Tupelo Press 30/30 Project, Day 4:On the Nature of Wallflowers

I’m four days into the Tupelo Press 30/30 poem-a-day writing marathon. Four poems down; twenty-six to go. (Yikes—wish I hadn’t said that.)
  One thing that this well-organized marathon provides is instant camaraderie. Already, we nine July poets have our own “secret” Facebook page, and a lot of good-natured conversation is getting swapped around. They’re skilled poets and witty Facebook buds, and I’m having a good time.
  But it’s early days and, as with so many other poem-a-day groups, I feel a tinge of awkwardness mixed with the camaraderie. Inevitably in these things, as the compliments and comments begin to fly, I always worry that we’ll leave someone out, or that I’ll praise someone’s work too much (because it really kicks ass) and short-shrift* someone else without realizing it. We writers are a sensitive lot—but, you know, we humans are a sensitive lot.
  Of course, the short-shrift phenomenon doesn’t just happen in poetry marathons. Certain groups seem to have a built-in mechanism for producing wallflowers. At a dance, for instance, crowd dynamics usually dictate that a few people won’t get asked to dance, or at least not right away. And it’s not like they can’t dance or anything; they’re perfectly good people, fully realized and talented (though maybe the neon socks were a bad choice). For whatever reason, the school of fish shifts away, and a few people end up alone. I laugh as I write this, because that was so often me, standing there in my new purple dress and swaying alone to “Colour My World,” trying to look like it was no big deal that the rest of eighth grade was dancing without me in a slow-moving, impenetrable whirlpool.
  So maybe that dance trauma is what’s at the back of my mind when I worry about inadvertently making someone into a wallflower, or becoming one myself—good God, I’m standing here again, studying my empty Dixie cup! But now I’ve been to a lot of dances—ones where I was the belle of the ball, and others where I was that shy and awkward girl—and I see that it’s all a pretty arbitrary business.
  Which is a long way of saying: Here’s to you, fellow marathoners. I think you all are dynamite dancers.





* I always thought “short shrift” had something to do with short-sheeting, that old campground prank. Wrong: Its original meaning was much more grave, something to do with “little time between condemnation and execution.”

Tupelo’s 30/30 Project: Off to the Marathon

Starting this Tuesday and continuing all through July, I’ll be taking part in a public poetry spectacle: Tupelo Press’ 30/30 Project. This is Tupelo’s ongoing fundraiser where a handful of poet volunteers bravely (stupidly? crazily?) write a poem a day for a month and post each day’s work on the 30/30 website. It’s like a literary bike-a-thon, where we poets sweat and huff and risk embarrassing accidents while raising money for a good cause—in this case, supporting one of the most respected literary publishers in the country.

Community…creativity…kvetching

Why on Earth did I agree to do this nutty marathon? Three reasons:

1) Tupelo Press is worth supporting. This 15-year-old publishing company, based in Western Massachusetts and headed by editor Jeffrey Levine*, keeps coming out with beautiful, world-class books—mostly poetry, but also fiction and essays—by stellar writers like Ilya Kaminsky, Geri Doran, Floyd Skloot, and Kate Gale. They’ve just announced upcoming books by my Ashland bud Allan Peterson and the wonderful Tony Barnstone. And, like most independent publishers, Tupelo depends on fundraising to keep its doors open.

2) I’ve become a little bit addicted to poem-a-day marathons. For the past six years, I’ve done NaPoWriMo (National Poetry Writing Month) each April with a Rogue Valley group, where we write a poem a day and e-mail them to each other. At first, I thought the whole thing was nuts—who wants to see their lumpy first drafts wandering around in the world? And writing, let alone finishing, a poem every day is freakin’ hard. But I decided to give it a try, and you know…it was freakin’ hard. But I came up with a couple of decent poems that I wouldn’t have written otherwise, and I liked the camaraderie of it—the communal kvetching, encouraging comments, and weird little thematic threads that ran through the group’s poems.

            Last year I also joined two postcard-poem groups, where we wrote short poems on postcards every day for a month and sent them to each other. That was even more fun—having to fit a poem into the tiny space of a postcard, then sending it off to someone, often a complete stranger, felt crazy and exotic.

3) My good friend Amy MacLennan did the 30/30 Project in February and seems to be physically unharmed.

Useful addictions

Aside from thrills and philanthropy, I’ve found some practical benefits in these poem-a-day marathons, new habits that help strengthen my writing practice the rest of the year. For instance:

• It pays to keep a little notebook of ideas. In every marathon, there comes a time when I’m sitting there, completely stuck for an idea and sweating the midnight deadline. That’s when I grab the little notebook that I keep for such emergencies—the one with lines from movies and bits of conversation and conundrums that I’ve jotted down at odd moments. Sometimes one will pop out and hit the right chord just then.**

• Having to write a poem every day fine-tunes my poetry antennae. After a few days, I find I’m automatically sifting through each day’s experiences—sights, phrases, stories, puns, tragedies, questions—and asking myself, “What kind of poem would this be? What would be a surprising way to approach writing this?” That’s a handy habit to get into. And the leftovers go into the little notebook (see above).

• The pressure of cranking out a finished piece every day makes me take risks that I would probably be too lazy to try otherwise. It might be a persona that I think is silly, or a rhymey-dimey thing with nonsense lines, or an angry rant. Whatever it is, it goes into the assembly line and comes out…however it’s going to come out.*** Sometimes it comes out kind of cool.

Not quite cheating

The side benefits are all fine and well, but to do this kind of marathon, the hardest part is just sitting my ass down every day and doing it. There’s no shortcut to that, but I’ve found a small trick that helps: I write the poem the night before I have to post it. It still works out to a poem a day, but I take full advantage of the 24 hours. This way the poem can percolate overnight before I look at it again the next day, type it up, and post it. Having that extra time takes some of the pressure off, which, for me, results in less anxiety and better poems. Of course the system breaks down now and then when something—work, apathy, beers with friends—messes up the schedule. Then I have to cough up the poem the same day as the midnight deadline. And that’s fine, I can do that, but the marathon is less of a grind if I can keep to that night-before groove.

You can help me out—and win a prize!

Just like a bike-a-thoner, I’m looking for sponsors to make this thing a success. So I’m asking everybody—cohorts, co-workers, co-conspirators, and kind strangers—for donations (see instructions below). How much is up to you; $1, $10, $20 or more will make my toil in the poetry salt mine that much happier, and will help keep Tupelo Press alive. My goal is to raise $350 for them.

      And to sweeten the deal, I’m offering a prize: At the end of the marathon, I’ll randomly draw the names of two of my sponsors. If you are one of the winners, you’ll get your pick of: a) two Tupelo books of your choice, or b) three hours of my time as an editor or publishing/writing consultant to do whatever you like—help you put together a chapbook, do a Kindle version of your book, copyedit or critique anything from poems to your manuscript to your resume, or just talk about your writing. I work fast. I can get a lot done in three hours.

      It’s easy to donate. Here are two ways:

1)   Go to Tupelo’s donation page to donate using a credit card or PayPal. Important: In the box that says “Is this donation in honor of a 30/30 poet?,” put my name. Again, you can donate any amount from $1 up.

2)   You can donate by check (made out to Tupelo Press) or cash by sending it straight to me; I’ll forward it on to Tupelo. If you need my address, just e-mail me at amymillerediting[at]gmail[dot]com.

Whether you donate or not (and there is no obligation), I hope you’ll check in with the 30/30 site throughout July to see what my co-marathoners and I are coming up with. And keep looking in on this blog for periodic updates, whinefests, and thoughts on poetry blisters, similes for carb-loading, and metaphorical watering stations.

* For a funny and informative read, check out Jeff’s article about putting together a poetry book manuscript. (Item 9: “Weak poems. You know which they are. Don’t include them.” Jeff has also taught at the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference, which I wrote about on this blog last year.

** Case in point: “We flowers all sleep in the winter,” a line from Bambi that I love. But that’s about all I love about Bambi. I saw it for the first time a few months ago, and I guess you have to see when you’re six—before you learn words like “sanctimonious.”

*** There’s a line from ER that I find useful for a lot of things: “Treat ’em and street ’em.”

Bike sprint photo by I, Kuebi

Case Study: Publishing a Chapbook with Amazon’s CreateSpace

All those nights when you can't reach me?
I'm making these things.

When it comes to poetry chapbooks, I’m a DIY gal. So far I’ve self-published nine chapbooks at home using InDesign or QuarkXPress, a couple of desktop printers, and a huge stash of paper from a print shop that went out of business*. I edited books for a living for many years, and I still get a creative rush out of designing and assembling them. So if it means giving up a few evenings to print, fold, staple, and trim chapbooks while listening to Bollywood music, that’s OK. I like it. It’s fun.
        But recently I went a different route and published a chapbook through CreateSpace, Amazon’s print-on-demand program. A client had asked me to help him marshal his book through the CreateSpace process, so I decided to use one of my own chapbooks as a guinea pig first. I figured if things went badly, I could steer the client away from the mistakes I’d made. And if it went well, it would be smooth sailing for him…and I’d get a spiffy new book at the same time.

Something for nothing?

In a nutshell, CreateSpace works like this: You design the book (either by yourself, or with the help of their online templates and design services), and then Amazon prints and ships copies of the book whenever customers order them. If you design it all yourself and simply upload your PDFs to their system, it’s completely free and seems almost too good to be true. You do pay for any copies of the book you order for yourself—say, a few dozen for your own readings or book shows—but you buy them from Amazon at such a deeply discounted author price that it works out to about what you’d pay a local print shop to do them (for most chapbooks, a little under $3.00 per book, including shipping). And, unlike with a local print shop, your book gets listed on Amazon and is handled and shipped by them, which means your readers can find it easily and buy it while they’re shopping for frying pans, yoga balls, and Breaking Bad DVDs. I’ve got to admit that, even for an independent-bookstore lover like myself, it was all weirdly attractive.

The CreateSpace portal.

        To back up for a moment, let me repeat one point: CreateSpace is only free if you can design the whole book—interior and cover—either completely by yourself, or by using their simplest templates. (They also have fancier templates, for a fee.) Obviously it’s great to have InDesign or Quark to do the interior layout, but you could probably use Word, assuming you’re good at it (which I’m not) and your book is something simple like poetry or fiction. For the cover, you might be able to figure out how to lay it out in Word (again, if you have more prowess with Word than I do), but just about any graphics program will work, as long as you can save your final design as a PDF.

        If you don’t want to wade into the world of design on your own, CreateSpace can do that for you too, but this is where it can get pricey. They offer all sorts of professional services and packages, ranging from design and copyediting to help with marketing and publicity, costing anywhere from a hundred dollars to several thousand. And judging from the online forums that I’ve scoured over the past few weeks**, many authors do use these services, and some are perfectly happy with them. But I didn’t wade too deep into that; I figure that thirty years in publishing should have taught me a few skills. And besides that, I’m a cheapskate. I was going it alone or bust.

Enter the guinea pig

Editing—in my house, anyway—
still takes paper and patience.

For my test case, I decided to do an expanded version of my book Beautiful Brutal: Poems About Cats. I chose this baby for one reason: I sell a lot of copies of it. Now, I pride myself on being a real poet, but this little novelty book has turned out to be surprisingly popular—it always sells well at book shows and writers’ conferences, and people contact me out of the blue to order five or ten to give away as gifts. I spend a lot of time printing those little books.

        Beautiful Brutal started life four years ago as a palm-size nugget of a book, 5.5 inches high by 4.25 wide. So I took a couple of weeks to add a few new poems to it, revise some of the old ones, and do a little re-ordering. I also gave it a larger, airier trim size (6 x 9), fancied up the interior design, and built a new cover around a 17th-century painting*** by Georg Flegel that I particularly love and that is firmly planted in the public domain. Finally the files were ready, and I followed CreateSpace’s easy directions and made the PDFs.

Ready…set…stop

The next step was to register the book with CreateSpace. This is where you let them know what you want your book to look like—page count, trim size, paper color (white or cream; I chose cream), cover finish (glossy or matte; I chose matte). At this point you also set up the book’s Amazon page, which entailed a couple of curveballs I didn’t see coming, such as deciding on a cover price and where to send the royalties, and that brought the process to a grinding halt while I pondered them. The toughest was the “book description,” that little marketing paragraph that you see on the book’s Amazon page. I tinkered with that thing for a long time, trying to make it descriptive but not dorky.****

        Filling out the online forms was fun, but then came the meat and potatoes: uploading the PDFs of the book. That part went quickly. I clicked through a few windows to send the files, their system processed them in just a few minutes, and then a digital proof of my book appeared on my screen. Many printers use online proofing systems, and CreateSpace’s is particularly attractive and realistic, with animated pages that appear to turn. My book looked fine—nothing had shifted or reflowed, and the fonts looked the way they were supposed to. The one hiccup was that the system froze up twice while I was sending the files, and I had to quit out of my browser and go back in. Also, they didn’t process the cover file right away, I presume because I asked them to insert the UPC barcode on the back (another free option). They finished it the next morning and sent me an e-mail; I looked at an online proof of the cover and it looked fine too.

The moment of truth

Sharp yet velvety.

The last step in the approval process was to order a print proof of the book. This is the only part of the process that cost me money, and the total was $5.74—about $3.00 for the book, and the rest for shipping. You don’t have to order a proof; you can just have them print the books without seeing a sample, but I wouldn’t recommend that no matter what printer you’re using. And I especially wanted to see how the matte cover and cream paper looked, since I’d chosen both sight unseen.

        The proof arrived in my mailbox about three days later. Just like in my book-editor days, I opened the package with a mixture of excitement and dread. I pulled the slim volume out of its little box, leafed through it and sniffed it. I scrutinized the cover: handled its silky matte finish, pressed my thumbs on it to try to make fingerprints, and lightly scratched it to see if it got easily marred. It passed all the tests. And I’ve got to say—it was beautiful. The matte cover felt velvety, the type was clear, the cream paper robust, the perfect binding elegant and crisp. I was pleasantly surprised. This system actually worked.

Next up

So now Beautiful Brutal has a new home on Amazon (see its page here). I like the way it holds its own alongside the Hawthornes and Lemony Snickets—there’s a wonderful sort of democracy at work*****, not unlike the internet itself. I also did a Kindle version (which you can see here) while I was at it—it was like, I’m in the hospital already, so while they’re fixing my knee, I might as well get my gall bladder out too. That’s a whole other story, which I’ll write up at a later date. And Amazon is a world unto itself, with author pages and analytics and keywords and search engine optimization, which I will also write about later. For the time being, I’m just trying to figure out how to get the print and Kindle versions on the same page. Apparently the Amazon robots, which take care of such things while patrolling the system like so many Skynet terminators, haven’t figured it out yet.

* That was like some crazy-sad dream garage sale. A local print shop, which had been in business for decades, was closing its doors and needed to get rid of a warehouse full of supplies. It was down to the stuff that they couldn’t sell—literally tons of paper, envelopes and hand tools—and they asked people to just come and haul it away. They even had two letterpresses, which broke my heart. Each was about the size of a Cabriolet convertible, and probably weighed more. I wished I had a house big enough for one of those beasts. Hopefully somebody did.

** There were many, many points in this process where I had to stop and look things up online. Amazon has plenty of instructions, but sometimes they get bogged down in legalese and make things overcomplicated. Plenty of bloggers and internet writers out there have used CreateSpace and have good advice, available at your Googling fingertips. This makes me a little misty-eyed about the democratic nature of the internet. I mean, look at us right now. I have written something that you are reading! And we’re real people with no editors or agents between us, like we just bumped into each other on the street. Doesn’t that just make your head go pop? Nutty good.

*** With this title of characteristic German precision: Zitronen in einer Schale, welche auf einer Käseschachtel steht, ein Korb voller Wal- und Haselnüsse, eine aufgeschnittene Zitrone, ein Messer, eine Maus, die von einer Walnuss nascht und eine Katze auf einem Holztisch. (Translation: “Lemons in a bowl standing on a cheese box, with a basket of walnuts and hazelnuts, a sliced lemon, a knife and a mouse eating nuts on a wooden table, and a cat.”)

**** It was late and I was tired, so I was tempted to stick something flippant in there, like, “These 22 poems are the best ones I could write.” But you know, thumbing your nose at Amazon on Amazon does not hurt Amazon; it just makes you look like an idiot. I ended up with “This graceful, unflinching collection of 22 poems explores the real cats in our lives—the companions, the hunters, the strays, the kittens who grow up and grow old with us. Beautiful Brutal turns the ‘sentimental cat poem’ upside down, reminding us of the deep, wild mysteries we seek in cats—and see reflected in ourselves.” It still feels over the top. But I can change it later.

***** I know—I’m totally missing the capitalism angle, the consumerism and instant-gratification culture and big-brother apocalypse. But I just had a baby (book). I'm emotional.

8 Kitchen Implements That Sound Like Sex Toys

rice paddle

egg beater

double boiler

orange juicer

wok rack

corkscrew

cocktail strainer

meat fork

Estate Sale, Cortez Ave.

Three glass coffee carafes

Eleven bibles, English

Two bibles, Polish

Bedroom set, blond wood

Encyclopedias, two sets

One scrapbook with nothing in it

Pile of handmade lace table runners

Fourteen assorted serving plates, Chinese

Dining table and sideboard, matched

Twenty postcards, various U.S.

Half-size ironing board

Single bed, light green wood

Lighting fixtures, assorted small

Mixed flatware

200 tongue depressors

French rococo ceramic girl

Brass birdcage with cloisonné feedbowls

1976 newspaper: Carter Wins

America’s Most Rejected

Recently I got the news that a literary journal accepted one of my poems. Now, this is always an occasion for whooping and hollering—any “yes” from any publisher makes me do the happy dance. But this one was special. This particular poem had a dubious distinction: It had been rejected by many, many other literary journals. How many? In the 12 years since I wrote it, it got shot down a whopping 34 times. It was, by far, my most-rejected poem.

The Sigh

Why on Earth, you would be right to ask, did I keep sending that poem out, when so many people clearly thought it sucked? Simple: I did it because it got the sigh.

            The sigh came one night years ago, when I workshopped that poem in a creative writing class. I was asked to read it out loud, and just as I finished the last line, I heard it: the wonderful sound of the woman next to me sighing. It was, you know, that sigh—the one that poets long for, the slightly orgasmic one that tells you that you have something there, a poem that somebody likes so much that it drew a physical reaction out of them. I heard that sigh and I thought, Ooh yeah—that one’s a winner.

            I was off and running, sending that poem out to one top-tier journal after another. In my mind, it was my marquee poem, the best horse in my stable, and no little journal would do. But the months went by and time after time, the poem came limping back home in its scuffed SASE. I kept at it for about five years, sending it out to every top-drawer mag I could think of. Then, perplexed, I gave up and put the poem back in its stall for a rest.

Land of Ten Thousand Revisions

Still, it gnawed at me. Every once in a while I’d take it out and give it a hard look, wondering what the hell was wrong with it. I’d tinker with it, sharpen up a few words. Once, in a pique of minimalism, I got out the big knife and hacked away two-thirds of it. I felt all satisfied until I read that pared-down version a couple of months later and realized I’d cut all the spirit and nuance out of it; all that was left were a few listless lines that even I couldn’t understand. I restored it to its (tinkered, sharpened, revised) longer version and read it again. Crazy thing. I still liked it.

            As time went by, other poems rose to the top of my “send out” list, and that old poem sank farther down and spent more time at home. But it kept bugging me; it was like a hill that I could never quite climb. So about a year ago, I made a conscious decision to change my strategy with it. I still wanted to see that poem out in the world, but I decided it didn’t have to be in Ploughshares. So I started sending it to middle-tier and regional journals, but always ones that I especially liked; I still wanted it to live someplace that I would want to visit when I felt the urge to see it. It became a sport, tucking this poem into the envelope to round out a submission to this small journal or that one. And it still came back a few times, so I added those rejections to the list, filling up four index cards in my Byzantine tracking system. I kept thinking, come on, surely somebody out there will give this poem the sigh, somebody besides me and that woman in that class all those years ago.

            And someone finally did.

Behold

I’ll be delicate here and I won’t say which journal’s editor was kind enough to sigh, or which poem it was. That will come out in time, but right now I don’t want that editor thinking he/she picked up a poop that all those other editors stepped around for all those years. This lovely editor obviously doesn’t think it’s a poop, and friends, I am not about to make him/her think otherwise. Whether it’s a poop or not is all in the eye of the beholder. That’s art.

            Naturally I’m hoping that, after such a long and difficult journey, that poem will find its way into the Pushcart anthology or Best American or whatever. That would be sweet justice, and a damned good story. But for now, I’m just glad it will be out there in the sun, rubbing shoulders with other poems, instead of stamping its foot impatiently in its lonely stall.

Things I Worry About While Lying Awake at Night

Whether my neck bones are fusing together and will cause me constant pain later in my life.

Whether a video can be evil, like in The Ring.

Why cable stations show The Ring in the middle of the night.

Whether I’ll be living in an SRO apartment and eating cat food when I’m 80.

Tsunamis.

Not having earthquake insurance.

How long it would take the radioactive cloud to reach Ashland if San Francisco were hit by a nuclear attack.

Whether the frog in the back yard will park itself outside my bedroom window and ribbit all night.

How long I would be on crutches if I blew out my ACL playing tennis.

Whether I would cut my foot on a rock if I went outside right now and tried to shoo away the frog.

Whether the arthritis in my right hand will get so bad that I’ll have to write with the left one.

Whether I would puke onstage if I ever got to do a poetry reading at the 92^nd Street Y in New York City.

Whether that was someone’s brakes or a far-off scream.

Whether a baby and a tumor are essentially the same thing—a batch of cells grown crazily out of control so they sap our strength and crowd out our internal organs, but the tumor never grows a face and a brain and hair and fingernails, unless tumors actually do have these things and we just don’t know it.

Whether frogs get cancer.

Whether we keep the frogs awake.