Hi and I hope you’re having a great writing summer. Here in Southern California it’s been cloudy and sunless for a month, ideal weather for writing. I personally love these cloudy days. I find in the absence of sun there is much wondrous and mysterious in the world above our heads - something like trying to find pictures with my eyes shut. I’ve got some July announcements for you that could maybe jostle a few clouds around:
- My Italian immigrant novel, I LOVE YOU LIKE A TOMATO hits the bookstores July 16. It’s my first novel so I’m excited, jittery, hopeful, pleased, happy, you know - I’m experiencing emotions not unlike sending a child off for the first day of school. Please check the book out at your local bookstore. Info appears on my website: www.mariejordan.com.
- Here’s something I’m really excited about also. The inaugural issue of ROADSPOETRY, a new on-line poetry journal, for which I am the editor-in-chief, is now up. The very brilliant Hillary Plathe is editor. Our featured poet this issue is Sydney Lea, plus other poets you’ll want to read. We are open for submissions for future issues. So send us your poems and send us your comments! www.roadspoetry.com.
Here’s a Writersword for July 2003:
I thought you might enjoy the following writer’s fear of rejection advice from Garrison Keihlor. His cure is to employ the skills of self-deception, rationalization and fantasy and says: "We all have 3 a.m. thoughts about our children being run over and about our books being savaged by predatory critics. Some of us have these thoughts every day. The phone rings and your heart flutters. You have a bright idea for a book and moments later you can see a torpedo of a review written by some bitter enemy you hadn't been aware of. Sometimes it helps me, sitting at my desk, to say (out loud), "And the Lady Byng Trophy for Earnestness in Fiction goes to -- "and say my name and hear the applause in the Grand Ballroom of the Holiday Inn and walk forward and accept the small Lucite trophy. ...Whatever gets you over the hump. Except gin. Gin is no good for the fear of rejection. It only works to boost hilarity and then only for 15 minutes or so." Keihlor also recommends writing your own New York Times rave review (which works for both fiction writers and poets).
And here’s something by the poet Eleanor Wilner who said: "I think our culture has made us shallow and dreamless by inculcating the myth that the individual is defined and set apart by his or her own personal experience. As if we did not share a language, an ancestral history, a planetary memory called DNA. As if even our most personal experiences were not variants within a matrix common to us all." This can be an illuminating reality as we hammer away at our computers and notebooks seizing the day and the moment, trying to share our guts with the world. Longfellow wrote about seizing the moment, about finding our lives and our art in the 'now' of things when he wrote about the bird not returning to last year’s nest ... "For time will teach thee soon the truth. There are no birds in last year's nest."
Where rejection and universality fits into that I’m not sure so let me close with Pope’s classic opening lines of "Sound and Sense."
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
Dance on! We’re in this together.
marie
May 2003’s Writersword:
Here's something Francis Coppola said I thought worthy of passing on to you:
"I think we're going to see in the world in a short amount of years a real transition. We're entering the creative age." (hello!) "Everyone has creativity.... Creativity is after all the thing that makes us like God. You think of a god as someone who is creative."
-- If your mind works like Mr. Coppola's, what you do as a writer or artist might seem less laborious and more a divine appointment!
Be sure to check my website for info re the new on-line poetry zine I'm spear heading. SUBMIT YOUR POEMS. We are about ready to publish the inaugural issue, so submit right away. The theme for this first issue is "winter". Next issue theme is "windows".
Good writing to you and keep living your life as art ... marie
January 2003’s Writersword:
Difficilia quae pulchra
(Beautiful things are difficult)
I received this happy note from poet Marjorie Rosenfeld:
"Dear Marie: Thanks for your holiday greeting. [Writersword about Solitude] I've had a bit of luck. Andrew Kobos has taken another one of my poems for his Polish online journal ZWOJE ("The Scrolls"). It's in the current issue (No. 33: www.zwoje.com/zwoje).
You can click on either of the two buttons with "33" on them to get to the Table of Contents once the page loads. There's a lot of poetry in this issue but most of it is in Polish. However, you'll find a translation of Waldemar Kontewicz's "Pod Podloga" ("Under the Floor"), and I think that poem is quite wonderful in English. (It's probably even better in Polish but I can't tell you for sure!)"
---- Please check out this website and Marjorie's beautiful poems. ---
Kaye Van Nevel wrote thanking me for the Writersword last month about solitude and sent the following poem that could fit all year round:
(Untitled)
The ancients have lived in us
from time before books.
Often they are our five senses, sometimes the sixth.
They are flight and fight.
Stop, drop and roll.
They are more in our violent selves
than our peaceful ways.
We have had only 2000 years
(a mere infancy in the eons)
to recognize peace.
So God, smart father that He is,
each December brings to us
His Birthday for Our Birthday!
That we may raise peace above violence,
bring all our senses to rest in His freedom,
And, welcome the ancients to join us.
Kaye Van Nevel
December 2002
Now that the 2002 holidays are past, don't forget they'll come again in 2003. Trish Duggan wrote me in response to the last Writersword that the advice she gives is, "You don't have to make Christmas happen for everyone else. Let Christmas happen to you."
I always tell my students, "Don't let life happen to you. You happen to life!"
Bob Ashby sent me a funny piece on dust this week. In essence it said we should forget the dust in our houses and all go out and engage in the exciting prospect of living our lives. A sort of "seize the day, carpe deim" message. Most of us who live in our heads (or are struck down with a virus or something and can't get out of bed) could care less about dust. The venerable Kate Braverman once told me she is never lonely, I mean how could she be? She's got her characters!
I always look forward to hearing from you and receiving response to the website. I like to know you're there.
Kick up some dust,
Marie
Tragedy brings out our authentic selves. Reaching inward and then out to others through these times make life bearable. Living through a tragic event unmasks us, strips us of pretense. This is who we are, this is what we have. It puts us in touch with our deepest selves and regenerates our humanity. The poet, Kim Addonizio said some time ago, perhaps prophetically:
" ... Meanwhile, the essential questions remain the same. Who am I? How do I fit in this world? Does writing about it help? How do I balance a solitary activity such as writing with engagement and participation in the world around me? Can I fabricate some sense or rationale to make it all worthwhile?"
God bless us every one.
-- Marie