I’m going to squash some considerable curiosity & insecurity about my pursuit of writing or publication or recognition, & I’m going to do it publicly.
Is there a certain way to sell your writing that is easier/optimal when compared to other ways?
I want answers, perspective & a red flare shot into the murky, twilight of my interior. A sample of the questions I want answers to include:
What is objectively true about my writing?
- What objective truths about our writing (frequency of articles, the use of the first person, etc.) matter & do not?
- Does a matter of fact (e.g., a tendency to mention a golden retriever in every story, poem, my essay) suggest or indicate that there is an intrinsic value, or some repeating pattern to my work that affects it at all?
Is my writing good?
- Is my writing arranged or organized in such a way that maximizes its potential “goodness” or desirability?
- Why do I frequently receive encouraging, personal, positive proclamations of the goodness of my submissions (a very rare thing) from editors on 63-75% of my submissions to ‘top-tier’ publications, but never get published?
What increases one’s odds of being published?
- If I know other published authors, or, put differently, attend the same schools, win the same awards, & meet the same people as other published authors how much does that affect my odds of being published?
- Is there an observable hierarchy or likelihood that someone who submits in March with a .pdf will do better than someone who submits in Sept. with a .docx?
- Does the typeface, format, style, or identity of the author affect their odds?
- Do metaphors about the x or y appear more frequently in publishable work? Like, do poems that include figurative language abt. the nighttime do better than poems that include figurative language abt. the daytime?
- Does writing this article, or articles of this sort, or promoting this type of dissent—a type of dissent that I think is both ambient & natural contrapposto in any pursuit that depends on the invention / commodification of human enterprise—increase my odds of getting published?
Do publishers (both art house & mass-market) consistently improve, recognize, & challenge their idea of “literature” as it exists & is invented or sold in markets?
- If not, why not?
- If one compares a statistically significant sample of rejected submissions & a statistically significant sample of accepted submissions, should the qualities of a [non]/publishable literature become obvious, evident, or at least determinable?
- If either published or rejected work shares no specific trends, patterns, or qualities with similarly published or rejected work, then can it be assumed that publishers do not have a rigorous, consistent, or logical guidelines for accepting or rejecting a particular submission?*
How can this be objectively measured or investigated?
Objective
I am compiling everything I’ve written in the ten years since my graduation. I’m an analytical person, so it makes sense that taking an objective, measured, metrical assessment of the 1000+ pages/hundreds of thousands of words that I’ve written in the last decade will help me solve something.
Hopefully, it will help me write more freely, more clearly, and more truthfully—even if that lowers my chances of being published. My friends & peers are pretty well aware of my thoughts on the literary marketplace.
I’ll expand on them elsewhere, but, suffice it to say that my writing can not be comfortably sold or pitched because of its form, style, & incomplete nature.
Admissions / Context
I have enjoyed, luckily, tremendous successes—and failure—as a writer:
I am an alumnus & fellow of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, which, technically, is both a premier literary program, but also the most selective academic institution in the world.
My writing has won prestigious awards (though not for quite a while, &, therefore in journals that barely exist or do not exist); this suggests that writing is good, in theory.
- I won the Stegner Literary Prize as an undergrad, which at the time, was a big deal—mostly because everyone at the ceremony got a glass of champagne & I was 19 yo.
- My thesis manuscript (Weekending) earned me Alberta Metcalf Kelly Fellowship.
I’ve been published a lot, edited a lot, & written for several publications myself.
- I’ve been a paid writer/critic for The Star Tribune, The Richmond Times-Dispatch, The Millions, & a bunch of other places.
- I have never published a book-length work, despite having book-length-work-worthy writing to publish.
I’m finding rejection less upsetting / disturbing than I used to. I have a well-established & semi-toxic streak of a sort of suspicion & entitlement regarding rejection, but I feel much less intensely after introspection, work, & proper framing.
I write because I like to write, just like I game or hike because I like to game or hike. It’d be nice, for example, to be a famous gamer or hiker, but not being either has not negatively affected my enjoyment of those activities—if anything, it’s probably enhanced it, given that I do not have a field of distortion that comes in the form of praise, critique, celebrity, etc.
Dang, look how much I wrote, despite specifically restraining myself. Apologies. Without further ado:
Still, it’s a curious thing to be published and unpublishable simultaneously; more curious that this spectral qualifiers (published author/writer/poet) depend on the momentary preference (a shifting, opaque, disintegrated hallucinations that lack both an objective correlative & any meaningful consideration of a system that does not depend on taste, privilege, hegemony & entropy to establish or certify the worthiness of literary art) of publishers who mostly are lovely people, or, like all of us, are trying to be—people who care deeply about an industry that is changing, or “dying”, which is not how I choose to describe a shift from potential to kinetic mode.
A live a database of everything I’ve ever written. The first language / written piece comes from weekending, for which I won the x in 2012. The last was probably written on 05/02/2024.
Document Name
Tags
Best Lines
Document
Some of the most evocative and compelling lines from the document are:
• "In the stillness of the night, whispers of dreams dance."
• "A tapestry of emotions woven with words."
• "Through darkness and light, the journey unfolds."
• "The echoes of forgotten stories linger in the air."
• "Lost in the labyrinth of thoughts, seeking meaning."
These lines capture the essence and beauty of the poems within the document.
- "Rumors of the dead prone, waiting cut in the miry, fetid ink dark"
- "burning lapping at the purple root from which issues our tongues"
- "The features of the removed world suddenly return to us"
- "Visited by a devastation so complete it becomes an element of the landscape"
- "The tireless recreation of remarkable prayers recorded in dead, [unknowable] languages"
- "Deaths left marks on each bed that correspond with the marks on our heart"
- "even her rudimentary understanding of spellcraft keeps her protected from the violence that characterizes American life"
- "A fire has started to burn wildly across the trunks of the evergreens"
- "My helmet relays the message: I deserve to die"
- "I wake up to flashes of the suit cooking my buddies alive"
- "I am the last soldier fighting in an unmanned war"
- "she moves killed militiamen beyond a stand of shimmering green sigils"
- "Among the munging lowborns—a cartographer, a prophet, Magic depends upon the disadvantage"
- "the capital city: Perfusion of dimness drooping figures pursuing the quiet sublimity of domestic lives"
- "Every day, we open our hatches, leave our shells with purpose, vanish into the wilderness"
- "the reconstruction of the sunken, relocated capital"
- "Sufficiently augmented, the city appears immaculate, full of movement"
- "the glitchy blind stork stumbling confused in the murk"
- "wildfire occupies the valley suspended in the half lit purple season"
- "Find me after the financial sectors lose their detail to the mechanics of meltwater"
- "I am a colorless figure emerging frozen from the languid meltwater"
- "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer." - Albert Camus
- "Do not go gentle into that good night." - Dylan Thomas
- "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference." - Robert Frost
- "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife." - Jane Austen
- "To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
- "In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer."
- "The only limit to our realization of tomorrow will be our doubts of today."
- "Not all those who wander are lost."
- "It is our choices, far more than our abilities, that show what we truly are."
- "The best way to predict the future is to create it."
Single Poem
- "the honeysuckle dissolves on the nape of a young prophet"
- "A discharge of concentrated light transforms the last squadron into steaming violet residue."
- "meaningful predilection for violet"
- "before onlookers in formalwear transfixed by concussive blasts & sudden obliteration"
- "before memories of wintertime"
- "before forgetting"
- "complaints like: whoever you did or did not invite for dinner"
- "I keep expectations for the [meal] high."
- "whatever we have will be simply lovely"
Single Poem
- "Another season retrieving wildflowers & fissile materials."
- "Not unlike the purple tongue coiled in our mouth like a cornered adder."
- "famous for the prevalence of ghosts & the widespread erosion of language:"
- "The reason I spent lifetimes rebuilding the capital after years spent establishing meager shelters."
- "obliterated by missiles describing perfect arcs approaching incremental detonation."
- "attend the revivals of traditional hymns descending light becomes brightest at the exact point of termination."
Document
1. "Pain is a signal like wildfire in the understory is a signal."
2. "I am not the bumper crops or their senseless ignition."
3. "Witness widespread obliteration of familiar forms, featureless drowned submerged beneath the rising violet currents."
4. "I am a colorless figure emerging frozen from the languid meltwater hoping that danger will pass."
5. "I am included within the lines, forming outside the impromptu temple."
6. "After a certain interval, after spectacular demonstrations of violence, combat becomes indistinguishable from peace."
7. "I watch a cow get wedged in the crotch of a southern live oak, and I watch a cow get devoured in stages by a nonnative species."
8. "In the congenial warmth of the southern district, the bits of ice melt as if in resignation."
9. "The midday consumption of diminutive figures waving on the spit by a wave as purple as the interior of the soldiers we pass piled around the barricades."
10. "Entertainment consists of watching the loyalists shell the slums blindly. Mark how precisely the production of violence reduces familiar landmarks to dust."
Document
- "In the quiet corners of the night, dreams whisper secrets untold."
- "The sun kissed the horizon, painting the sky in hues of fire and hope."
- "Amidst the chaos, a single heartbeat echoed the rhythm of resilience."
- "Beneath the weight of silence, words danced like shadows in the dark."
- "Each tear a testament, each smile a promise of tomorrow."
- "replaces the sepia, pacific, opiate placeholder of mimi & jin yong’s love"
- "the difficulty of one of six new diverse, celebrates the friendly, violent surrendor"
- "the internal combustion of dead evergreens"
- "the land that once held the capital spectacular becomes dire, imperative"
- "The hotfix resolves the misbehavior of songbirds, the glitch