What Does Success Mean for a Poet

If you’ve been following along with my last few posts (starting with “How to be a poet: A Choose your own adventure story“) you know I’ve been struggling with the idea now of “what to do next.” How to measure true success. Should I keep going with this poetry thing or give it up and, I don’t know, open a gluten-free cupcake shop/bookstore or something.

Yesterday Robert Lee Brewer, who is the editor of Poet’s Market with his first full-length book collection on the way from Press 53, wrote on his blog about “finding success as a poet.” He broke the idea of success down into “Publication Credits, Money, Fame, Artistic Achievement and Immortality” with the idea that some things, like “publication credits” and “money” are measurable, while “fame” and “Immortality” are dubious to try to measure at best. But I don’t know that for me, it can be broken down that easily. As I spoke about before, I have the strong feeling that compromising what you write to be popular or famous will only lead to a feeling of being ultimately cheated.

I’ve been asked in previous interviews about my “success” which I have to put in quotation marks for myself because I really don’t think of myself as successful, even if a younger, more shiny-eyed version of myself might look upon some of the things I’ve accomplished as “success.” Being a practical-minded girl who didn’t grow up with family money, some part of me will always have “being able to support yourself with your work” as the highest priority for success, in which case, I’m dramatically failing. A more romantic version of myself cares about connecting with other people with my work – maybe that’s the ultimate version of success, or the ability to maybe shine light on difficult topics – in case you’re one of those readers who wonders why my work is “so dark” and “focuses on hard things” – because maybe that seems important to me, to talk about cultural issues. But if all I want is to connect with readers, or get people talking about some subject matter, surely there’s an easier route – because most people don’t read poetry at all. Immortality is attractive, but elusive, and always comes with a price. And I also think it’s really hard for a generation to measure their own artistic merit with accuracy, so I’d have trouble judging not only the merits of my own work and the work of my peers, even as a practiced critic, because each generation is blind to some tics and generous to a fault towards others. So that leaves us with things like publication credits, grants, jobs, awards, etc. Things you would write down on your imaginary CV. The problem with those is, the feeling of success we get with each accomplishment is illusory and fleeting, because as we achieve one step on the icy mountain, the goals we have actually slip up – as soon as we get a glimpse of the snowy top of the mountain, it turns out it wasn’t the top at all, but just another crag to climb. In other words, if you achieve your goal of publishing your first book, then you want a second, and then you want your third to get a book award and good reviews in big places, etc. It’s human nature not to celebrate the present, but brood on past mistakes and fear the future. If you read the journals of famous writers, you can see it – this ability to never really focus on the good things they’ve just done but worry and fuss and fidget (and sometimes, in more extreme examples like Sylvia Plath, even kill themselves) over what they haven’t. I wrote a poem recently about Hedy Lamarr, who was only recognized for her scientific achievements at nearly the end of her life – sometimes the recognition, as Emily Dickinson put it, “comes late, and is held low to freezing lips/ too rapt with frost to take it – how sweet it would have tasted – just a drop…” (From “Victory Comes Late.”)

So I think the question can really only be answered with more questions…but surely Isaac Asimov’s quote would be apropos: ““You must keep sending work out; you must never let a manuscript do nothing but eat its head off in a drawer. You send that work out again and again, while you’re working on another one. If you have talent, you will receive some measure of success – but only if you persist.” So that even when we lose hope, or we become somewhat jaded, or burnt out, we keep coming back, not just to writing, but to writing and sending out that work…hoping that it will achieve for us something…immortality, maybe, publication credit, maybe, connecting to an audience, maybe…

But it terms of career as “poet,” I’ll admit to still being mystified, to wondering “where do we go from here?”

So, how do you define success for a poet? Are some of you struggling? Are you happy with your accomplishments? Are you always aiming upwards towards an increasingly difficult and slippery climb? What is it about this job that leads so many to nervous breakdowns and alcoholism and other destructive behavior…the constant rejections, the dispiriting low pay and lack of readership, the not-exactly-knowing-what-you’ve-done-or-if-you’ve-made-a-difference nature of the job? Or are you able to embrace yourself and your art exactly where you are? Clearly I am shuffling about in my head for definitions, structure, the reassurances of certainty…which just may not exist for a poet. Or maybe it’s just my fever and I should go back to sleep.

Unexplained Fevers Reviews, HuffPo UK, Lit Mags, and Appearances

Wow! I woke up this morning to some welcome things – a review of Unexplained Fevers by Robert Peake on Huffington Post UK (along with a review of my lovely friend Annette Spaulding-Convy’s In Broken Latin), and a new review on a book blog called BookBabe. What was really funny was I fell asleep last night listening to Z: A Novel just at the part where F. Scott Fitzgerald is getting all twitchy waiting for reviews to come in on The Great Gatsby. I guess all writers, no matter what genre or time period, are just going to feel itchy until they get some small feedback from the loop about their work (and hopefully positive feedback!)

I also wanted to point to two literary magazines that I have poems in you may not have heard of before, but you – like me – probably love to discover new literary magazines – I have two “Robot Scientist’s Daughter” poems in the Black Magic issue of Spoila Magazine, created by the folks that brought you Bookslut, and “The Princess Turns to the Sea,” a poem from Unexplained Fevers, appears in the latest issue of Sou’Wester edited by Stacey Lynn Brown, along with poems by friends and admired compatriots such as Allison Joseph, Mary Biddinger, Ivy Alvarez, Sandy Longhorn, fellow Seattle-ite Martha Silano, and a bunch of wonderful folks. Both issues are a lot of fun to read!

And, I’m appearing tonight in Redmond at 7 PM at The Redmond Library as part of the Jack Straw reading with fellow 2013 Jack Straw writers Emily Perez, Dennis Caswell, Larry Crist and Judith Skillman. There will be refreshments, a raffle, and readings with a Q&A! Plus it’s the last official Redmond Poet Laureate event of the season, so come out if you’re nearby and looking for something to do!

Advice for Post-MFA grads: How to Pay for Student Loans and Fancy Shoes

This post began with a dream I had, probably in anxiety over talking at my old MFA program Pacific, on an Alumni panel in a couple of weeks. The dream involved two petulant girls complaining to me, asking me how they were expected to pay for their fancy shoes and their student loans if they couldn’t get jobs as librarians and didn’t want to go to the temp agencies. In the dream, I was flummoxed on what to tell them. Kind of a funny, obvious dream, right? But one I think about a lot, especially given years of a down economy and increasing college prices. I got my first degree for free – with a National Merit Scholarship and an Honors scholarship on top of the free tuition because my father worked at the university – but my two graduate degrees I had to pay for – though I mostly had a grant cover the costs of my MA in English, and I worked full-time at AT&T as a technical writer the entire time I went to school – the MFA was pretty pricey, and I didn’t have a full-time job to offset the costs, just off-and-on contract and freelance writing.

When I got my MFA degree, it was after quitting work as a mid-level technical manager at the “world’s largest software company” and a mutual decision that my husband and I made after some severe health crises that I was going to become serious about my writing and really go for it rather than trying to sneak it into 90-hour-work weeks and very few vacation days. We’ve never been well off enough to not worry about money, so for us, this meant knowing we’d have to put off buying a house or going on vacations for a few years (I got my MFA in 2007 – and we finally put a down-payment on a townhouse last year, in 2012, and of course we’re broke again because of it! No fancy vacations for us again, I guess.) We decided also to make some adjustments to our style of living – we thought the sacrifice would be worth it. The MFA was a symbolic change, yes, but I also put very real expectations on myself about what I would be trying to accomplish (to write a publishable book and build up a CV of published poems and reviews) My vision of getting an MFA meant really putting myself out into the world as a writer – taking my work seriously, treating it like a job, writing and submitting and reviewing and later, doing readings and promotions for my first book – over 40 hours a week, every week. I did not expect to get a teaching job or any job directly as a result of getting an MFA. My only expectation was time and space to write, and maybe some friendships with encouraging other writers, and maybe some mentors/advisors who would give me direction and advice as I went through those two years. Half-way through the MFA program, which was low-residency, I got sick and had to take a semester off – but this resulted in spending a lot of time sending out the MS of my first book (at the time called “A Thousand Tongues,” then I made a last minute switch to “Becoming the Villainess”) which I had been working on for five years and finished in the first semester of my program, and then getting the happy news that it would be published. I finished up the second year of the program with a good draft of my second book. Could it have happened differently? Of course. But to me, the MFA was both a motivator and an encouragement to strict discipline and practice of reading, revising, writing – in general, making space in my life for my work as a writer, which I had never really done in a dozen years of (somewhat lackadaisical, I see now) poem-writing and sending out.

But what to tell today’s MFA-about-to-be-or-recent graduates about how to make money after the MFA? Certainly I’ve had some luck after my MFA – some adjunct teaching work, a few paying writing assignments, a few decent monetary literary prizes, and my work as Poet Laureate of Redmond among them – but all that put together wouldn’t cover my student loans I took out for my final degree. And today’s economy is worse than it was in 2007. Tenure-track teaching jobs – something I’ve had in the back of my head since I was a child, what with my father being a tenured professor and my husband’s father the same – are disappearing and I don’t think that model is going to suddenly rise up and reassert itself in academia, somehow – though that would be lovely. Freelance writing jobs – paying writing assignments of any type – are harder to find as newspapers and magazines have folded. The publishing industry has been collapsing and consolidating so much I can’t keep track of it (thank goodness for the small but hearty independents.) It’s hard for any sensible person emerging with a graduate degree in the liberal arts not to feel a little anxious!

On Facebook, a ton of folks piped up – anxious MFA students among them – and offered advice, solace, and opinions. Neil Aitken, who left his job in the programming world to write, publish, and pursue a PhD, offers this: “Unfortunately there’s a glut of qualified would-be instructors out there, so not everyone ends up in a teaching gig (and some that do, probably shouldn’t). However, there are ways to make the transition into a non-teaching position. Think of your skills not as being creative writing specific, but rather a set of tools and skills that can be adapted to many situations and fields. Writing is done in many fields, for instance — if you have a knack for condensing and clarifying, you might make a good technical writer. If you’re good at thinking outside the box and arriving at creative solutions, sell your creativity as an asset — and find ways to demonstrate how you have used it to create new solutions for existing problems. If you’ve worked on a literary journal, you’ve become familiar with certain aspects of office work and the division of labor — depending on your specific roles, you may have gained experience in desktop publishing, web publishing, advertising, public relations, administration, marketing, sales, management, etc.” Professor (and magician!) Jim Brock makes some interesting points about advising students, which should start even before the MFA: “The advising of MFA students should begin well before they even apply to MFA programs. I tell my students that if they think of pursuing an MFA is about getting a job or about even becoming a “real” writer that they are entering it for the wrong reason. All an MFA is, at its best, is an artificial and often expensive opportunity to join a ready-made community of writers–and even then, there’s no guarantee that it’ll be a healthy community–and to have an opportunity to devote oneself to writing. I routinely point out that there are other ways to have that community, and I remind them that if they are devoted to writing, they don’t need that degree. Now, for some students, this artificial community and its often cool opportunities are worth it and are rewarding for their own sake, and for others, no, there are better and more sane ways to pursue their writerly aspirations. I think this kind of advising is paramount so that you have fewer individuals who end up feeling betrayed. My responsibility is to advise students for their interests, not for my self-serving or self-confirming interests. My own MFA experience was a most happy, fortunate one, but I have to remember the cases where it wasn’t so good at all for some really good writers and friends. I also have to look honestly at some of the phoniness that attends academia in general and the MFA degree in particular. Let’s be honest to some of its pretensions and limitations, as well as its difficult rewards, be candid with our students, and not be so naïve when we advise them ourselves, just because we’ve had a little good fortune come our way and believe that others should follow our paths, just to affirm what we’ve done.” My friend, poet and publisher Kelli Russell Agodon, says “Tell them life or their degree doesn’t owe them anything. And fancy shoes will give them blisters. That will quiet down those imaginary students. 😉 (Or your kind self may say– buy your fancy shoes from a consignment shop, write well, and focus on what you *have* instead of what you don’t.) ” Jennifer Greshem, fellow Steel Toe Books author and founder or “Everyday Bright,” suggests an alternate path: “Start a business, that’s what you should tell them. Poets have HUGE advantages as entrepreneurs: they are good at observing the world around them, they have empathy, they can make brilliant use of metaphor (great for marketing).”

Anyway, whatever path you choose, to MFA or not, or whatever means you find to pay off those student loans and buy shoes, I say good luck to you. And drop any advice in the comments!

Sometimes Writers Need Friends

So, after my last post about the important of guarding your writing and not being too nice, this is a balancing post about the importance for writers of having friends. Friends give you perspective, give you support when you’re feeling discouraged, help you celebrate when you’re feeling encouraged. If you’re mean and petty and insist on seeing the worst in everyone, it will be hard to have or keep many friends – I’ve been reading a couple of biographies of Plath, and I think it was one of the main things that kept her so dangerously isolated – not only did she see the worst in herself, she saw the worst in her girlfriends and dates, the occasions around her – the world was full of shadows, and very little illumination, except in her beautiful words. Think how much happier she might have been if she’d given herself – along with some other people – a break and let them into her life a little more.

Having friends who are also writers is really helpful, because when they complain about how to hard it is to book a reading, or how nervous they’ve been about reviews, or how excited they were about a particular acceptance or bummed about a particular rejection, they will be reflecting back your own struggles – and remind you you’re not alone in your crazy ambitions and adventures. Like these girls flying into the great unknown future, most of the time we will be out on our own, piloting rickety craft across uncertain seas – so to get together and talk and laugh and share secrets of the trade is a great gift. Writing isn’t a competition, though it can feel like one – often, the most talented people you encounter – the one that make you bite your lip out of nervousness or even jealousy – are the ones that will help lift you out of yourself and help you see the next adventure on the horizon. Meet on a regular basis, talk about what you want to do next, exchange information about grants and contests and your wish lists. Talking about something doesn’t necessarily make it concrete – but putting things out “in the universe” in a group is often a huge motivator.

And let me say a word here about interesting misfits…sometimes your best friends will look just like you…but often they will not. They will be outliers, maybe a little awkward, maybe you can have friends with whom you discuss lipstick and others with whom you discuss particle physics. I have been surprised over and over throughout the years how the people who seemed like the biggest risks often have the most to offer, people who look, talk, and act in a completely surprising way. Diversity isn’t just a buzzword for the workplace, it’s something we should strive for in our own lives of family and friends, because there’s a danger in surrounding yourself with people who are too comfortable, too much like you – because those who cause you to push yourself will ultimately open some doorways in your mind and heart. Which is ultimately really good for your writing.

I’m grateful that I’ve come across so many interesting, entertaining people in my life that I can call friends, and that while I never feel I have enough time to socialize, I’m always happy when I come back from a writing group or a coffee trip with an old friend, I always feel less bitter/anxious/caught in my own head. This is also a thank you note to all my friends, across the country, old and new. You have all added tremendously to the sparkle in the world. There’s a verse in the Bible that I think applies to both marriage and friendship – yeah, I know, surprise, a Bible quote at the end! But it really applies especially to poets, who can feel lonely and isolated and slapped in the face by life, and I imagine that in the original language, it was probably pretty good poetry once: “Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor: If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help them up. Also, if two lie down together, they will keep warm. But how can one keep warm alone? Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.” Ecclesiastes 4. (PS If you only read one book in the Bible, that may be the one to read. I have always loved it.)

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?