Since I stopped seeing girls as “soft boys who smelled nice,” (in quotations because I read that somewhere many years ago and it neatly sums up gender relations from the POV of a elementary school boy), until early adulthood, I nursed two fantasies about where I would meet my soul-mate.  The first involved wandering the aisles of a used book store (okay, Barnes and Noble).  The second was serendipitous seating on an airplane.  I never really outgrew this phase, and while working for Willow Springs I added a third category: the slush pile.  You might logically ask, how is that even possible?

In my head, I would find a great story by a fellow aspiring writer, and while the story wouldn’t be accepted for publication, I’d be tasked with sending her a personal rejection from my email account asking her to submit stories directly to me in addition to the online submission manager.  She would, and perhaps she would ask to see some of my stories, and then the timeline of this fantasy gets a little murky.  I suppose we’d somehow eventually meet up and live happily ever after.

I never pursued anything like that because, unlike the bookstore or airplane, it would have been super creepy.

It’s been many months since I’ve read Willow Springs slush, so I relegated this bizarre fantasy to the nether regions of the brain.  Then, a few months ago, I really hit it off with a woman on a date.  Like me, she had recently finished an MFA and was struggling to make it as a writer.  The date went so well that we started emailing and g-chatting later that night and I learned her full name.  And it was really familiar.  Tip of the tongue familiar.  But I couldn’t place it. I wondered and wondered, but the only possibility, longshot and all, was, you guessed it, “Willow Springs slush pile.”  Memory is not exactly my strong suit.  But when I asked, she went and checked her submission records, and sure enough, she had submitted to Willow Springs a couple years ago when I worked there.  The short synopsis of her story struck me as very familiar, and when she sent me the manuscript, my suspicions were confirmed.

I don’t like to brag, but this was pretty amazing.  Out of at least hundreds, if not thousands of manuscripts, her name had lingered.  To be fair, her story had been discussed at a meeting, so I’d read the piece at least twice, but still, this seemed like a sign.  Was it meant to be?

Unlikely.  As she flaked out on our next date, and flaked on our rain-date (get it?) and then didn’t respond to a third date request.  Such is life.  Time to buy some new books or do a little more traveling.

A tea towel, embroidered by my husband's grandmother + a cookbook I found at the farmer's market = a story waiting to be written

It’s that time of year when the world thinks of things, of gifts gifts gifts gifts, the over-commercialization of Christmas, bells that jingle and fully-decked halls. Physical items start to seem more important than they do the rest of the year: the bike you wrote to Santa for, the ornament your daughter made in second grade, the divinity candy you have to make though only you and your dad really like it because Grandma used to make it every year. Every string of lights or holiday platter bears memories, or the promise of memories yet to come. These things are artifacts of Christmases past, endowed with meaning that accumulates like dust as the boxes sit in the garage, far enough out of sight and mind to make them seem that much more important come December.

It seems the longer we leave an item alone, the greater the emotion it carries. This can make for some pretty interesting stories (if you’ve written one, Hayden’s Ferry Review is accepting submissions for their “artifact” issue right now). Dawn Raffel explores her relationship to items from her past in a series of short essays, quite a few of which appeared in Willow Springs 67. Each essay is titled for an item that carries a story–”The Prayer Book,” “The Bride’s Bible,” “Garnet Earrings”–and uses these objects as windows into Raffel’s past. Read more »

My hands are tied

I was a little miffed the other day when I went to submit to a journal and found the following Duotrope disclaimer: Open to all/most forms of poetry excluding  – Erotica. I poked around on the website and didn’t find a definition of what this particular journal or editor considered to be writing of an erotic nature and the more I thought about it, the more I felt like I didn’t want to submit to a journal that put that kind of limitation on submissions. There is, obviously, a huge difference between smut and erotica, between a tasteful scene of intimacy and porn but I guess someone somewhere had crossed that line one too many times for this journal to put up with. Or maybe it distributed its latest editions to middle schools.

Either way that disclaimer led me down a very uncomfortable path of introspection. My work is often intimate, sensual and very sexual. Sometimes I write about my pubic hair. Is that erotic? Read more »

What IS in a name, Shakespeare? And while we're at it, how come you got away with calling your brilliant poems things like "Sonnet 29"?

Well Thanksgiving has come and gone, which means it’s practically Christmas. Which means it’s almost spring and holy poo I have to defend my thesis soon. Which means, of course, that I should start writing it.

Confession #1: I actually picked out the name for my thesis about a year ago because things are less scary to me once you name them. So I was feeling pretty good and not too nervous about my thesis until I was browsing Auntie’s Bookstore the other day and saw my brilliant manuscript title on the cover of a young adult book. I rushed home and googled it and discovered my title idea already belonged to at least two books, an indie band, and possibly a dead magazine.

Well, damn. The little well of panic started to set in after that because Confession #2: I suck at titles and kind of hate them. There’s a power in naming things, and naming them correctly, which makes selecting the correct title for any creative work rather intimidating (at least to me, anyway). How do I strike the right balance of drawing the reader in without giving too much away? Is my title establishing the right tone for the poem? And now, of course, is it original? Read more »

So I was on the phone with Dinty Moore yesterday…no, really, I was, and the fact that there were about 30 other people on the phone call does not diminish the aforementioned.  I attended a telesummit put on by the National Association of Memoir Writers, and hosted by its founder and president, Linda Joy Meyers.   Dr. Meyers put together the telesummit, which included five hour-long panels which I was able to access by calling in.  I wasn’t able to call in for all of the five panels, but I did listen in for about half. 

This is how you do a conference call, right?

First up was Dinty W. Moore, who answered questions from Linda and talked about truth in Creative Nonfiction.  It was a good conversation.  He jumped right in to the truthiness of it all, pointing out that fiction and nonfiction writers are both trying to get to some kind of truth, but that writers of nonfiction come to a different kind of truth, a truth arrived at by an unveiling of the self.   And writing nonfiction but calling it fiction, Moore said, is a bad way to write nonfiction.  It blurs the boundary of what you could have discovered if you’d gone ahead and mined your experience rather than changing a few details of it.  I’m not sure about that (Pam Houston comes to mind as a really good writer of autobiographical fiction), but I get his general point—it’s the digging and the honest unveiling, the metaphors you find when you’re writing nonfiction, that make it so compelling.  “It’s good for the world,” Moore said.  “People need to tell their stories.”  It’s universalizing. 

                As for truthiness, when it comes to changing the name of a neighbor or using a composite character or compressing time, Moore believes that though a writer must be honest,  emotional truth is more important than the factuality of each and every detail.  Try your best to tell the truth, but realize it’ll never be perfect, is what I got from what he said.  And I like the way he summed it up:  “I get tired of those arguments…Let the people who buy the books decide.”  Yes.  Read more »

It seems like every one around me is having their work accepted for publication. And by everyone, I mean three or four people in the last five months but I’m obsessed, so it feels like everyone. I’ve got it in my head that my work isn’t good enough unless someone very far away who doesn’t know me and my back story of fuckery, says, “Ah, yes. This is Good.”

Excitement from my Special Reader wasn’t enough. Neither was the lady-boner-inducing compliment I got from my advisor. It’s great that my family, my friends and my boyfriend think I’m a decent poet but it doesn’t satisfy me. I’m never satisfied. In the writing process this can be a good thing, in most instances, it drives me insane.

Increasingly I find myself up at one a.m. staring at my color-coded excel spreadsheet of submissions (with 25 currently active & rotating of 12 different poems) and see where I’ve submitted to – all the Goliaths of the literary publishing world -all the places that have a 1% acceptance rate, all of whom my fellow classmates and other MFA students across the country are also submitting to and I can see reason for a few moments: Who am I kidding? Read more »

I went through a phase, a few years ago, where I read a lot of magazines. I loved the quizzes, especially. There was something so comforting about the bland, glossy advice, the stock personality definitions based on how my answers added up–no truth required. You want the magazine to tell you you’re a fun person? Answer the questions as a fun person might. Then you’re a fun person turning the page, looking at earrings and purses you can’t afford. It’s nice.

Of course, it also gets boring. And after a while, all the quizzes and articles start to repeat themselves. So I cancelled my subscription to Glamour and stopped wasting five bucks every time I checked out at the supermarket. I maintained my subscription to Food Network Magazine–I still haven’t tired of being quizzed on my knowledge of wine or seeing how two great chefs riff on the same recipe–but as for the ladies’ journals, I was through. I would not be duped into wasting my money for the same old article on feeling beautiful or spreads of clothes I’ll never have the body or the wallet for. I was free, with more money to spend on coffee.

But a few weeks ago, I broke down and bought a copy of Family Circle, lured in by a photo of Halloween treats and an article that promised to cure my fall allergies. Except the article told me nothing I didn’t already know and I have no one to make these Halloween treats for. It was a little relapse. No big deal. But a few weeks later, I gave in again, on a bigger scale. I bought my first-ever issue of O: The Oprah Magazine, lured by her beautiful curly hair and the promise that I could find my true calling. Read more »

Toad Suck Review

If you are a person who is getting (or has gotten) an MFA in creative writing, there is a high likelihood that you are also a person who has at least toyed with the idea of starting your own literary magazine. Don’t even pretend like this isn’t true. I know you. Don’t lie.

And if you have considered starting your own literary magazine then you know there are a lot of big decisions to make before undertaking such a project. Like, you will probably need to figure out how to get a lot of start-up cash and a Web site and a printer you like and trust and other smart friends who will help you edit it and many other things that you haven’t even thought of because logistics are boring and therefore not a part of anyone’s literary magazine daydreams. In the land of what-if-I-started-my-own-magazine, there is really only one concern that reigns supreme.

What am I going to name it?

Read more »

Photo Credit: Cold Front Magazine

I have minimal investment in the Bark/BlazeVOX conflict. I’ve had friends and teachers publish with Blaze, but have never actually submitted there myself. I’ve also never met Brett Ortler, and likely never will, despite both of us being fellow Barkers. Still, I’ve watched events unfold these last few days, and though I may not have the same history with Bark, the same experience as a seasoned MFA, I feel compelled to speak. My opinions are neither those of Bark, nor of Eastern Washington University. But I speak anyway.

The world of letters is viciously competitive. It is a world filled with talent and ambition, but also with frauds and hucksters, entities like James Frey who would take the naive or the desperate and exploit their hard work for profit. I do not sincerely believe BlazeVOX to be among this number, and indeed I was disheartened to think that they would shut down. I am glad now after all that has transpired to see that they may not. That said, it is still hard to look at their correspondences with Mr. Ortler and not feel that they have crossed an ethical line. At best their model is ill-conceived; at worst it is dishonest. If one wishes to charge authors to cover the costs of publishing, then fine. That is one’s prerogative. But if such is the case, one should not cloak one’s intentions in the latter paragraphs of an acceptance letter, or fail to keep one’s numbers completely consistent. Read more »

What I did over my summer vacation

You know how, as writers, we often feel ineffectual and separate from all those other people in the world? Okay, maybe I’m just speaking for myself, or for poets. Alright, for myself.

Regardless, the question of the usefulness of writing is one that I’ve been asked more than once in more than one venue. I remember just a few months ago one of my well-meaning developmental writing students came into my office, presumably to cheer me up or something, when he said something like, “Jaime, I have to be honest with you. You’ve seemed really tired this quarter, and I just don’t know if teaching writing is worth wearing yourself out over. I mean, seriously, I’m not going to use this stuff outside of school, and I don’t think most other people do either.” Sigh. He was right, I was tired, but not of teaching writing or even of hearing students tell me things like that. He was, after all, telling me the truth as he experiences it.

Besides, there was some wisdom in his statement. A lot of students really don’t use the academic skills we teach them: MLA format, essay organization, how to locate a scholarly article on a library database…. But, whether they know it or not, they do use the less tangible, more cognitive skills we teach them: to look deeply at a text, to analyze an argument, to question authority.

These are the reasons I enjoy teaching college composition, but I often struggle with the applicability of it. When, as my student asked implicitly, will they ever use the academic skills I’m charged with teaching them? When will essays ever become relevant to anyone outside of academia?

I know of at least two places (I’m sure there are more.) where essays are not only relevant, they are promoting social change. The first is my own, newly started nonprofit organization, Dream School Commons. The second is Eastern Washington University alumnus Ross Carper’s website, Beyond the Bracelet.

Read more »