When to Be Nice – the Writer-Girl-Type Edition

You wouldn’t think a writer who wrote a book called “Becoming the Villainess” might struggle as much as I do with what I call “nice girl syndrome.” But I do. I don’t like to bother people or let them down, so at doctor’s offices, I don’t insist on one kind of treatment because I don’t want to assert myself, or in the writing world, I have trouble turning down offers to do things for others. (As you can imagine, this makes jobs like teaching – no, I can’t write a 23rd letter of recommendation for you – or a local city’s Poet Laureate job – sure, I can show up at blank event with five minutes notice and do anything you want – a little bit of a struggle, because without clearly defined boundaries – yes, I will do this, but no, I can’t do that – these jobs will take up your entire life.)

I started thinking about the problem of the “nice girl syndrome” a bit after this discussion, which includes a bit of argument – not from me – about whether or not it’s worthwhile for a writer/editor to prioritize being, in Mary Biddinger’s words, “kind.” (See interesting discussion between four writers here: http://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/four-poets-read-poems-and-talk-poetry) Kindness comes up somewhere in the middle and sparks a debate. I am looking on silently in this debate, because honestly, I am wrestling with own feelings of how to balance “nice” with “self-preservation/success.” I actually think Mary does a model job with this balance – gracious but committed to her own work, too. So when does a writer put her own work second, to her teaching, to her spouse’s/children’s/family’s needs, to her four adopted rescue dogs, to the needs of everyone but herself?

I think kindness enormously expands our writing world when done in the right way – a thank you note to a writer who moved you or an editor who was especially helpful, blurbing or reviewing other writers, inviting someone you admire to come do a reading with you or teach a class or whatever – and that it is part of our writing community’s well-being that hangs in the balance between doing what’s kind and doing what’s in our own self-interest. Remember when we were writers just starting out, when a kind word or act made all the difference to us, and we should strive to include and encourage others in the same way. There’s an old saying to “whom much has been given, much will be expected” – so the more gifts we receive from the universe, the more we should give back.

On the other hand, there’s a terminal kind of niceness – the “can’t say no” kind – that will get in the way of your writing and publishing. One thing I’ve noted while reading these multiple biographies and memoirs of famous dead successful writers – besides the lack of happy endings – is that they were none of them known for being particularly nice. Egotistical to the point of delusion, sometimes – always aiming high and believing their own work had merit and deserved recognition – the women writers whose names we now know we know partially because they didn’t put up with a lot of crap, they took risks, they did what they pleased most of the time. They made a scene, they switched publishers because they weren’t happy with one editor or publisher’s treatment of them, they withdrew stories and revised til the last minute and went with the best-paying and most prestigious offers every time. Especially in the cases of Sylvia Plath and Flannery O’Connor, this may have been because, for two different reasons, they both knew they had limited time.

Those of you who read this blog on a regular basis know I struggle with various health stuff, that usually rears its ugly head at inconvenient times. At those times, I am forced to acknowledge I cannot, actually, do it all – and maybe no one can. (To illustrate – I was in the hospital on oxygen with two IVs in my arms with double pneumonia when I was writing to my students about being a day late to turn in grades…and I still felt so bad about it I actually finished grading in the hospital bed.) So if I’m going to stick to priorities, what are mine? What comes first? When do I need to face conflict, assert myself, say no? When do I need to say “It’s time to write” instead of one of the six-thousand other things I could be doing? I know I don’t like to let anyone down. It literally hurts me physically sometimes – stomachaches, migraines – to do it. But if I don’t, what opportunities drop away – the chance to write, to submit, to offer up an idea or start a memoir or take a risk – that might make the difference between a writer who makes history, and a writer who does not?

Happy Memorial Day! And thoughts on Writing Priorities and True Success

Happy Memorial Day Weekend Everyone! And thanks to all our troops who have serve or are currently serving!

This weekend, after scanning with some dismay the number of poems I’ve written and/or sent out in the past twelve months, I decided to make this weekend profoundly unscheduled – no parties, no readings – and just devote myself to getting back my brain’s space, writing, and trying to send out some work and revise some of my manuscripts. It’s been tough – I’ve been easily distracted – but I’m getting back into my old habits after a day or two – staying up late to write poems, starting in the morning before I get out of bed to go over XL spreadsheets and deciding where to send out or researching publishers and magazines. I want to have some sort of higher ambitions – I’ve been reading, a little bit every night, Flannery O’Connor’s Habits of Being , and have been really struck noting both her tough ambitions, her constant revisions and aiming high in her publications. (I have some other literary memoir-type things calling my name to read as well – Pain, Parties Work on Sylvia Plath, and Z A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald when I’m done with Flannery.) Note that things didn’t really end well for any of these writers. Oh well. I’m taking note of their good habits and ignoring the bad. After all, that’s what we do in real life with friends and mentors, right?

I have been thinking about notions of “success” for a poet/writer (as you may have notice from previous posts) and have come to an odd conclusion: you cannot compromise or let your writing become commercialized or fall victim to trends or else, like the tragic example of the brainy teen girl whose high school crush finally comes around when she puts on a short skirt and makeup – she’ll find the shiny object of her affections sadly tarnished. As a writer, what I really mean when I say “Success” is that someone (or someones – hopefully a larger number rather than a smaller number) – appreciates what is unique and special about your writing in particular, not your writing as part of a trend, or your writing for what it represents, but what is unique to you in terms of ideas, styles, slant, POV…you know, without the short skirt and makeup, with your hair in a ponytail and your glasses on. We worry about how to make our writing pretty and popular.  But inside, you want your audience to love your writing in the same way you want a loved one to love you – that is, to embrace not just the exterior, but the true nature of you. Of course it would also be nice to sell, say, 7599 copies of your new book! But really, what is the use of “success” with money or numbers if your work has ceased to represent the real you? In other words, don’t worry about sending your poems to that Reality Makeover Program. Editors and readers – the ones your writing is meant for – will like you just the way you are. (This is advice, by the way, that you cannot give a teenage girl. Do not try. They’ll figure it out for themselves.)

Springtime and Change is in the Air

Quick update: Thank you to “Up the River Journal” who posted three poems from Unexplained Fevers up on their site: http://uptheriverjournal.wordpress.com/issue-one/jeannine-hall-gailey

Last night I went to a really fun poetry reading where I got to hear from Marge Manwaring’s new book and work by Ron Starr, and got to hang out with a few friends afterward, had a long phone conversation with a good friend in medical school – and had one of those spur-of-the-moment, embrace-change haircuts! (Razor-cut asymmetrical bob.) I also colored my hair much, much blonder. It felt good to do something different. That’s right, people – I don’t want to be a walking cliche, but when you have the blues, go blonde! I mean, what can it hurt? (PS my blonde is always a bit strawberry, because I really can’t get rid of the red in my hair no matter what color I mean to color my hair. “Chocolate brown/mocha” ends up auburn, so “light brown/dark blonde/caramel/honey/almond” ends up strawberry. By the way, notice how many of those words involve food – is someone going to be eating our hair? Right? Gross!) I know I’m being a total junior high girl and posting pics of the hair. (I did it on Facebook too! Crazy!)

Talking to a bunch of folks yesterday, I realized a lot of people have been feeling down and ready for a change, not just me – especially in their jobs. How many people have been stuck in jobs they hated because of fear, because of the bad economy? Maybe it’s time for some optimism, some positive change, again – time to stop gritting our teeth and getting through the day, and looking for something better.

I’ve also applied for a long-shot job kind of thing, and am continuing to look for newer, bigger opportunities. Why not, I say? What can it hurt? I’m also planning my first out-of-town reading for the new book out in Portland in June, so yay for that! I’m trying to write a little, God-help-me, fiction. Maybe an attempt at memoir too. Maybe I’ll send out a few freelance queries. I have always thought when I get really down, it’s a sign I should change a few things.  Not moving to Hawaii/get a divorce/meltdown kind of changes, but changes to the small things I’m unhappy with – personal interactions, job and money stuff, adding and deleting things to the schedule (writing time in – doctor’s appointments – out!)  I do think struggling with weird health problems AND being a poet (talk about job uncertainty!) could potentially drive a lot of people batty, not just me. It’s my own work to figure out how to balance and manage that with good things in my life – how to let go of worrying about my family, how to be ask for the things I want and not be afraid of being more assertive, how to add in things like writing time and hanging out with friends and going out (i.e., fun!) and make those things just as important as the many duties and responsibilities I usually give priority to. Also, trying for things I’m normally too nervous to try for! Because, at this point, why not?

Taking Steps and a fear-based society

You may have noticed a bit of shambling around in the last couple of posts, trying to align my life (over here) with my values and actual passions (over here.) So, after a few weeks of trying to get my thoughts in order, yesterday I finally took some steps after several long walks in the unusual May sunshine watching duckling and bunnies and hearing the red-winged blackbirds chirping mightily and other such springy-visions.

I started a job application. (By the way, if any of you are looking for an MFA-holding, three-book-published poet to work for great pay part-time let me know! I’m looking at you, well-funded low-res MFA programs!)  I wrote to a publisher that had been holding a manuscript since last August, I looked at that same manuscript and rearranged it a bit and took out some poems I can see now don’t fit in it, I printed out my Excel spreadsheet of poems to send out, I looked at the drafts of the poems – eek, often full of angst and not much else – I have written in the past few months to see if any were worth revising. In other words, I actually did some real writing work. Also, I painted my nails cobalt blue, which looks sort of goth and scary but also reminds me that these fingers are getting stuff done. No more polite buffed nude fingernails, which seems like a metaphor for a life lived in more color, with more vigor. I know, it’s just nail polish.

One of the things I realized after this aforementioned set of writing chores was that, after an acceptance from earlier in the week and the publication of the new 2013 Jack Straw Anthology, every single poem from “The Robot Scientist’s Daughter” has been published. I also watched a bit of “The Girls of Atomic City” lecture from PBS I had recorded some days ago, really thinking about how foreign and alien the subject matter of nuclear enrichment and bomb-building in a secret city must seem to the screeners and editors looking at the manuscript, how outer-space-science-fiction so much of my actual real life has been. Most people, I know, don’t grow up with Geiger counters in their basements, knowing how to measure nuclear pollution in their gardens. I was thinking suspicious thoughts about government coverups by the time I was seven and eight, because it wasn’t science fiction, it was happening within a five-mile radius of my house. My whole early childhood, complete with men-in-black and secrets locked is safes, was like an Appalachian X-Files episode. A neighbor stabs their husband one night, my father is teaching me about radionuclides and dosimeters the next.

My next manuscript, almost finished, might be more user-friendly, but no less dark – it’s all about apocalypses and the end of the world, which it seems is the subject of every single movie that’s come out in the last few years. Kids today don’t know what it’s like to fly without taking off your shoes because of terrorism – it’s created sort of a fear-based society here, one different than the kind I grew up in the seventies, when, yes, we were worried about nuclear bombs and hostage-taking in Iran, but basically, America felt safe and secure – not “fifties” safe and secure, exactly – there were moving tides all around us then, racism and sexism held up in the light, the EPA starting to have a voice – but still, I felt safer and more secure than I bet the kids I teach in workshops today feel. That’s what I’m trying to capture in this (fifth?!?) manuscript, that sense that the world is about to end, all the time, if not by zombie, then by plague or food chain collapse. (I’m reading a delightful YA-style geek-and-tech book called “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore” that features a near-future in which the food chain has already collapsed. So much fun to read, it’s like a vacation for the brain…) The idea that disaster, unpredictable and uncontrollable, is always near, right around the corner, and how one can live a life in that kind of mindspace.

Anyway, despite all the foreboding, the bad economy, the fears, young people today have the daunting task as they enter school and then the workplace, trying to decide what to do with their lives, how to make a difference. At forty, I’m considering the same darn questions, it seems. How to (and if I can) make the world a better place. How to do more than complain and be afraid, because those things, besides being useless, are boring. The idea of the superheroine and supervillain today seem more applicable than ever. If anyone is going to save us…it’s going to have to be…us.

Mother’s Day and its Lessons and revelations re: Self-Pity Versus Self-Care

Stay with me. It will all come together.

I used to get really twitchy on Mother’s Day. In my twenties, it was because I resented the existence of a guilt-based holiday that was supposed to be a feminist, anti-war holiday before it got co-opted by governments and corporations (and look that up! The true origins of Mother’s Day are fascinating.) In my thirties, it was because of the “can’t have kids” thing – it just made me miserable to be celebrating something I could never be. See? Self-pity and anger-based stuff, right?

But I’ve started having revelations since I turned 40, just like everyone told me I would. One of them was – I can celebrate Mother’s Day with no resentment or guilt or feelings of loss these days. My mom wasn’t perfect, but she taught me several important operating principles of my life, including:

• All mythologies and religions come from a collective subconscious. (Not sure who taught her Jung and Campbell, but it sure stuck with her and she taught it to me when she was still reading me nursery rhymes.)
• The most important thing about any religion, and specifically, Christianity, is love. To love other people. Which, you know, if you’ve read the Bible, pretty much checks out.
• Never go into the kitchen, because you might not escape. (And consequently, I’ve never cooked much. And my husband is thinking of putting together a cookbook! So, it all works out.) And in terms of housework, it’s important to be clean (as in germs) but not neat, so embrace the messy. Let the children and animals on the good furniture, throw a party every once in a while and don’t worry if the house isn’t perfect as long as the bathrooms are sparkling, etc.

I had this other revelation: you cannot control other people and they all have free will. Hmmm.

And this third: I was reading a British magazine that had a short article in it about the practice of self-pity, which it seems women encourage each other in the practice of, versus the practice of self-care, which is much more healthy. Instances of this would include – doing something smart about the people you choose to date instead of whining to your girlfriends about your boyfriends all being jerks, and considering why you’ve decided on the guys or girls you’ve decided on in the past in the first place. Quitting a job you hate and actively searching for a new one instead of constantly complaining about it to others, who will only absently pat you on the back for a while before they lose interest anyway. If you have health problems, um, as I have been known to have, do the smart things for your health – take the medications you’re supposed to take, do the type of exercise (or, in my case, the type of rest from exercise) you’re supposed to do, eat the things that make you feel good rather than things that make you feel bad. You know what I’m saying. Get your sleep instead of staying up worrying all the time about stuff you can’t change (see previous revelation.) Read a book for fun once in a while, do something that feeds your brain and soul, go to a museum, walk in a park. If you’re on the computer or your smartphone all the time, get away from them for a bit every day. This all sounds like sensible, rational advice, right? But the article I read pointed out how our culture – via books, television characters, other women’s behavior – kind of encourages women to tell other women “It’s all right, it’s not your fault your job/boyfriend/life/money situation sucks” when really, that’s not helping – there’s usually something that needs to change and until it changes, you, my friend, will remain miserable. Huh. For some reason this article hit me with a real punch.

So, for me, this means – instead of whining about not having enough money, I’m going to seek out better-paying work. Instead of feeling like poetry is killing me – (I possibly took too much on in the last year, which leads to this kind of burnout) – I want to enjoy poetry again. I want to spend time with people I enjoy spending time with, and I want to make good friends a priority again. Spending time doing things I actually want to do instead of what I feel I have to do. Resting when my body tells me to rest (like, if you dislocate a rib or sprain an ankle, genius, you probably aren’t resting enough.) Prioritizing health stuff even when it’s a pain in the ass to do it (yes, make that dentist appointment.) Spend more time with animals and in nature. You know, self-care versus self-pity. It seems like Mother’s Day is a good day to kick off this kind of thinking, doesn’t it? Because in the end, we all have to learn to “mother/nurture” ourselves.