Dusting Off After a Stumble

A rejection sure can take the wind out of the old sails. Puntitas was feeling very writerly and accomplished all week. She revised, pondered, experimented. She had a positive workshop with a friend, who really liked her narrative essay and gave her helpful suggestions. She had an idea for a new poem. Then she received yesterday’s rejection, which was especially disappointing because she thought it was the most likely of the journals to take her work.

Today Puntitas caught up on email, had lunch with a friend, floated around the house doing very little of consequence, spoke to two other friends on the phone, finished the fudge in the kitchen. She thought about working on the essay, thought about working on her tables of contents, thought about revising her resume for a couple of possible jobs. But she didn’t do any of those things, and she didn’t turn off her computer because the week’s activity had gotten her into the habit of writing, and not writing was making her restless.

So Puntitas decided she’d do a little writing anyway–start that poem that had been rolling around in her head, the one with the ending, but no beginning or sense of voice. She wrote a few short lines that didn’t grab her, a vague description that didn’t do much even on the literal level. She thought about them to figure out what to do next, And she realized that the items she described were nested, like Russian dolls. That was the first metaphor she came up with—Russian nesting dolls, which is physical enough and universally understood, but not really part of Puntitas’ experience, more a literary cliche. She asked herself what other mundane thing nested or stacked naturally, and she thought about the almond tree she grew up with, the nut inside a woody shell inside a suede-like hull. She added that to her draft, only she didn’t know the name of the hull, So she went to Wikipedia to read about almonds.

Wikipedia is a beautiful thing.

Puntitas learned lots of interesting things about almonds. They’re native to the Middle East and Mediterranean. The wild varieties have pink blossoms and are poisonous, even lethal in large enough amounts. the domesticated varieties have white flowers and are safe to eat. The almonds themselves are technically not nuts, but a drupe. If the shell has been removed, they’re shelled, and if the shell is present, they’re unshelled—the most amusing part of the entry hands down. They’re related to the apricot, And forty-two percent of the world’s production is cultivated in Puntitas’ home state.

She read the entire entry mostly as an avoidance mechanism, but when she returned to her draft to properly name the shell and hull, she discovered she could use these details to shape the poem, to develop the speaker and set up the conceit. She wrote two expository stanzas and thought about what images and information they would lead to. Then she stopped, with the plan that she would continue tomorrow. She doesn’t think this poem will draft itself, but she does think that it will allow her to discover its rhythm and help her write it.

Puntitas is sleepy now. It is time for bed.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. Tudge and _first Comes Love_ by M. Balogh.

Rethinking the Tables of Contents

Puntitas’ single writerly act of the day has been to move two poems in one of the books to reflect the change she made to the chapbook. As she read over one of the tables of contents to make sure it had updated properly, she realized that some sections make more sense than others, so one possible mission this evening is to rearrange the poems in the books.

She may put it off, however, because she’d like to add at least two new pages to each book. She’s got a couple of drafts, but she isn’t sure whether/where they’d really fit in, and she’s had one idea (complete with closing) that has been eager to get out on the page, but she hasn’t settled on the tone or the beginning. She also has a long poem that is more finished than not, which would really pad out the pages, but she isn’t sure that it will be ready enough by next week, which is when she wants to send manuscripts out. Whatever she does, Puntitas needs to hurry up and decide.

Oh, yes, there was one other writerly event. Puntitas noticed that one poem was one page and two lines long. She tinkered with the line spacing around the epigram, and now that poem and the book it’s in are both one page shorter, Making each collection fifty pages in length.

Puntitas reads _The Link_ by C. tudge and _What Was Lost_ by C. O’Flynn.

Puntitas Has an Interlude with the Muse

A friend and I went to hear Naomi Shihab Nye read her work tonight. She was great. Her poetry is accessible, vivid, and compelling, using ordinary things to talk about profound truths.

I came home feeling poetical and wishing I could write something as simple and meaningful as her work. Then I sat down at my computer to check my email, startled by a lovely message from a yarn craft list about knitting hexagons and all the wondrous possibilities in such a simple form. I experienced that writerly burst of energy that turns to restlessness or … crime (it’s a real possibility) … if it isn’t channeled into some aspect of a manuscript. I typed out a rough draft of a poem (my first in months) about knitting (a subject I’ve wanted to take on for the longest time). I’m so excited that I would spend the next couple of weeks revising if I didn’t have my translation due.

I’ve written as much as I can now to get the general structure of the poem down and to create toe holes for the expositional details that give the knitting meaning beyond the literal. The actual knitting part needs little revision. Most of those details are concrete and clear. But the other parts (the thing I’m comparing to knitting) need lots of work. I plan to do some knitting to refine some of the images and details that connect the knitting and nonknitting elements of the piece, but the bulk of the revision involves developing the thing for which knitting hexagons is a conceit and whithout which I’d just have a set of rambling instructions.

I really enjoy the discussion list that gave me the idea for the poem. We talk yarn and drift off into other realms. When I told them about my book rejection, one person commiserated with me by saying something like, “That’s awful. It’s like being told you have an ugly child.” that felt so exactly right that it made me laugh and went a long way toward cheering me up.

Puntitas reads _the Abduction_ by M. Gimenes.

First Acceptance in Three Years

Puntitas is a happy, happy person! She’s had an acceptance: one or two (can’t tell from the letter) poems to appear in a chapbook. It’s neither her greatest poem nor the greatest chapbook anthology ever, but both are fine and she’s damn proud. Details will be posted when the chapbook is a reality. For now, the acceptance is reason enough to bust out a few cumbia steps. Be grateful Puntitas does not own a web cam.

The email came at just the right time. Puntitas went to visit her accountant today. Yes, she has one. Originally, he was a low-key verging-on-sixty tax savant, the kind who is so low-key as to be mistaken for unpromising. Then he sold his business to work for the private sector. His replacement is earnest enough, but less wily about what the self-employed can deduct, and Puntitas has not been reassured by his having to interrupt to take a call from the IRS regarding another client’s audit.

Bravely, Puntitas persevered with her interview. Today’s foray into Puntitas’ financial affairs led to a discussion of her delusion that she is a writer. She has claimed to be one for two years now, and because she has made no money at it, he suggests that this claim be downgraded to a hobby. Few things are as shriveling to the ego as the juxtaposition of one’s degree, aspirations, and oeuvre with the government’s thoughts on hobbies and failing businesses. Puntitas supposes that she and the IRS are more likely to reach a happy medium if she were to sell the chapbook in which her poem(s) appears to a recycler for a profit.

In other news, Puntitas is a third of the way through her big, ugly translation. Reading in Spanish, even on something unrelated, while translating such a long document into that language has really been helpful. Puntitas has noticed many improvements in her style, and she has been much more successful at researching terms. She hasn’t been posting here or sending manuscripts out because she’s been so absorbed with that project, but she’ll need to take a day off to do some more mailing.

Puntitas reads _La reina del sur_ by A. Perez Reverte and _Say Goodbye_ by L. Gardner.

Respite

No other rejections have come in this week though the mail has continued to arrive early. It’s a different letter carrier, so Lestat may be in rehab.

I’m not expecting anything from the recent batch of submissions. Except for Zyzzyva, they all have at least a three-month turnaround time. But I am starting to wonder about two journals I submitted to in late November or early December. Responses should arrive in the next few weeks. In one case, I think my odds of an acceptance are slim. In the other, it’s a coin toss.

I’ve been doing some cleanup. It started with a drawer. I had to find something, and in the process, I pulled out several empty medicine bottles, found a few lost items, and lost track of the various spare tooth brushes and floss containers from dental checkups near and far. In the middle of something else at the time, I only threw out the few things that were obvious garbage because doing so felt better than returning the pile to the drawer. Then I came to my computer, deleting eleven thousand old email files (a process which involved some sorting), removing files and folders from the My Documents directory, taking a few rarely used programs off my system, and running disk maintenance. I’ll go into my bookshelves next, probably not sorting the books (I need to properly label them first), but taking nonbooks out so that more can be transferred to them from random places.

Though the work has been slow and often sad, it’s felt good to free myself from clutter and to engage in activities that help me make the psychological break from both my teaching and my interpreting jobs. I did keep a few things, a couple of unfinished poems and the responses to my program exit exam, the latter being surprising for their sincerity. I wonder what I’ll think of this blog five or ten years down the line.

Puntitas reads _Ensayo sobre la ceguera_ by J. Saramago because she decided that _La sombra del templario_ has more characters than her current frame of mind wants to keep track of.

The Muse Is a Flirt

Puntitas has been visited by the muse twice this week. The first time was when she read someone else’s blog. The post begged to be recast into a poem, so Puntitas requested permission from the blogger, and having gotten it, has been Googling her stubby little fingers to the bone to learn more about a couple of the concepts. She is pondering the possibility of other types of research because she thinks the poem would benefit from it, but thus far, she has limited her creative efforts to copying the triggering post, trimming most of the prose elements, asking the blogger about an important detail, and identifying the kind of information she wants to know more about. She had considered one direction for the poem, the same point and direction taken by the blogger, but as she has been reading, she feels her mind moving somewhere else, though she will need time to figure out where that is.

The second visitation came last night. Puntitas was editing a very short text for a friend, when she had one of those mental hiccups that leads to confusion about uncomplicated things, like which preposition to use after the word connect. Puntitas’ own spasm concerned which Spanish verb to associate with the making of compost, so she Googled around for blogs and videos that might help.

Puntitas learned lots of fascinating things about gardening, so many and so fascinating that she didn’t get back to the blurb for at least an hour. The thing that stayed with her most was this:

People spend lots of money on expensive activating agents to make their compost piles start composting, but there is no need as human urine is an effective activator.

This is a quote, and the woman who imparted it was muy de la high, pausing ever so slightly before and after “human urine,” as one would expect from a lady who knows herself to possess the highest sensibilities but knows, nonetheless, when she must needs take her skillet by the handle.

Well, need I say it?

Puntitas had a sudden and nearly uncontrollable urge to find a compost pile and … well … activate it. The thought of gathering the leaves and paper into a heap or barrel, squatting over it, urinating into it, and revisiting the garden over the days and months to spread the compost and eventually to eat the produce it fed had Puntitas-poem written all over it. Puntitas got as far as going through her list of friends and accomplices to identify one or two she be willing to piss on a pile with, but she couldn’t actually name one she could really squat with. Plus she started thinking about the mechanics of keeping her jeans dry while crouching, which led to a review of all Puntitas’ skirts and other minutiae.

Of course, Puntitas will not start this poem or continue to work on the other any time soon since she is certain that all this poetic activity (or activation) has been prompted by her realization that the big translation she is also working on has progressed slowly this week, so Puntitas will probably not post much over the next two weeks, by which time the muse will have chosen to visit someone else.

Puntitas reads _La sombra del templario_ by N. Masot.

Perspective

I’ve been less diligent about keeping my blog lately because I’ve been behind on other things. My thinking has been, “Once I get X done, I’ll blog,” as a reward. That line of thought led to my not reading, except what was required for a class, for over ten years. I would say to myself, “As soon as I write this paper, I can read a novel,” or “When I study for this test, I can get back to reading the poems.” I rarely wrote the essays or studied for the exams, so I read nothing, and I felt interest in very little.

Last week, I picked up my largest translation project to date. It really isn’t much larger than the previous record holder, which was one of my early assignments, but I’m feeling intimidated. I haven’t found very many equivalents for much of the terminology, and I’m starting to think I may have to do more improvising than I had expected. To add to the stress, I’m working on a short timeline, and I’m still finishing up an interpreting assignment that keeps me pretty busy.

But I haven’t stopped thinking about the writing. In fact, I almost put everything else on hold to do some last week. The piece was the extraterrestrial story. One of my aunts lives in a city which is alleged by its residents to have a Martian base either under the pier or in the hospital basement. As I’ve probably said here before, the story is set in that city around someone who has grown up with that lore. Because the plot and conflict were prompted by something my cousin said, as reported by my mother, the characters were originally loosely—very loosely—based on my mother’s sister and her two daughters, the protagonist resembling my oldest cousin.

I’ll interrupt myself at this point to say I’ve had very little contact with my relatives. I grew up far away from them, and when we did visit, their approach to me, though courteous, was more remote and less friendly than their attitude to my siblings. This particular set of cousins also lived far from the locus familiae, so my contact with them was rarer still. The last time I was in the same room with either of them, we were in preschool. Not surprisingly then, I got only vague scraps of information about them until three or four years ago, when my mother suddenly developed an interest in and a cell phone plan that allowed for calling them regularly.

I’m saying all of this because I know my cousins mostly the way I know characters in books: through hearsay and the imagination I use to fill in the gaps. Lately, their lives have become eventful (the older one has developed a malignant and apparently aggressive cancer), so the hearsay is coming, not just from her mother and sister, but also from other aunts, cousins, and uncles, who are making the trip out to pay helpful visits. Suddenly, what I know about her, my conception of her, has changed dramatically, and details from previous reports are taking on new meaning. This is an unsettling feeling to have about a real person with whom I have a blood tie.

About the story, my conception of it has changed as well. The protagonist is now modeled after my younger cousin, a character I’d initially thought boring, and less of the plot line comes from my head. More accurately put, less of the plot comes from my imagined experience, and more of it is based on what I imagine their experience to be. It’s still by no means a faithful rendering of events, but it is a story about something that can happen to my cousin or someone like her, a story she’s more or less told my mom over the course of the last few months. I feel better about what that story is supposed to do.

Puntitas reads _Three Bags Full_ by L. Swann and _The Barred Window_ by A. Taylor.

Sending Out Is Hard to Do

Puntitas is having a very cranky moment. She

 renewed her ATA membership (money she should have wiped her ass with for all the usefulness that brings),
 joined the MLA (ditto—well, there’s at least the possibility of having a job interview a couple of years down the line with that),
 finished writing book proposal letters for literary presses (exercises in depression, bullshit, and suicide prevention—just barely), and
 failed to pay for an online contest submission (which she can not do because she opened a Pay Pal account in some diluted moment and must perforce use said account, which she has never used because she doesn’t know her own password).

The saddest part of this whole tragicomedy is that no manuscript left the house. I had a whole free day (my only job being an evening appointment that went on for an hour and a half) to send out three manuscripts with letters/fees. Instead,

– I second guessed the proposal letters I spent the whole weekend writing.
– I contacted the contest editor about the press’ electronic submissions policy.
– I made up a list of publishers and contests I planned to submit to.
– I calculated how much money that would cost, given my impending dental issues, lack of medical insurance, useless boss who processes payment only after emptying out his testicles, and project to buy a new washer, freezer, non-analog TV, mp3 player, and portable reader/scanner.
– I had my nails done, filled a prescription for acne killing tetracicline (yes, at forty-plus, zitts are still a reality for some people), bought colone for a friend from a saleswoman who clearly hated her job and disliked men in general.
– I wrestled with Pay Pal.
– I went to work to hear about the misery to which we subject ourselves and others.
– I came home, tried to figure out Pay Pal, and decided I could just send the manuscript and reading fee in the old fashion way.

Yes, I’m feeling scared and insecure, and yes, I’m getting weird about the strangeness of what I’m trying to do. One of the publishers asks that writers list experts who may review the manuscript. The only experts I know are the people who work at my alma mater (incidentally, they can not be listed), and the experts I don’t know, people like Yusef Komunyaaka, would hardly be interested in reading a nobody’s work. Another one of the requirements of that press is a list of other books like it. After much stewing, I interpreted that to mean that I needed to pigeonhole the poems into a known subclass. That made me uncomfortable, but after much aprehension and self-doubt, I came up with something. Replaying the material I dealt with at work, however, my petty dramatic tempests all seem pretty pointless.

Puntitas reads _Virgins of Paradise_ by B. Wood and _A Sense of the World_ by J. Roberts.

Art as a Psychopathology

The life of an artist is much maligned. Despite my dreams of becoming a rich and famous writer with a tenured position at a modest university, I pay the bills by working as a community interpreter, dealing primarily with medical and social service encounters. (Thanks to the current Republican regime, part-time teaching jobs are scarce, which works out since student fees are high and enrolment is low—no connections to be made, of course.)

Anyway, last week, I was interpreting for a parent. The assignment was a monthly follow-up with a child psychiatrist treating a sixteen-year-old male who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder. I’ve worked with the family off and on for about a year and have observed that the young man seems to be doing very well on his current medication regimen, responding intelligently and sensibly to the doctor’s questions.

At the latest appointment, the psychiatrist asked the young man what he wanted to do when he finished high school. The youth said he wanted to go to college to become a photojournalist.

The doctor put on his thoughtful face and asked the young man how he would “pay the bills.” The young man shrugged, so the doctor went on to explain to him that this sort of irrational thinking was exactly what characterized the manic depression.

I kept my mouth shut because interpreters aren’t paid to think, remember, or have opinions, but it was incredibly difficult for me not to point out that the mass communications department at the local university is full of aspiring photojournalists and that many of them, especially at the beginning of their careers, pay their bills by working for police departments, local advertisers, and photo studios or by providing other services to people who are not at all interested in their photographic genius.

While my general mental health is something I choose not to dwell on very often, preferring to focus on others who have little in common with myself, I’m pretty sure that my writer and artist friends are not manic depressives (well, not most of them) or even particularly irrational (well, not most of the time), and I’m bothered by the fact that careers in the arts are considered so far outside the norm that they can be symptoms of mental health pathologies.

Dovetailing with that, a few days after the encounter, I read an article about the need for a sense of tradition among contemporary African-American writers. The piece pointed out that, while there is a body of African-American literature, the current generation of writers doesn’t really come from families that value writing or the arts as a career.

My own feeling is that the lack of a tradition has more to do with socioeconomic factors than cultural ones. Writers who come from a tradition of writing also come from environments where job security, money, and time are in abundance. For The vast majority of people who have to worry about the roof, the cupboard, and the closet, art is done in small ways, a good joke or a fine piece of mending or repair. In my own case, I’ve been willing to hang on to a job I’m dissatisfied with because it gives me both enough money to pay the bills (though that amount is shrinking) and enough time to read and write.

That the arts rarely provide financial stability (except in indirect ways, like the tenure that results from publication) is not to be argued, and that parents and other more sensible people would want to steer their charges toward safer careers is understandable, but symptomatic of irrational thinking …, really?

As an aside, the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, which is used to identify personality structure and psychopathology, asks individuals to assign a number to a series of statements in order to indicate how well those statements describe them. One of the statements is “I want to be a poet”—no doubt indicative of some dreamy, irresponsible tendency. The statements before and after it are something like, “Sometimes I torture pets” and “Rules only get in the way.”

Puntitas reads _Ice Blue_ by A. Stuart and _The Late Roman Empire_ by G. Downey. She has decided not to read Harlequin romances for a while since this last was annoying in lots and lots of ways.

Counting Down

After much wasteful procrastination, Puntitas has had a productive weekend. She wrote a new poem last night, one of those poems that come of themselves with a little prodding, the kind that can stand and walk and speak in telegraphic sentences when they’re born so they can go into the mail with minimal nurturing at home, and today she has gotten over the last of the hideous hurdles in the damn poem she’s been working on forever—well, off and on since Easter more or less.

Both poems have been interesting experiences. The one I wrote last night was inspired by the Independence Day celebration, which has always struck me as far more Dionysian in nature than Halloween or even Carnival. I’ve never quite been able to explain why that is, but eight years ago, when the good home schooling Mennonite neighbors argued over whether to let their screaming five-year-old go ahead and light a Fountain (Mom was for allowing her in order to teach a lesson about obedience and parental judgment while Dad objected on the grounds that the resulting emergency room trip would ruin the party and spoil all the food), I came close to putting it into words. This year, with all the forest fires and talk of global warming, I found the perfect context. I didn’t write it out there and then because my mother and I were having such a nice time laughing at the neighbor’s silliness and munching on big pieces of fresh fruit, that getting up for the note taker only to tune her out seemed crass. Later, of course, the moment was gone, and I didn’t know if I could recreate the piece.

Sunday night, when I did write it out, the poem was different from what I had imagined. While I remembered the general movement of the piece, I didn’t remember all of the elements that got me from the opening image to the climactic ending. I also didn’t know how to prepare for the final image and overall conceit without giving it away or making the poem feel like a riddle. What I did instead was to suggest the conceit in two places and organize the details to do the rest of the work. I won’t know whether I pulled it off until I read the thing relatively fresh.

One pleasant surprise was the closing image. I couldn’t use the one I had planned and was floundering around for a direction to take the poem when I read what I had and realized it was already somewhere. I did a little tweaking to make the ending less abrupt and went back to work on making the conceit stand out enough. Then I was done.

I hope it’s as complete as I think it is the next time I work on it. There is one image I really like, but I’m nervous about it not quite blending in with the rest of the poem. I can tie it into the general conceit, but that may be more trouble than it’s worth. I’ll just have to wait to decide.

The other poem has been a struggle. I’ve stuck with it because I really like its potential. I like the idea, the images, and the general narrative arc. Done right, it can turn out to be an excellent piece, but maintaining a balance between exposition and metaphor, resisting bathos, keeping two ideas separate while using one as a conceit for the other—all have been extremely difficult for me. On top of all of that, I’m not sure that I have the right life experience to write it. It’s about marriage, and I’ve based it on conversations with and observations of some of my married friends, but having never been married or involved with anyone for a long period of time, I’m nervous that I may not be true to the speaker’s feelings.

During our last tussle, I did some rearranging. That made for a stronger draft, but it also created a massive gap that called for the speaker’s history and a link to both the present situation and the metaphor for her marriage. Since then, I’ve been researching the linking details and thinking about how to integrate them into the details of her history.

Today’s mission was to fill in that gap even if the work was far from polished. The gap has definitely been filled. Again, it’s a matter of waiting a few days to read the poem fresh and have a more objective sense of how to direct my revisions. At this point, I’m thinking it would be helpful to have someone read and comment on it. I’ve got one or possibly two people in mind, and depending on the next round of revision, I may ask them.

I think the next time I work on my book, I want to read the really long poem. The last time I read it, I thought it was just about done. The changes I made involved cutting out excess in the final section. I was only concerned about an important transitional point, where too much snipping could affect pacing.

Puntitas reads _Quiller Salamander_ by A. Hall and _The Zookeeper’s Wife_ by D. Ackerman.