming the hallway, every person who walked past us got a warm “how’re you doing?” from Mr. Reed.

Literary folks like Ishmael Reed, who can be provocative and hard-hitting in their work and kind and generous with others in their lives, are a gift to the literary world. He’s not only an inspiration as a prolific writer, but a model citizen of the literary community. I hope to someday be as much, myself.

In honor of banned books week at the end of September, I had my 9th and 10th graders take a look at a list of books we’ve read together, and that they’ve enjoyed: The Great Gatsby, Of Mice and Men, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lord of the Flies, Night, Wise Blood, A Separate Peace–the list went on and on. When I told them what the books had in common, that people in various locations across the country and the world cannot access these books because a school system of a library has deemed them dangerous and immoral, they were perplexed.

They wanted to know what could possibly be so awful about The Great Gatsby. I explained that some people didn’t think students could handle reading about Jay Gatsby trying to win the affections of a married woman. “But,” they said (I paraphrase), “that leads to his downfall. Why would anyone decide to act the way he does if he ends up getting shot?” As for The Lord of the Flies, they could see how the violence might put some people off, but recognized that the entire point of the novel is that the baser instincts of violence and a lust for power have to be controlled, not indulged. They got it. They understand that literature is there to make us wiser people, and to learn from the consequences of human behavior. To make us better people.

It’s easy to scoff at book banners, especially now that great literature is available to so many of us online and in free formats outside the academy and the public library. It’s easy to thumb our noses at those who would restrict others from reading. But the fact remains that, across the world, reading or writing banned books isn’t safe. It’s common knowledge that Salman Rushdie had, for many years, a price on his head for having written book offensive to Islam. While I read The Satanic Verses on the train, readers in Venezuela faced incarceration. Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the novel, was stabbed to death. Ettore Capriolo and William Nygaard, the book’s Italian and Norwegian translators, respectively, were both seriously injured in similar attacks.

This year, Amnesty International, a non-profit worth your time, attention, and donations, brought attention to the cases of Nguyen Van Ly, a jailed publisher in Vietnam; Abuzar Al Amin, a detained newspaper editor in Sudan; Prageeth Eknaligoda, a disappeared journalist in Sri Lanka; Lydia Cacho Ribeiro, a threatened journalist in Mexico; Isa Saharkhiz, an imprisoned journalist in Iran, Nurmemet Yasin, an imprisoned writer in China; and Aayat Alqormozi, a conditionally-released poet in Bahrain. All of these members of the global writing community are under attack for their work.

Those of us whose worst brushes with censorship involve having a favorite book thrown in the garbage have a duty, I believe, to advocate on behalf of these writers. I hope you’ll join me in supporting Amnesty International in their efforts to free these writers. Learn more here.

As many of my readers likely know, my collection Burn This House was accepted by Red Hen Press for publication some time ago. And though I knew I’d have to wait my turn for publication, I was so pleased to have the book accepted at a wonderful press like Red Hen that I would have waited a decade longer to see it in print. (And because I’m a compulsive tinkerer, I enjoyed having a great deal of time to continue to fuss with the poems in the book.) Even though I’ve been polishing individual poems in the book for some time, as my final manuscript delivery date came closer into view, I began to get a serious case of the nerves.

As I put together my author questionnaire, selected some strong candidates for the book’s cover art, wrote bios of various lengths, wrote book descriptions of various lengths, and even conquered my fear of having my author headshot taken (really–I sat still long enough for an author photo! However…let’s just say the intrepid photographer has her work cut out for her in terms of airbrushing), I avoided digging into the manuscript itself. I was scared of my own book.

What if the manuscript as a whole didn’t stand up as well as I remembered? What if I reread some of the poems and was embarrassed by them? What if the whole thing was just no good? I hate to tell you that I lost sleep over this, but it’s true–there were more than a few long nights of lying awake, staring at the ceiling, and wondering whether the book was really ready, and whether I would have my fledgeling idea of myself as a “real writer” shattered by hindsight.

Finally, when I couldn’t put it off any longer, I made a huge pot of coffee, sat my butt down, and read the manuscript through, not allowing myself to stop and tinker with individual poems. I read the whole thing, from the first to the last page. And you know what? I liked it. I really did. I was proud of it. I think it’s a real book.

After a little more polishing, a little more editing, and a little more pulling and adding of poems, this morning, I sealed a copy of the manuscript in a big envelope and mailed it off to the press. I didn’t let myself get too emotional about sending my little book out into the world. After all, there will be many more steps along the path to publication over the next 18 months. Maybe I’d let myself get emotional about the galleys, I thought.

When I got back from a long, cathartic run after hitting the post office, I found an email in my inbox from a writing mentor. He was a teacher who was neither lavish with his praise nor shrinking with his criticisms, and he’s a formidable writer and reader I thought I’d never impress with my writing. I never felt that I’d brought forth more than a base-level interest in him, and spent much of my grad school experience trying to write a poem he would like. He’s also known for not being into blurbing books, so I felt it was a coup when he agreed to let me take a small, positive phrase he wrote on my thesis manuscript and use it as jacket copy. But in his email, he told me he was proud of me, and that he’d been thinking about me and my book, and would like to write a real, substantial blurb for me.

Folks, I lost it. I dissolved into a blubbering puddle of weepy nonsense and all that emotion that I was trying not to have. Maybe I’ll never feel like a “real writer,” but having a book manuscript in production and having that one, elusive reader actually say he’s proud of me? This feels pretty damn close.

As I was heading back to life, tanned, relaxed, and not a little more portly for all the delicious things I’d eaten on vacation, I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the most recent literary kerfuffle. I may have been the last person in the publishing world to hear about the flap over BlazeVox Books’ latest fundraising efforts (if you, too, were living under a rock and had not heard the fuss, here’s a glimpse at the issue, and the high emotions it called up. A short version: BlazeVox is accepting manuscripts, and, upon acceptance, asking authors to make donations to the press. A host of authors are speaking up, arguing that this practice makes BlazeVox, a bastion of small press publishing, a vanity press, up there with concerns like Publish America.)  But as you may have noticed, I can’t help but rattle my two cents around, even if I’m a little late.

I stumbled on the news about BlazeVox on the same day that I got a Los Angeles Review-related email I’d classify in the second of my three categories: “normal mail,” “snippy and strange mail,” and “hate mail” (the last of which we’ve dealt with here in past blog posts). This snippy email was from a writer who chastised me/the magazine for not offering our issues free online (we’re a print-only magazine). He informed me that, while he’d like to send work to us for publication, he he wanted to read what we’ve done before. And he thought he should be able to do that for free.

This guy’s email seemed to be a little encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with trying to run a  small press or trying to publish a literary magazine: people want publication, but they don’t buy books. They want to get something that costs a publisher money–a book deal, a publication credit, and award–but they don’t want to contribute money to that effort.

Okay. I get it. We writers don’t have endless cash to spend on literary journals we send work to. I mean, I’m an ESL teacher. I’m not exactly rolling in giant piles of money. I will be the first to admit that I haven’t subscribed to every publication that’s printed my work, or donated to every press to whom I’ve sent a manuscript. But I do open my wallet for a good number of them. And sometimes, like any journal editor who isn’t financed by a university, I open my wallet for LAR; I think that, if I can back LAR with my own cash when I have to, those who want to publish in LAR might be able to kick in $15 bucks to read the magazine, or at least refrain from demanding that it be given to them for free.

Okay, back to BlazeVox. I don’t know if it’s a great idea to require new authors to donate to the press. It rubs me as much the wrong way as it rubs many other writers. But I don’t think the press is attempting to be predatory. I think they’re trying to do something–maybe an ill-advised something–to ease the extreme financial burden that running a press puts on an individual or a group of individuals who are trying to be good literary citizens by bringing fine writing to market. The issue, as I see it, isn’t that a press is financially strapped enough to try a fundraising method that seems so questionable to many. I see the issue as the fact that a press was allowed–by readers and writers, the people it serves–to get to the point at which it needs to dun authors for money.

Buy books, guys. Buy books.