Please Don't Block Your Channel!
Spring Workshops, Morning Seeding & Tending, Lots of Recommendations, Our Writers in the World
“It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. ... No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others. ― Martha Graham
Dearest Writers,
I had a mini-breakdown a few weeks ago which I can’t fully tell you about for reasons I’ll disclose in a second, but suffice it to say I had come to a proverbial fork in the road and had to pause. I was living so deeply within the world of my novel Pimmit Run (a coming-of-age story of a trio of musician siblings surnamed Becket) that I felt almost disoriented whenever I emerged into the real world.
Add to that a deadline: I was about to send the book to an editor, my baby going to sleep away camp for three weeks. Out of that muddle, I wrote what was supposed to be a newsletter to you, all about the dark place I was in––essentially saying I had so lost confidence in my own writing that I was on the verge of giving it up, until I had the breakthrough that always comes from mudwrestling with my ego.
I read a draft of this essay to some of you in our groups, and a couple of you suggested I submit it right away to Brevity Magazine. I was flattered, but that really hadn’t been the intention of the piece. Still, taking my own advice to be courageous and trust my own authority, I edited it down to a more appropriate word count, then almost balked again, but forged ahead.
Five days later, the piece was accepted.
Which is why I can’t send you the essay in a newsletter and had to write something else.
To say I was delighted was an understatement. My spirit soared! I shrieked, “This is a career-changer! All my problems are solved!” For twenty-four hours, I basked as I drove with my family down the New Jersey Turnpike, as I visited colleges with my 16 -year-old, as I walked with my sister Abigail in Wayne, as I watched Fleishman is in Trouble with my dear spouse at our Airbnb in downtown Philly, as I Wordle-raced my kids, I was happy, the good news a small soft treasure I could hold to my chest, like the brand new stuffed animal I’d intensely desired and finally won.
And then, to paraphrase what we rock musicians are always supposedly saying to our managers, I asked the Universe, “What have you done for me lately?” Then I began to doubt that this acceptance really happened. Maybe I dreamed it. Maybe the Brevity editors changed their mind. Maybe they discovered me for the fraud I am.
In this great article “A Writer’s Lament: The Better You Are the More You Will Fail,” when Philip Roth is asked if insecurity around one’s literary merits due to the inevitable rejections ever goes away, if one ever grows a thicker skin, he purportedly said, “It’ll get thinner and thinner until they can hold you up to the light and see through.”
I’ve known this of course. For my whole entire professional life. My own antidote/protocol has always been:
1. Recover you own unique voice.
2. Write in that voice, uncensored.
3. Have fun letting the world know about your work.
4. Connect with your true audience (as opposed to the audience you THINK you should have).
5. Don’t bother reading your bad press. Or your good press. Just keep on making your art.
Lately, I’ve been reading everything I can get by hands on by the author Brian Doyle . I read his novel Mink River, and while I could see all kinds of reasons why that book would never get picked up by an agent or Big 5 publisher, it was so fully infused with Brian’s voice it seemed to contain a life within the pages. I mean, something in that book is alive. So much so, that when I finished reading that novel, I wept and kissed the book. Famously, Brian wrote long run-on sentences, many colloquialisms, threw together genres that usually don’t usually marry, and generally just had fun with his writing. Something about reading him has liberated me to relax about the perfection of my sentences and instead focus on just allowing myself to tell the truth on the page.
While I’m waiting to get my manuscript back from my editor, I’m looking over my smaller, non-fiction pieces and the many many poems I’ve written and shoved into a drawer. Are they coming from my authentic voice? Or am I trying to be someone else, someone smarter than I am, someone harder than I am? If the piece doesn’t feel authentic, I revise it. I don’t know what the editor will say when she returns my pages to me, but I am ready to get back into the novel with a new eye.
Meanwhile, I’m headed to Seattle for AWP (which stands for Association of Writers and Writing Programs, so it really should be AWWP, but maybe that was just a few too many double-Vs.) I look forward to spreading the word about Writing It Up in the Garden, learning a whole lot about the literary world, and bringing it all back to you.
See below for lots of good reading and writing suggestions, our own Writing It Up in the Garden writers’ new work out there, spots in our Spring classes, and more.
Love, Nerissa
Spring Groups are FULL but stay tuned to learn about Summer Retreats––weekday, weekend, and maybe even an ADK retreat. Write me to be added to the waitlists.
Morning Seeding & Tending
My daily Morning Seeding & Tending group is going strong! Every weekday at 10am sharp, a group of us gather to write for an hour on Zoom. Some days it’s me and one other brave soul. More often, there are four or more of us. We blink at each other, mutter some greetings, sometimes, and then I read a prompt—a secular prayer, usually (AKA a poem) and then I send it to the group via email and we set our intentions for the day in the chat. What do we write? Whatever we like! Some days I work on a novel, attempt to get my “first draft” quotient in for the day of 1000 words. Some days I edit, some days I submit to literary journals or work on a query letter, some days I write something to you. I always know I have an hour in the morning to get SOME writing done.
Some folks come almost every day. Some just once a week. The low cost of the group ($20 month via Ko-fi subscription) means that no one feels like they’re not getting their money’s worth. Writing with a group of others is powerful, just like meditating in a group always felt more bolstering to me than meditating on my own. I know there are others out there aligning themselves in the same way I am.
You can sign up here to join the group. Every month, you’ll be charge that $20 fee. When does the month start? Whenever you want it to! How about now? What will you do with your hour a day?
For this month: try it to see if you like it! Come for free the last week in March (March 27-31). To receive the Zoom address, write me at Nerissand@gmail.com with “Try MS&T” in the header.
Great Stuff I Recommend Reading:
More about Brian Doyle:
Although I should have known about Brian Doyle before now, I did not. Or rather, I did not heed the many friends who recommended him to me over the years. At Vermont College of Fine Arts, Brian and his beautiful work was spoken about often. Though I hadn’t remembered this, my father talked to me all about the first essay in the One Long River of Song, "Joyas Voladoras" all the way down Indian Head Mountain in 2019. Still I did not heed! Then my father sent a copy of that collection to my aunt Jenifer and uncle Brian, and in turn, finally, this past Christmas, Jenifer and Brian gave me one of his books. I still might not have heeded, but they insisted on reading one of his essays aloud to me--something from The Thorny Grace of It. I laughed out loud. I heeded. I read. I read that, and then I proceeded to comb through his many books and online pieces. Here’s a brief excerpt.
“So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.”
― Brian Doyle, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder for the Spiritual and Nonspiritual Alike
Our Very Own Writers Published!
Congratulations to our very own Emily Fine! Read her story in CommuterLit.
Tzivia Glover’s new book Dreaming on the Page is available everywhere, including Broadside in Northampton where I recently saw her book in the window!
Our own Karen Lerner has a YouTube show called Short Stories for the People. Last week, she read my story “Blueprint.” She’s a great reader!