Big News: My First Chapbook Comes out This Summer

You might recall that from time to time over the past year or so, I’ve mentioned that I was having trouble cracking the chapbook nut. Last winter, I put together a manuscript that I really liked, and I kept entering it in various contests, and it kept getting turned down.

One evening in January of this year, I got a phone call. I expected it would be yet another robocall from my kids’ school about an emergency closing due to excessive cold. So I was only half-listening when Gordon Grigsby from Evening Street Press started leaving a message. Wait … what? This is not how rejections usually arrive. I’ve received plenty of rejections in plenty of ways — but never a rejection phone call. So …?

I leaped up, picked up the phone … and accidentally hung up on Gordon. Fortunately, he called right back — with news that my chapbook, Secret Rivers, was the 2013 winner of the Evening Street Press Helen Kay Chapbook Prize.

The funny thing is, I had just reached a point where I was starting to reevaluate my approach with Secret Rivers. Instead of entering it in contests, should I just focus on trying to find a good publisher for it, even without a prize? I believe I vented about this both here and on Facebook — and I know that a couple of blogger friends said they felt like this would be my year, and a few Facebook friends offered encouragement, one of them saying she had her fingers crossed. And that’s when I got that call.

I waited a while to announce it here because I knew Evening Street Press had plans to announce it as well, and I didn’t want to step on those plans or catch any other entrants by surprise. But now they’ve announced it on their Facebook page and in an ad in the current issue of Poets & Writers, so I’m in the clear.

Seven of the poems will be in the upcoming spring issue of Evening Street Press Review, and the chapbook will be published sometime over the summer (I’ll keep you posted on that). I’m now lining up back-cover blurbs, considering whether I want to thank anyone (how do you choose?), trying to think of a good image for the cover, and steeling myself to have an author photo taken (my best photos are are all cellphone selfies). It’s all really exciting work, and I can’t believe this is happening.

Evening Street Press is such a great fit for Secret Rivers, for a number of reasons. First, it is known not only for its high-quality work and the great care with which it showcases it, but also for its focus on equal rights and social justice, and on spotlighting current barriers to those. When I started writing Secret Rivers, I didn’t intend for it to be a political piece, but the issue of fracking found its way in and then would not be denied.

Another thing I find really satisfying is the “home” connection. I live in Chicago, but I went to high school in a suburb of Columbus, and my dad still lives there. In back-and-forth during the submission process, it came out that Gordon and his wife (and managing editor) Barbara Bergmann live just up the road from my dad. I’ve probably driven right past their house.

Also, Secret Rivers is set in a lightly fictionalized version of Belmont County, Ohio, where fracking is now a huge issue of concern or opportunity — depending on whom you ask. Don’t get me wrong: Evening Street Press is limitless in its geographic scope. In fact, its 2012 Helen Kay prize went to Lynn Veach Sadler’s Mola … Person, which incorporates the anthropology and history of the San Blas islands off Colombia and Panama. Still, I find it so pleasing that my Ohio chapbook ended up coming home to Ohio to be published.

To Evening Street Press, and to anyone who has shared words of encouragement as Secret Rivers struggled to find its home: Thank you! And for anyone else who is trying to place a chapbook and is hanging in there despite rejections: I’m keeping my fingers crossed, and may this be your year, too.

Doing the Dishes

Doing dishes that are made from earth
managing not to return them to earth
managing not to break

everything
oh, everything

There is a certain line holding me
there is a certain thread holding me
there is a plumb line holding me

and it could snap
in rotten teeth

Everything is tired in the snow
there is thunder in the snow
you are out there, in the snow

and here I sit—
I lied about doing the dishes

If it’s Tuesday p.m., check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Hot Idea!

Let’s talk to Lucy and learn to play bongos.
Let’s break all our old habits and then start new ones.
Let’s leaf through some old issues of Playgirl.
Let’s read our fortunes in whorls of chest hair.
Let’s see if Lucy has any ideas about aluminum doors.
Let’s run through a hallway of doors, slamming them one by one.
Let’s ask Chief Robotman what he thinks of our actions.
Let’s not stay to hear his answer.
Let’s ride away on our Schwinns, or in a Vista Cruiser.
Let’s eat Hostess Sno Balls, thumb our noses at everyone but us.

If it’s Tuesday p.m., it’s time for Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Winter’s Wing

Speaking of travel and snowy owls,
white wings of this weather,
the dishwater sky awaiting heavier
clouds than these, another round
of snow; we are pulled into
the polar vortex again and again.
It’s because we’re heating the seas,
making soup out of creatures
we have no interest in eating.
Still, there’s something about
winter again, the real winter,
how it puts you someplace else,
like the inside of a closet, muffled
and warm when your parents are
having a party, and you are a child.
The laughter and the clink of ice,
present, distant. It’s like that,
under winter’s wing—your blood
thick and quiet, hungry for meat.

Check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets every Tuesday p.m.!

Ghost Ship Full of Cannibal Rats Could Be about to Crash into Devon Coast

But then again, it might not; there’s still time to divert its course if we all
pull together, acknowledge the unimpeachable reality of cannibal rats,
and beam our positive thinking toward that voluptuous shore, help her
fend off this assault, the scrabbling of vicious claws tearing tender rock. Or
shall we get lost in the seaweed that tangles our minds? Deny not only the
rats, but also the ship? Chalk it all up to some paranoid wish list of unlikely
events—even as that spectral prow laps the milk where land meets sea?

Be sure to check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets every Tuesday p.m.

Man Dead, Woman Missing from Chicago River Accident

Whatever it is, it isn’t worth it, though it seems so at the time.
A little climb on the rocks by the lake at night, in midwinter, or
a January midnight lunge into the river to retrieve a falling phone.
It only looks calm, navigable, shallow, that water. It only looks
placid, like it will happily receive you, help you find what you lost.
It will receive you. You may perceive that it is glad. You might find,
as you are fading, that nothing more is lost. But now your family
dredges up from some other depth this fact: You died at age 26
for a phone that is now waterlogged and frozen, no longer
sending any signal, no longer searching for you.

If it’s Tuesday p.m. (which it’s not right now), check out Open Link Night at dVerse Poets.

Transported

But when I came back, I was celery
or a facsimile of celery, and it took me
a while to coordinate my leaves and
the pumping system that keeps me
occupied and crisp throughout the day.
I have no teeth anymore, or else I would
crunch myself, accidentally on purpose.
I had never been celery before, or even
been especially interested in celery,
because who is? Because it’s celery.
Because I am celery. Because I am.

Hey, it’s Tuesday, and Open Link Night is back. Check it out!

Let it Drop

I want to write something to you for the end of the world,
but I can’t peel this orange. It pushes back the seam between
thumbnail and thumb, and there it stays, and stings. Do you
know the feeling of stepping in a pool of slush in your sock feet
as you take off your boots—when you are in the seam
between away and home, outside and inside, your public and
private selves? The slush is dirty meltwater from road-driven snow.
It is possible, entirely possible, that you have tracked lead, soot,
other poisonous particulates, into your kitchen as you stand by
the back door and worry this seam—as I worry so many seams,
am aware of so many seams. This is why I can’t comfort you, can’t
exalt your year just ending, can’t help you put on a brave face
and a party hat for the one that’s yet to come. We will all just have
to let it happen, count down and let it drop like the orange that it is.

Will 2014 Be the Year I Solve My Chapbook Problem?

So, I’m ending this year feeling a little bit like I’m spinning my wheels. I spent a long time earlier in the year working on a chapbook and then entering it in a bunch of contests because I really wanted to accomplish that before going back to submitting individual pieces.

But …

Then a long time passed and nothing happened (yet — I think it’s still out at a couple of places. Wait, “think?” — Yep. We’re dealing in pretty high volume here, and I have zero belief that two publishers will say yes to it, but if that does happen, I’ll cross that happy bridge when I come to it. But yes, you’re right, I should absolutely retrace my steps and figure out where all I sent it, lest some type of Three’s Company-type slapstick disaster occur).

Anyway, then it started to feel as if maybe my prior moderate success with individual poems was a fluke, would never happen again, etc., etc. The more time went by, the more that seemed to be true. Don’t get me wrong — I do (mostly) enjoy the creative process for its own sake, but I really like the submitting, publishing, “Ah, here’s my contributor’s copy!” part, too.

So I got busy with Duotrope and submitted many, many poems and enjoyed decent success with those. I had poems accepted by several great publications (which I will resume telling you about *soon*), met lots of nice people online and in person, and was really excited and pleased. And still am — and grateful, too.

But here I am again, in Chapbookland. Or Nochapbookland. I have a manuscript that I like a lot, and I keep thinking that someone else might like it a lot, too — but I can’t seem to connect with the right publisher.

I’m thinking it doesn’t help that the manuscript is made up of persona poems with a pretty strong narrative thread. When I inevitably get the “you didn’t win, but here’s who did” notice, the winning piece often seems to be about, say, the passage of time on a farm, sharpening the saw blades in the weathered, old shed where Dad once skinned a live deer because that’s what you have to do sometimes. You get me? A rural, beautiful, kind-of-disturbing-in-parts recounting of personal experience. There are spikes of narrative here and there, but the writing is mostly lyrical.

I admire things like that, don’t get me wrong — I just can’t write them.

So … any thoughts on how to crack this nut? Am I entering all the wrong contests? Should I let go of the contest thing (and the prospect of prize money) and just focus on finding the right match?

If you’ve done a chapbook, how did you find your publisher, and how did you know it was a good fit? (And no, I really don’t want to self-publish. I know, I know … but I just don’t.)

Many thanks, and whatever your writing goal is, I hope 2014 is the year you reach it!

Fig Wasps

I tell you a tale as big as a kite,
and I fly it into your fig tree.

It rattles the wasps from their
work in your figs, their offices

of pollinating, egg-laying, death.
They are annoyed, and they sting

with the knowledge that
there’s no tale bigger than

their own. It is, they are certain,
the greatest story the sun ever told.