Because I cannot help myself, I write a "General Prologue" for each
Two Page Tuesday. I’d be lying if it were not in
part a way for myself to read also, since I’m not going to do a two-page reading
(I’m the organizer: I want to hear other people read), but I conceived of it
mainly as a scene-setting device, as a way to establish a tone and a mood and a
clean way to transition from the bullshitting into the reading (before we, of
course, go back to the bullshitting). There have been three readings so far and
therefore there have been three "prologues," and in this last I began by talking
about how on
this podcast
the hosts were discussing where it’s best to get poems and stories and things
published, if and how that should be a goal. For the purposes of the "prologue"
I then took it over to communities and in-person things and why the reading was
so great, etc., etc., but I’ve been thinking about it mostly in other ways, at
least as far as myself is concerned.
I tend to dislike sending stories out. In fact, I really haven’t done very much
of that at all since grad school. Partly it was the pandemic, partly it was
working on a novel, but largely it was because I just don’t like the waiting.
I’ve worked for/on enough journals to know that it’s a deeply weird and
haphazard thing. Yes, good work does rise to the top eventually. But also a lot
of stories get passed on because the reader, often a grad student, is hungover
and needs a snack and has to power through 200 submissions by the end of the day
and thinks that what they’re working on right now is better than anything they
could possible read here, so why send anything along through?
(Am I bitter? Maybe. But also this is not an inaccurate picture. I have been
this grad student. This is also part of the reason I no longer work on literary
journals.)
There was a period at the beginning of this calendar year when I was sending
stories lots of places. These were "short shorts," around or under 1,000 words.
They’re kind of too long for the "flash fiction" people, and a little too short
for the "fiction" people (and so I tell myself that that’s part of why it’s so
hard for me to get them published). But I was sending them. I’d finished a good
draft of a novel and needed something different to do. Eight months later I’ve
collected a good number of form rejections, a couple personalized rejections,
and six or seven still outstanding. I’m debating sending out again, but we’ll
just have to see: I’m also querying agents about the novel, and I don’t know how
much further waiting and rejection I want to carry. (I’ll probably send, maybe
after looking over the stories again; I’m OK at compartmentalizing the waiting.)
But what I’ve been thinking about, mostly, is time. How long it takes to hear
back, and how long it takes to get the thing published, and then how long it
takes for the next one. I’ve had new friends ask to see work, or if I would mind
if they went and read some of the published stories, but I always say that
they’re so old, they’re not really representative, but then, even if I were to
get one of the stories I’d sent earlier this year published, those would not be
representative now, either.
This is partly because I’m still not really "settled," I guess, artistically.
But also I don’t think anyone ever really is, and also I suppose I’m more
settled now than I have ever been. Still.
I met a guy at a wedding who’s also a writer and with whom I was commiserating
about how hard it is to get a novel published. He’s got an agent, but is in the
no-man’s land that is what’s called being "on submission." It was good to talk
to someone about it. But he later sent me a link to a recently published story,
and again the caveat was something to the effect of it not really being
"current." The journal in question had a little drama and he’d sent it in before
any of the drama even began, how long ago. It’s all a lot of weird delay.
Of course, I completely understand why things are the way they are. There are
too many fucking writers. Too many fucking submissions, too many fucking micro
online "magazines" that nobody reads, too few fucking dollars to support any of
this. I think the only people making money on literary concerns are the people
who own Submittable. And there has
never been money in literary journals. That’s not the point. But they also
used to be run by the generationally-wealthy. The circles were smaller. This
wasn’t necessarily a good thing. But it was different.
That’s largely the reason why, when I was running
Response, the model was one
of solicitation vs submission — I had (and still have) absolutely no interest
in reading through a slush pile. It’s almost inhumane, the waiting. And journals
are even now catching up to the literary agents in terms of there now being a
"Closed No Response" option: "Unfortunately, due to the volume of materials we
receive, we may not be able to respond to every submission or query." I mean:
rude.
All of which is to say that I feel good about running a reading series instead
of a literary journal (even though I genuinely love producing literary
journals), and I feel bad about the state of literary publishing. This is not,
of course, a new or particularly unique take. But a long time ago, the writer
who was then serving as the department head of my MFA program railed during
workshop one day about how young writers — fiction writers especially — try to
publish too soon (never mind that many of us were in or approaching our thirties
or were even older than that). As with many of the things this writer said that
infuriated me back then, I’m a little less enraged now. I can almost see his
point. I mean, I still disagree. But this is a world in which you might get
something published a year, two, three years after you finished your edits and
rewrites and revisions and proofreads, and will it then still be something
you’re proud of? Maybe, maybe not.
But also I guess you’ve still go to fucking try, don’t you? If you want to do
the "writer" thing, I think, you really do.
It was last night, it was a success.
I didn’t do a final count but I know for a fact it was the largest crowd at a
Two Page Tuesday we’ve had so far. We accidentally
had a whole eight readers because I lost count of how many people I invited.
This was actually really fine, and really, really good. The readings were
lovely. There was plenty of bullshitting and fun and revelry before and after.
Many French fries were consumed. Folks talked about writing and books and not
books. There were new faces, and I got some new emails for the email list. I
asked folks to take photos and send them to me and they did, so I have some
photos to play with for future things as well.
A part of me is tempted to try and get one going in Cambridge (or anyway
somewhere north of the river) in November. But we’ll see. The Banshee was happy
to have us, seemed like.
I’ll get some work going on organizing the next one(s) tomorrow.
For today I’m content to bask in the glow of a very good time, and enjoy the
lazy, somewhat absent-minded feeling that comes after a very good night out.
I’ve been thinking about being on the internet and not on the internet lately.
I have been spending a lot of time on my computer working up a
number of
different
computer projects, but also I think I’ve
more or less given up on Bluesky as a place I’m really interested in (it’s not
as varied as Twitter was, or at least: I haven’t put in the work to make the
feed interesting), and I finally killed my Twitter (I refuse the new name)
account because… well, probably I should have parked on the username, but I also
just hate that there was an account there.
I’ve also been spending a lot of time not on the computer, in fact, out in the
world. I’m making progress on becoming best friends with the new owners of a
local bar I like a lot (see me at karaoke inconsistently on Tuesdays). I went to
a mother fucking backyard poetry reading for the first time in years, and it
was so, so, so goddamn good, the reading, and also nourishing, the event.
There have been bar nights and I’m pretty pleased with how
Two Page Tuesday is going.
I wish I could remember what I was reading specifically — although the phrase
is everywhere — but I came across (again, for the nth time) the phrase "a
certain kind of very online person", and I wondered about this. I often wonder
about this, this online-ness. I think I’m so interested in it because a lot of
the kids I thought "very cool" in high school — with whom I was friends, but in
a kind of distant way — were proto-very-online, by which I mean, they were kind
of in the shit before the shit was shit, you know? Proper fucking hipsters,
riding the beginning of the wave. I’m not saying that they were happier or in
fact cooler for it — a few of them did go on to do kind of cool shit — but I
admired it, or at least was interested in it.
(As an aside: it’s funny how these things tend to linger.)
And so I’m here sitting in a WeWork for the free WiFi and coffee (I am off work
today) looking at the website of the poet I saw headlining the backyard reading,
and at some poets around him, following links, and I’m thinking this guy might
be pretty good at being online. And not in a always on social media or anything
way, but in a "good at presenting the interesting things they’re doing on the
internet" kind of way. And so we have a distinction, or at least maybe the
beginnings of one: online in a way that online is a tool to do and talk about
art, not online as a means of… I don’t know. I want to say something snarky
about vanity or selling our eyeballs to advertisers, but that’s not quite right.
But there seems to be a certain species of "online" that I don’t mind — more a
Web 1.0 type cornering where you go to a place to find a thing and maybe you go
back and check that thing later, or — here, go read this article about
"The
Revenge of the Homepage".
I have, at times, aspired to be "hip." Have a fun, interesting online presence
or whatever. I’ve done the Instagram thing — I did pretty well when I was on my
pretending-it’s-not-a-finding-myself-trip — and I enjoyed Twitter when it was.
I’ve had more and less good websites. But now?
I’m not really trying to find a job. I have more or less given up trying to
publish short stories (maybe I just suck at them: this might be true and is
fine) and so don’t really need to have a site dedicated to shouting when they
get published. I’m trying to publish a novel but if that happens I’ll have
plenty of time to do whatever needs to be done for that after the things are
signed. So we just have this here blog that I infrequently write on. It doesn’t
really have a purpose right now. This is OK. I like having something on the
Internet, some kind of "online" for when I want to play on it. It is, even if
I’m not really in a publishing phase or a job-hunting phase, good to have a
result I control when someone googles my name. But still: it’s all just
bullshit, anyway.
I wish I had come to more of a point, but — :shrug: I always start these
thinking I’ll come to a point but I do not, but that’s why I write things for
here and not a magazine or something. I mean, I can do that kind of writing.
And I have — and have plans to again — written things for here that are more
essay-like and coherent. But this isn’t that. And that’s just fine.
What is now a long time ago I went to England and northern France on a high
school AP European History trip in my senior year. I was still newly eighteen
and mildly obsessed with blank-verse poetry. By which I mean I was writing a lot
of it (badly), and was attempting (in vain) to corral what other members of our
out-of-school book club that were on
the trip to write stories that we could tell each other on the long drive down
to Canterbury. Suffice to say I was the only one
who finished the assignment, having hand written pages and pages of
semi-sensible blank verse (or was I trying heroic couplets? I have no idea.) in
a spiral-bound notebook I wish I still had.
It was, as all high school trips are, an odd collection of people. I had two or
three very good friends on the trip, one or two folks I was friendly with from
choir, a few kids in other grades with whom I was acquainted, and then a bunch
of people I either knew by sight or was simply in class with. I was more or less
(I hope) friendly with everyone and — being somewhat extroverted — became
closer a few of the folks that were on the trip. One of these was a guy I’d been
in classes with for a long time, with whom I was friendly, but not someone I’d
ever spent much time with. His name was Steve.
Steve was smart, and good at the kind of thinking and calculation and science
that I was pretty shit at. But we both liked history and sort of arcane things
and we had a grand old time at the British Museum. I don’t really remember
anymore what we had talked about going there and back and whatever else, but I
remember a strong fondness for him; we didn’t really keep in any touch after we
went off to college, save maybe running into each other at some party or other a
few years after graduation, but at the end of the trip, waiting in one of the
airports on the way back, he pulled a Rosetta Stone mousepad out of his backpack
and gave it to me. Whether this was in pure friendship or as thanks for letting
him use my cell phone to call his family a couple of times over the course of
the trip, I’m not sure, but it caught me off guard (as someone who
is not really a gift-giver himself, nor a particularly comfortable
gift-receiver), and was super nice, and anyway that mousepad has been on nearly
every iteration of "my desk" since, through college, back home, and how-many
apartments.
Unfortunately my brother sent me a very nice, fancy,
has-a-lot-of-buttons-I-don’t-know-what-to-do-with mouse so I could try a little
better to keep up when we play video games, and it doesn’t work
with the mousepad, or at least not well. Long gone are the days of the
rolling-ball mice and maybe the laser gets confused on the semi-reflective
surface of the pad. And it’s intermittent that it doesn’t work so well — sometimes, I think, it’s the batteries, but then I "turn it off and on again"
and it works, but in general when I remove the pad it works best. And so it
might be time to put the pad into the "technology box" in the closet for another
day.
And I’m a little sad about this.
Not, of course, in a sad-sad way, but I’m inclined toward nostalgia,
particularly about tools I’ve spent a lot of time using, and I’ll be a little
sad not to occasionally notice the mousepad as such and remember Steve, take a
minute to wonder where and how the hell he’s doing, but then, perhaps the absence of the mousepad will remind me of him
and that trip anyway.
If I were smarter or if I didn’t have to go do my day job I might come up with
some grand metaphor about how the Rosetta stone serves as a translation layer
between my past and present, while keeping in mind the intermediary steps along
the way, mapping one mode and cycle of life to another, but —
Mostly it’s just a real fucking cool mousepad, and maybe one of the best
unexpected gifts I’ve ever gotten.