hydroplaned all the way home from borders today in the second torrential downpour in so many days. q: why do i spend so much time in the anthologies section? i love picking up books about books: time out's 1000 books to change your life; essays on how to read like a professor, writer, hypnotist, zookeeper; the best american everything; harold bloom edits a book of scandinavian stories about centipedes. i buy nothing. i ignore the poetry section completely. instead, i pop into the fiction aisle on my way out the door and grab something off my life list, something inevitably written by a dude who died a few hundred years ago. it's the closest i get lately to acting like someone who reads things, much less writes them.
i didn't think this whole mfa application business was going to be as devastating as it's been: not necessarily to my ego (though that damage has definitely been done), but to the way i conduct my days. i used to wake up, browse poetry blogs with my coffee, go to class / attempt lunch / go to work, and then i'd read and write for the rest of the night, research things i'd write the next day. while i ran my errands, i thought a lot about words. i wrote things down in notebooks sometimes. i spent a lot of time submitting my work and watched some of it get published. i started this weird little blog. i took baby steps toward the life i wanted to make for myself.
and it's like not i've taken this dramatic 180 and now am working in sales or something (oh wait). but going through my old routine kind of hurts now. i can't shake the feeling that i'm a pretty serious fraud. writing poetry is suddenly all bound up with my self-worth, like there's something important riding on my performance. and yes we all know poetry is SRS BUSINESS (i am srs here), but you need to be able to shake that pressure in order to write it. otherwise sitting in front of a blank screen feels a lot like being in a nationally broadcasted hot seat, even if no one is watching but you. i used to joke about my personal poetry business going bankrupt, but dude, i am like really broke right now.
what i'm saying is, it's hard to knock on the door of the establishment only to be looked at like a jehovah's witness.
in the end, adjusting my worldview is necessary, even if it hurts. maybe i need to diversify my personal stock a little bit. there are a lot of things about myself that i've ignored in favor of this poetry stuff. for example: i like to make headbands and jewelry and sometimes weird little stuffed cats. i like being in sales because i am good at being in sales. i like to make books too (though this is meandering back towards the po-biz) and i used to really like playing the piano for hours on end. once i took singing lessons. oh yeah, and rollerblading was way fun too, though doing that now is probably social suicide and/or makes you a lameass hipster (so says the girl who likes to pratter endlessly about poetry).
and whatever. if these last two (hyper competitive) schools don't accept me, or if i don't get into either of the (hyper competitive) schools that waitlisted me, i'll reapply. i've already made a list for that year in the future when i've sucked it up enough to try again. i'll keep publishing, if anyone lets me. and writing, too, though it might take awhile before that doesn't make me sick to my stomach.
but i'm just trying to take stock here. god knows i need to learn something for this process to have been worthwhile. i heard somewhere that the humbling of the heroine is the most popular plot in fiction. that's about as comfortable as i get, right now, tying my life to literature.
anyway, here is a cute animal, because that was kind of punishing.
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1 comment:
i understand what you mean by this, although my downfall was slightly less dramatic. as a writer, i've always been good at the "putting words together" part but less so at the "having original ideas" part. for most of my life, i was my writing teachers' darling because everybody else was bad or mediocre at both parts--but when i started hitting the advanced level writing courses, i started to see other people my age who were really good at the idea half too. it was really unsettling. i don't write nearly as much as i used to, because i can't shake the feeling that it's useless, i will never come up with a decent idea, and maybe i should just start writing harlequin romance novels. (which, now that i think about it, actually sounds kind of fun if still a total waste of a college degree, haha.)
you know what i'm going to say here. it's not necessarily about you, it was a bad year, applications were up, all writers face plenty of rejection. but i still think it's totally reasonable to take some time off and do other things until you're more comfortable with writing again. just make sure you do come back to writing! because you are good, and as long as you focus on continuing to get better and better, eventually good things will come.
i hope you start feeling better soon.
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