My essay, “How to Fix Everything,” is in the current issue of Creative Nonfiction. The essay was named winner of the Food Essay Contest. Scroll down on that link and check out that first line from the essay! That’s just a taste of what’s to come. (Get it?! Taste?!)
My hard copies arrived yesterday, which is when the shock and awe kicked in. I’ve known that the essay was getting published since January. Rounds of edits, saw a PDF, and lots of emails. It was all very exciting.
Yesterday, however, I did something I will now call the publication dance in the elevator and later on the sidewalk. I held up my package of copies, and one copy, above my head. Yes, this feeling does deserve awkward, ungainly, joyful dance moves.
This is really strange to me for two reasons. First, I’ve never been published. A wise poet I met when I was finding my writerly path told me that should I go the MFA route, be prepared to not get published for up to ten years; the MFA guarantees nothing except some time and support, if you’re lucky. She’s right. It didn’t take ten years, but I’ve gone back to her words over and over when I felt discouraged. This was the first essay, strange as it sounds, that I believed in—that I knew was ready to fly, that it deserved a home, and that I had to put myself on the line for that to happen.
Second, talking about your own writing is weird. Back in March, I read this post on Brevity’s wonderful blog, and the message stuck. Friends and fellow writers and those that fall in-between should happy for one another (and feel a little twinge of jealousy at times, but more happy than not). Like the article says, I’m always surprised when fellow writers don’t share their good news–as we always talk about those damn rejection letters. And yet, it feels egotistical to pimp out one’s own writing. It is so strange.
But if you believe in a story, an essay, a poem and someone else does as well, shout about it. Your words and work deserve it.
One of my favorite writers-on-writing essays is Wallace Stegner’s 1959 essay, “To a Young Writer.” He says:
To finance school and to write your novel you have lived meagerly with little encouragement and have risked the disapproval of your family, who have understandably said, ‘Here is this girl nearly thirty years old now, unmarried, without a job or a profession, still mooning away at her writing as if life were forever. Here goes her life through her fingers while she sits in cold rooms and grows stoopshouldered over a typewriter.’
Now over thirty, I’m still mooning away, still sitting in cold rooms, still stoopshouldered over my typewriter laptop. However, unlike Stegner’s young writer, I am lucky to have an entire cheerleading squad behind me. Mmm. Maybe they are more like soccer hooligans who tell me to shut up and write like a motherfucker.
Thank you all for kind words, hearing me tell the good news a zillion times, telling the good news for me. Huge, crushing mama-bear hugs to all of you.
