Category: Process

Rejections Update: The year in review

Jeanne Obbard

Here, a little bit late, are my final numbers for 2017:

  • Rejections: 62
  • Acceptances: 9 poems (in 8 journals)
  • Total submissions: 95
  • Submissions still open: 14? something like that?

I didn’t quite get to my goal of 100 submissions, oooooops. But, so what? Overall feeling:

I’m especially happy that the first of my “fey/strange girls” poems found a home at Gingerbread House. (See the “Writing” tab for all recent publications.)

And it’s become pretty obvious that I’m working on two separate book manuscripts. Nooooo problem.

I’m currently working 50 hours a week, so I’m confident that will end well.

But I learned something valuable from all the submitting this past year, and that’s that I need about 8 revisions to really get a poem to where I want it to be. It’s hard to define how much gets changed in 8 “versions”; since doing all my editing in Word, I’m much faster, more likely to trash whole sections, quicker to rearrange things. But regardless, I think it’s key that I go back to the poem with an exacting eye about 8 times. Less than that, and it’s not as polished; more than that, and I start to de-edit, mistrust myself, and lose all the weird parts. The poetry cleanse exercise has been huge in helping me learn how to jump over the weak early drafts faster.

My general feeling about the months of January and February are:

So… I haven’t submitted anything yet this year. But I did get one acceptance from a 2017 submission! And I need to take a look at my Spreadsheet O’ Doom and see if it’s time to update the format.

Happy writing and any other hobbies you might have!!

xoxo j

Rejections Update: Abandon expectations, all ye who enter here

Jeanne Obbard
  • Rejections so far: 57
  • Acceptances: 4
  • Total submissions: 87
  • Total submissions last year at this time: 5

I was pretty confident, in the depths of my Eeyore-esque soul, that I was going to finish out 2017 with no other acceptances, but then I got 3 in one week and now I have to do the other kind of reality testing. I.e., rejections are a part of life, but so are acceptances. (So are three thousand dollar plumbing fixes that have to be re-done, at great damage to one’s dining room ceiling and one’s sanity, but that’s another topic.)

I will not achieve that goal of 100 rejections in 2017. Whereas submitting a packet is something I have control over, whether I get a rejection in any particular time-frame is something I have no control over. Once I hit “send,” it’s in the hands of editors, readers, and slush piles; some of these processes are speedy, others are ponderous, and it’s not up to me how that works; I have to let it progress in its own time. So in thinking about this, I’m now recalibrating my goals. I don’t care so much if I get the rejections, but I’d like to get to 100 submissions this year. It’s doable, and I’ll be really happy to achieve that milestone. And as for 2018? I’m thinking 150 submissions.

The thing that holds me back the most from submitting is a lack of confidence. I have windows of positivity where I feel strongly “I’ve got five good poems,” and I put the packet together, and the only thing that keeps me from sending it out is a time constraint. But what’s much more likely to stop me in my tracks is feeling that I need to revise some more, and not trusting myself to know how to do it, or not able to concentrate, or not possessing a belief in the work and an excitement about it. And that’s a different challenge from just not being able to make the revision work or not being happy with the result. Looking back on my writing career, an insufficient ego has probably been my biggest stumbling block. I think in the project of pushing to get rejections, I’ve been able to confront this to some degree.

Sending out a lot of submissions has also forced me to finish poems faster, to let go of them sooner. I think overall this has been really good for me. But in some ways, I’m also kind of pushing back against it. Sometimes a poem really does need to sit for months or years before you can look at it with clear eyes and see where its structure needs to be rebuilt. A writer friend of mine said recently “I’m a slow writer and I need to understand that and be okay with my process.” I don’t ever want to publish something that I feel is not whole or ready. So my 2018 tactic needs to take that into account. After all, my end goal isn’t just to publish anything; it’s to create a small and lasting structure of meaning.

And that’s all the news from my Spreadsheet of Doom.

Just kidding, I love my Spreadsheet of Doom. 😀

The very, very, very long view.

Rejections Update or: The Speadsheet That Ate My Life

Jeanne Obbard

Where I’m at:

  • Rejections: 22
  • Acceptances: 0
  • Total submissions: 48
  • That breaks out to 23 poems being read by editors (or undergrads in charge of slush piles) a total of 207 times.
  • Total submissions last year at this time: 0

Meanwhile I am still doing a one-week-per-month “poetry cleanse,” and that’s the main way I’m generating new work and working through revisions.

Reader, may I be perfectly frank about this experience?

It’s fucking exhausting.

…

Some organizational issues that have come up:

  • It’s getting harder to keep track of versions. There have been a couple poems I sent out where I find I’m relieved when it gets rejected, because I’ve since revised it. I suppose this is a known hazard of Poet Life.
  • The spreadsheet has become a bit unwieldy. In the process of putting together packets that are appropriate to each journal, I’ve gradually lost my neat “Group A / Group B / Group C” logic. At this point I’m just keeping one poem at no more than 10 places, though, in looking at Duotrope’s data on acceptance rates, I am highly unlikely to have to pull a poem. Here’s a bird’s eye view of the spreadsheet now:

“Hope: A Conceptual Artwork”

But you know, I can deal with all that. The real issue is that I feel I’ve lost any sense of joy in this process. I feel beaten down. I’ve often approached burn-out in my day job, but to come up against it in my writing practice is a fun new experience.

…

I was watching a documentary on the making of Sense8, and the cast and crew were talking about the way the Wachowskis work:

“It’s really incredible to watch how they work. When they show up on a set, they use everything.”

“They are constantly open to inspiration, and taking inspiration from wherever in the atmosphere, the soil, the people, whatever that’s there at the moment, and take what they have on the page… as a blueprint. They allow it to come to life and be alive in that moment.”

“They enjoy putting things together; they enjoy trying things. We, often times, we’ll cut things one way, it’ll work, but let’s try this way. Let’s try something like this. Let’s try it like that.”

“Let’s just try things, because that’s what we do.”

“We try things. Yeah. Let’s try this.”

As I listened to this (and rewound it like three times) I thought, yes, this is what the work looks like. And what I’m doing now feels like the exact opposite of this. And I realized that I don’t need to keep up with some arbitrary goal. And I felt a weight lift off of me, a weight I didn’t even acknowledge I was carrying.

…

What is creativity? It’s labor, for sure, sometimes difficult labor. But it leaves you with more satisfaction and ambition, not less. In the past months, I’ve really lost that lightness in the midst of my dark, stressed “submit all the time” mood. “Let’s just try things” implies a sense of deep confidence in your process. It says that possibility is as important as the numbers. That progress is not always linear or planned.

Being rejected repeatedly is also a kind of labor. It’s good to approach it as a game, for sure. But it’s also demoralizing, and I have to acknowledge that.

…

Am I just not cut out for this?

…

I could do with less torture, and more trust.

Film editors discussing Wachowski sisters’ process

Rejections Update or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Spreadsheet

Jeanne Obbard

While I’m not yet on track to hit 100 rejections in 2017, I do have exponentially more submissions out than I did last year at this time.

What my submissions spreadsheet looks like:

 

  • Rejections so far: 3
  • Acceptances: 0
  • Total submissions: 21
  • Total submissions last year at this time: 0

I currently have three separate groups of poems out to journals/contests; each packet has between three and five poems. I guess you could call this cheating as far as the 100 rejections project goes, but I figured it’s more important to get things circulating than to have each packet be the maximum possible size.

As I send poems out, I’ve been putting them on a master list called “finished.” (Let’s accept on faith for the moment that anything is ever finished.) I added a column for category or theme… which is cool.. now I can see, for example, that I have more Greek myth poems than I thought I did. I have no idea if this means I’ll ever have a themed manuscript. I generally feel that I write too catholically to ever produce such a thing, despite how popular they are right now. But as far as the next iteration of the/a book, well, it’s not exactly “in progress”… but I’ll call it “closer to existing” than it was a few months ago.

What my “finished poems” tab looks like:

What I look at when I start to lose energy:

In other news, a poet friend made this book cover art out of my recent hand x-ray. In honor of International Women’s Day:

Progress

Jeanne Obbard

Text: The Art of the Deal; Erasure: Me

Friends, 2017 is here. Is it ever. And each day brings some new offense against democracy, good sense, and human kindness. The kleptocrats insist they will make everyone rich; the body police say they will free us from government intrusion; the grandchildren of immigrants are deporting other immigrants; and the biggest fake of all keeps calling real journalism “fake news.” And as if that weren’t enough, there is growing evidence that our executive branch has been compromised by a foreign dictatorship. We’re living in The Upside Down, complete with Cold War flashbacks. Maybe a few of us will find out we are super-powered like Eleven, but in the meantime, we have to get on our bikes and fight the monsters with little more than unearned confidence, friendship, and breakfast foods.

Eleven, with the Waffles Of Victory.

 

I will admit that I got to the point of exhaustion way too quickly. Having a day job and a job-for-love is already a juggling act; now I’m also integrating my responsibilities as a citizen. One way is to put my money where my mouth is, by supporting institutions like The Washington Post and the ACLU. Another way is to raise my voice. Although I’m sure my regular letters to my weaselly Republican senator go ignored, it does help me to be a high-information voter, aware of legislation as it unfolds. It also feels urgent to put this historical moment into words, and I’m honored that my work has found a home in Thank You For Swallowing and Cleaver’s Life As Activism series.

My recent writing has become much more “political.” But something I think we often forget is that every poem – every piece of artmaking – is a political act. We live in a culture that does not value art except as a commercial endeavor, but creativity has a profound value outside the marketplace, in the lived experience of Americans. Poetry says “what I do matters” and “how I feel matters” and it says “I am paying attention to the world.” Through poetry we have the power to see each other, to practice empathy, to recognize injustice and call it out. The poet and the reader of poetry is not a consumer; she is a citizen; this is our honored role going back to Whitman and Dickinson both.

Many days, I wake up saturated with a feeling of vague horror. But what I try to ask myself is: “how do you want the next four years to look for you?” As writers, we are called to record this moment in time; if all you are doing is writing it down in a journal, you are part of the resistance. Among my writing goals for 2017: be a witness; read more poetry, even just one poem a day; continue with monthly poetry accountability exercise; and collect 100 rejections in 2017.

In solidarity,

Jeanne

50,000 people at the Women’s March in Philadelphia

 

Resistance flair. Because jewelry is never not relevant.

Poetry accountability project #3

Jeanne Obbard

still

 

You know what’s a clever thing to do when you’re working a lot of 12-hour days? Start a poetry accountability project with some friends.

Really. It’s SUCH a good idea.

But my usual Instigator Friend said let’s do it. So here I am on the other side of a very sleep-deprived week, and I have seven new drafts.

See, I have a real problem. My problem is, I often wait to write new stuff until the mood strikes me. You know the mood I mean – the “let’s write something!” mood.

Let me tell you about the mood. The mood is very nice to have, in those golden moments when it presents itself.

The mood is also:

  • surprisingly rare
  • misleading
  • easily crushed by anxiety and depression
  • fickle
  • unreliable
  • and generally an asshole.

Seriously, fuck the mood.

In my experience, writing sometimes happens when you wait for it to happen.

But when you plan for it to happen, it happens a whole lot more. Sometimes what you produce sucks and sometimes it’s a workable draft, but you need both of these to happen in order to build the body of work.

I’ve done two poetry “grinds” previously (see here and here). (And here’s another great post about the practice.) This time my Instigator Friend called it a ‘”cleanse” and suggested we do it for a comparatively brief seven days.

A week really seems perfect – it’s long enough to produce both some junk and some good stuff, without too much pressure. But it’s not so long that the sleep deprivation will actually kill you. In fact we liked the outcome so much that we are planning to do it once a month. So in theory every month would look like this: one week for generating new work; the other three weeks for revising and submitting.

This time around, I came into it with a lot more intention. During the day I would focus on something and think “I want to write a poem about that.” (These were not grand topics of import to the humanist project. These were like “I’m going to write about that bird outside my office” or “I’m going to write about my neighbor’s dog.”) Then at about 9pm, when I should have been going to bed, I’d open a Word doc and start the poem. Let me tell you, the first things I write are always crap. I mean, always.

Here – for your amusement – are some opening lines:

I don’t LIKE pantoums, that’s all

I’ve never ever had one work at all

eve, eva, ever, either

is she  never never neither

eva, evita, evelyn, evie,

write something sexy

about a man and a woman

who aren’t supposed to be together

 

And then: I kept going. I wrote something. Something at least passable. Because I had to. Because I said I would.

 

Major recurring topic: [birds]

BIRDS!

To MFA or not to MFA…

Jeanne Obbard

… that is the question. And I’m not the first to ask it, obviously. There’s a near-continual debate, in writing circles, about the MFA – is it good for poetry? is it bad for poetry? – who cares! can we even afford it? What happens to a person of color in an MFA program? I’m strangely relieved that the debate is still a lively one. And I don’t see it dying down anytime soon.

I had a friend who was in school for her MA/PhD, and she had a classmate who had already completed an MFA from Iowa, and was getting an MA in art history at a prestigious liberal arts college. I was like, dude, you’re telling me he goes from highly regarded program to highly regarded program, just collecting degrees that interest him? Yep, he was. He was – and I feel like you can see this coming – from a well-off family. I wished, fervently, that I was him. Well, not a dude – but intellectually curious, gifted, and rich. You get the idea. A life of studying things I love? Sign me the fuck up!

So if I were independently wealthy, I’d get an MFA. If I wanted to teach, I’d certainly do it. And I think it would be awesome. But so would all of life be kind of awesome if I didn’t have a day job, worries about retirement, and all the various constraints on my limited life energy that most of us have.

I used to spend a lot of time thinking about how much I wanted more freedom. But in day-dreaming, I kind of shortchanged the freedoms I do have. I can’t throw all my structures away and go live in a yurt. But I can make choices, find out they’re right for me, or all wrong for me, abandon one path for another, abandon one path for no path, start over, double down, doubt everything I’ve ever written, send it out anyway. And maybe it’s the cynicism of encroaching middle age, but I spend a lot less time fixated on the pie in the sky these days. I suspect that a certain amount of pragmatism is a necessary step to actually getting what I want.

So here’s my life: I have a non-literary day job, and I squish poetry in wherever it will fit. Poetry, for its part, is remarkably agreeable about this. It understands my need to do sometimes a little, occasionally a lot, go down plenty of blind alleys, and on some days ignore it completely (mystery leak in kitchen, evening spent crying, important episodes of Gilmore Girls to watch, etc.)

It’s true that I often feel like less of a Serious Poet because I don’t have an MFA. I’m continually impressed by people who pursue them, whether full-time or on top of a job, or with small children at home, because they want to teach or because they just feel like it’s the right thing. We’re a tribe. I want success for every writer. I support every writer doing what she most wants to do. But I also accept that some things are not me, or not me at this moment.

At this moment, I think my writing benefits more from small, persistent actions than from grand, sweeping commitments.

And poetry holds, generously and gently, the imperfect life. The life of compromises. The life of the worried, the hopeful, the confused. I’d even go so far as to say poetry welcomes it.

This is not the book you’re looking for

Jeanne Obbard

So, I have a draft of a poetry collection. I had put it together to submit to a contest with an immovable deadline. [Outcome: I am not a Yale Younger Poet.] Even though the timing wasn’t right and I didn’t have enough good material, I worked hard on the shape of that potential book.

And now I realize I have to throw it out and start over.

Because the way I actually write does not match up to the way I wanted to write. The structure, which I put together like an elaborate puzzle? Was not organic to the things I actually write about. The book I had in my head is not the book I’m going to end up with.

 

New possible sections for a collection of poems:

Part I.  Angry poems, with hints of social criticism.

Part II.  Depressed poems, with overuse of winter tropes.

Part III.  Poems in which I come to terms with anger and depression and reach something as close to zen enlightenment as I’m capable of. Overuse of fall and spring tropes.

Part IV. [END BOOK BEFORE SAPPINESS SETS IN.]

 

Yeah, I think I’ve got this nailed down. This time.

Poetry Grind #2 Update

Jeanne Obbard

(Read about Poetry Grind #1 here.)

Poetry Grind #2 is in progress, instigated once again by the amazing K.T. Landon! This time we have 9 members; some of us are the same as last time and some are different.

It’s… different. I’m having a harder time generating new stuff. I think that’s just… life, honestly. A lot more static interfering with the signal.

On the other side of that, I’ve been using the grind as motivation to go back to older stuff that needs revising. Like, neeeeeeeds revising. Or needs to be summarily DELETED.

Do you ever just delete old work? I was always like “Save All The Things!” But in the process of moving house, I  ended up donating and throwing away bags and bags of stuff. It was easier than I thought it would be. And it was a shock to the system that I’m still recovering from, but that I needed. So now I’m doing the same thing with old drafts that never went anywhere. If there are one or two good lines in a draft, I copy/paste them into an “inspiration” document, then delete the rest.

I think the reason this works for me is that when I re-read things I don’t like, I have a really strong emotional reaction to it. I can’t stand the self-indulgence and pretentiousness. It makes me depressed and irritated. And since I’ve been keeping a journal for [redacted] years, it’s not like I don’t have those same thoughts written down somewhere else.

So I’m kind of feeling less precious about every single piece of writing.

 

Some art stuff

Jeanne Obbard

p_013131

 

Life gets increasingly complicated over time. I tend to take on multiple little projects, and since I have a day job, I sometimes have to cull my activities so I can refocus on writing.

So thank you to the friend who suggested I should have a crafting room in my new place. I had been thinking of it as a writing room, but it should be more.

Over the years I have undertaken a lot of amateur art projects. Lithographs and artist’s books, pottery and collaged valentines. I like to lose objectivity in the embroidery floss aisle at the fabric store. I have a mild obsession with sewing handbags. For several months, I kept a florid visual journal using colored pencils. I used to take weird Polaroid photographs for kicks (good times, good times). I’m not saying I’m good at any of these things – that’s really not the point – just that part of valuing creativity is that the creative thing tends to leak out everywhere. Packing and moving the detritus of all these projects (or, when I was desperate and out of time, throwing them in the dumpster) forced me to think about the nature of art-making.

And this is my conclusion: art is essentially – well, disposable isn’t the right word – let’s say in transit. It passes from me and out to the world. I don’t mean that the product is worthless. My nephew wore the bracelets until they fell apart, my friends seem to love their valentines (thanks for humoring me, guys!), and somebody at the Goodwill store is going to be happy to discover that bag I made out of batik turtle fabric (uh, I hope). And yes, my mom still keeps all my pottery.

But art, the product, has meaning as we give it away.* It starts life inside us, but it’s really complete when it’s gone into someone else’s head and rearranged things a little.

 

* Or sell it, if you’re a professional.