Sierra Nevada Review

 

 

By Chris Muravez

Rejection. You would think I’d be used to this by now. I’ve been turned down for jobs, by women, by men (well, that happened once, but that’s a different story and a rather confusing period in my life), and by publishers. But it’s that last one that always stings, especially since I’ve made the choice a few years ago to dedicate my life to my art. Being turned away by my favorite publishers always hurts more than not getting that interview, that second date, that kiss good night.

This last summer I spent a rather damaging amount of time putting together a short collection of poems. My first chapbook. My first real attempt to enter the published literary world. I say a damaging amount of time because by the end of it all my friends and family were seriously concerned for my sanity. But what good is sanity when I get to spend my days writing and creating? Sure, I spend my time “working” at a “job” or maintaining a living environment that might actually be livable. Then again, I wouldn’t be able to produce 18 pages of poetry that is rejected by everyone; which, in turn, means that I also wouldn’t have the experience to tell you these things. But let’s not get on the problem of causation here, there were more important things at work.

This enterprise of mine wasn’t completely devoid of coherent thought, however. I did a lot of research into chapbook calls and contests (see the post on Duotrope). Some of my favorite journals, Burnside Review, Arcadia Magazine, and Rattle, all had contests that I could enter. I also felt confident enough to give them all a shot, and the biggest motivator for me was the work itself. That creative process that produces a light at the end of a tunnel you didn’t even know you were in. That constricting tunnel of everyday life in a totalizing environment of confusion and consumerism. The work itself is an escape, a rage, a release.  That is why many of write in the first place, isn’t it? But once you’re done (or done enough, I fall under the “a poem is never really finished” camp) it isn’t enough. It has to be understood by others too. That is how we connect after all. That’s why we write. We want to the world to know we are here, we are human, and to listen to us (or read us). So, with a determined drive, I voraciously created.

Once my work was sent out, I had a serious sense of accomplishment. That hardest part at this point was to not dwell on the possibilities that the future of my endeavors held. But this is hard when I have my Submittable page bookmarked on my computer, always sitting there tempting me to check its status.

Then I got my first rejection, from Burnside Review, and I felt a slight pin prick in my chest. Granted Burnside was not my big hopeful for publication, I still felt that twinge of sorrow that rejection brings. And I know better. We all know better than to get our aspirations to a point that when it falls through we regress into depression. But knowing and doing are two different things here. I could go on about what rejection is to writers. I could sit here and throw phrases about perseverance and patience at you. After all, rejection (at least in this context) is part of a writer’s life. But I did learn something.

When I saw who won the contest, Ed Skoog, I realized that I was going up against some heavy hitters. People who are established, but have most likely gone through similar torturous experiences. This is when I learned that rejection doesn’t necessarily take patience or perseverance, but practice. I learned that as I develop my skills as a writer, rejection is one of them, and quite possibly the most important. Becoming disciplined at rejection, or at least dealing with it, I don’t want to project an air of mediocrity here, is an often overlooked foundation of writing and trying to get published. Sure, I could fall back into my usual attitude of “Fuck the system” and become a rogue writer, but that requires more discontent than I care to deal with. So, practice. I still have a few more submissions out there, and if they turn me down too, I’m prepared for it (but I might just lose my shit if Arcadia rejects me).

By Laurie Macfee

On September 6^th, Tobias Wolff touched down on the campus of SNC for a brief but profound visit.  His book School Days, about a boy’s evolution into a writer, is the all-school read of 2013. What a gift for emerging writers to hear a writer talk about his process and journey towards craft.  In case you missed it, here are some highlights.

He built on the theme that a “love of reading leads to a love of writing,” and told the standing-room-only crowd about his earliest influences.  Wolff wished they were as profound as Susan Sontag’s love of Kierkegaard, but admitted his own started with a love of Albert Terhune, who wrote books about collie dogs, such as The Lad.  He read all 50 books in the series at the public library, noting that it is “superficial pleasures that make readers of us.”  Which, I must admit, made me feel better about my own early Nancy Drew/Agatha Christie obsess-athon.

The librarian saw his interest and introduced him to London’s Call of the Wild and White Fang, after which he found his way to Hemingway, O. Henry and Fitzgerald. Wolff began writing stories during a time when, “books seemed to arrive from another world.”  His writing style was an imitation of his favorite authors, but he also copied stories by typing them verbatim, the way a musician might play Coltrane to learn jazz or an artist might learn to paint by copying a Monet. Being a visual artist myself, I never made that connection with writing – that you have to copy someone’s strokes before you begin to understand your own hand.  He said that writers must, “free yourself through imitation – everyone has to pass thru that stage.”

Hemingway especially was a strong early influence, changing Wolff’s understanding of what a writer does. “What always gets me is the intimacy of it….  tenderness, fragility, the breakability of a person.  To begin to discover these things is to begin to call yourself to account, and it is this that starts to make you into a writer.” Another influential writer was Tolstoy.  Speaking about the short story Master and Man, he noted that the “moral inventory Tolstoy took of himself is what allowed the story to come into being; to find what is true or embarrassing links us to other people in a dramatic form.” I connected this to a question that runs constantly through my head: what did I risk on the page? My goalpost seems to move with alarming frequency.

While autobiographical elements influenced Wolff’s writing of School Days, he drove home the differences between fiction and memoir, saying, “Writers must know what they are writing before they set out.  When you put dye in the water, it is no longer clear. From the outset, this had to be a work of fiction.”  He noted that writing fiction draws on everything, while memoir must in essence be true, all of it, even if edited to “discern a shape in the life you are writing about.” It made me question where poetry landed on fiction/memoir scale – the blurring of the lines allowed, how even something “truthful” was shaded.

Wolff chose the three writers that visited the school in the novel (Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost and Ayn Rand) because, “they were all legendary personas that self-consciously created themselves in the public eye.”  He found it “permissible to be able to put dialog in their mouths because they used themselves in this way.”  I loved how he had to negotiate this authority to be able act on his creative impulse.  That he told us about it.

In answer to a reader wishing there was more in the ending about certain characters, Wolff gave a reply that was a wonderful summation of a writer’s role: “since no two people read a book the same way, I want to engage the imagination in such a way that I could begin the arc of a story and then trust the reader – so when I step out of the way, you can finish the circle without me. I want to politely introduce you all, then walk away.”

When asked why there was such a span of time between an event occurring and when Wolff wrote about it (perhaps 25 yrs), he said it “needed time to sit and season, so I can see the form of the experience – the shape.  To see what was important and what was not.  Things have to settle for me…. so I won’t be self-defensive, or self-protective.” This notion has come up two times since Wolff spoke, most recently for a writer in my poetry group: how you can’t write about the thing until one day, you can.  I told her what Wolff had said and it helped her as much as it did me – a certain recognition of a shared trait.

Wolff spoke about process, how he wished he could call up good stories on command – how that was not possible for him. “The spark of a story is a gift. It is given, it isn’t determined by you. All it takes is one or two years for it not to be given to see the truth of this.” And he never talks about a story until he has finished in its entirety. “The idea can be talked away.  It’s a mystery to be respected.”  I’d always thought that the possibility of a piece was like a held breath and sharing it pre-maturely allowed a bit to escape. What a relief this isn’t a solitary assumption.

Boarding schools are an often maligned subject, but Wolff wanted to “honor the rigor, the close friendships, generosity and truth seeking, the love of literature” he found at his school, a place where in writing, “the attempt was honored.” He also recounted how the first person that told him he should be a writer was another student – the weight that voice carried. It led him to want to create a novel “about vocation, how someone wants to become something – that crisis of identity.  To reconcile present conditions with a history.” The fact that Wolff painted an arc that mimicked his own, addressed the breakability of a person very like his own person, called himself into account – that is what made for such a generous read.

At the end of his lecture, he read one of my favorite dog-eared portions of the book, which begins with the protagonist relating a “shadow on my faith in the school.”  Wolff said that, as amazing as his experience was at his own school, he couldn’t ignore the class divisions. From the book: “Much as I wanted to believe in its egalitarian vision of itself, I never dared put it to the test.  Other boys must have felt the same intimations.  Maybe that was why so many of them wanted to become writers. Maybe it seemed to them, as it did to me, that to be a writer was to escape blood and class.”  The passage goes on to speak about the power of a writer, ending, “And why would Caesar fear Ovid, except for knowing that neither his divinity nor all his legions could protect him from a good line of poetry.”

I so want to believe that is true.  Thanks Mr. Wolff, for holding it out as a possibility.

 

 

Sincere thanks to June Saraceno for engineering this opportunity for readers and writers, and to Tobias Wolff for his generosity, eloquence, and wit – he was a storyteller in every sense. 

 

 

Laurie Macfee is working on her MFA Creative Writing (poetry) at SNC. She is currently the Redfield Fellow in Book Arts at the Black Rock Press at University of Nevada, Reno, and poetry editor of the Sierra Nevada Review. Before focusing on writing, she was Director of the Sheppard Gallery, Curator of Education at the Nevada Museum of Art, Co-Founder of Youth ArtWorks, part-time instructor at UNR and full-time art teacher at Reno High. She has a BA Liberal Studies and BFA Photography from San Jose State University, and did MFA studies in Visual Art at University of South Florida.

 

 

 

Duotrope, as of January 1^st, 2013, is now a subscription based service. Why, you ask? Duotrope has this to say:

 “For over seven years, Duotrope has tried to make ends meet by asking those who use the website or subscribe to our newsletter to contribute a small amount. Unfortunately, only about 10% of those who have used our services have ever contributed, and we haven’t met any of our monthly goals since 2007. Quite simply, we can no longer afford to run Duotrope this way.”

So, in essence, because of the stinginess (or at least perceived stinginess) of the Duotrope community, their hand was forced.

Conventional wisdom might assert that this is a terrible decision and that the switch to premium based accounts would undoubtedly lower the traffic and use of Duotrope. I believe that this is false. For one, Duotrope’s subscription based service is a middling $5 a month, or $50 for a full year. For the services that Duotrope offers (more on that later), it is a veritable steal. I understand that I sound like a Duotrope spokesperson but I assure you I’m not getting a dime of your possible $5. From an affordability stance, $5 is less that what one pays for a soda and a candy bar anymore

Frankly, the $5 a month fee is worth it alone for Duotrope’s submission manager. Rather than having to keep a mental list or an Excel spreadsheet of all of your submissions and progress, Duotrope does this for you. Granted, it still requires manual input because one does not submit directly through Duotrope; to offset that, by reporting one’s submissions and acceptances/rejections, statistics are produced that give one an idea of how stringent or lenient a journal may be. For example, we may have all heard how selective Beloit Poetry Journal is, but at Duotrope, there are statistical averages: based on 1009 reports over the last 12 months, BPJ rejects 96.73% of all submissions. These numbers are not meant to dissuade an aspiring author, but rather give them notice of how selective a journal is, reinforcing the idea of submitting only one’s absolute best work.

Duotrope also features arguably the best search index for writers of any genre. Do you write erotic surreal horror stories? Duotrope can find a journal for you. General free verse poetry? Duotrope will help you to narrow down your results because you will receive over 800 hits. Duotrope currently boasts a database of 4,845 markets. Markets include print, electronic, and audio publications, 39 different countries of publication and payment scales from nothing to professional as well as royalties. A note on payments, however: “professional payment” varies between fiction and poetry. For poetry, a professional payment is considered anything from $50 and up whereas for fiction, 5 US cents and up (so a 3,000 word story could garner from $150 to thousands). There are other payment types in-between such as “token” and semi-pro. The best source of information on this would be 1) the journal in question’s Duotrope page or 2) Duotrope’s own glossary: https://duotrope.com/glossary.aspx

There are some downsides, of course. Some markets don’t update their postings very often so you will often have to check with the website for up to date information (though Duotrope itself lists this as a disclaimer on every market page). Navigation can be a cumbersome at times and even though the submission tracker is a great tool, if you submit multiple stories/poems in a single sitting, it can be a bit tedious to go through and manually enter information; the statistics gleaned from the tracker can also be a bit slanted at times simply because not everyone reports when they submit or even when they are accepted/rejected.  With these sparse qualms in mind though, the $5 a month asking price is more than suitable for Duotrope. The odds of you finding some of these markets based on Google or other internet searches is pretty low either from other markets padding the results with money or simply growing weary of dozens of pages without results. There’s really nothing to lose by subscribing to Duotrope. If you still go unpublished, the sheer amount of journals that are added to Duotrope monthly will doubtlessly keep your writing mind up to snuff. Who knows, maybe you’ll even publish a piece about not getting published. All thanks to Duotrope.

Bryce Bullins is a senior at Sierra Nevada College and currently an editor for the Sierra Nevada Review as well as Secretary of the Creative Writing Club. He is majoring in English with a minor in music (classical voice). He has interests in philosophy (continental), sociopolitical systems, music, and abstraction. When not writing poetry or reviews, he is practicing voice or has his nose buried in a book (or e-book reader) or is polluting his ears with sonic vibrations.

By Chelsea Archer

As anyone who has ever moved knows, living in a new city with no friends or acquaintances can be daunting. Having lived my entire life in Reno, NV, suddenly picking up and moving to Oregon was both the most exciting and scary thing I’d ever done, of course that was before I got married. Being a writer, one of the first things I did was look for a local writing group that could get me feeling more connected to the community and pull me out of my anti-social bubble. In stepped the Willamette Writers group. With more than 1,600 members and four regional chapters, they instantly made me feel like I’d made the right choice moving to Oregon. I recently sat down with the Willamette Writers manager Bill Johnson, who was gracious enough to provide a few words of wisdom.

Bill: In high school, I had no interest in literature (I enjoyed reading James Bond novels and encyclopedias), but then I read a collection of best of year science fiction short stories. They were powerful stories that spoke about the world I lived in, in a way that literary fiction had never done for me.  They made me think. I started writing science fiction short stories.

Chelsea: How did Willamette Writers get started?

Bill: Willamette Writers was started in 1965 by a group of local writers. In the early days, they had dinner meetings with a speaker at a local restaurant.  It cost $10 to attend a one day conference. That was 1973. There was only one chapter in Portland, with a monthly newsletter. Membership was under 100.

Chelsea: What is the mission / goal of Willamette Writers?

Bill: To encourage and promote writers. We have chapters in Portland, Eugene, Medford, Salem, and Newport. The meetings are a place for writers to gather and share information, and the meetings also provide a place for authors and teachers to do presentations and workshops. We have a Herzog Writing Scholarship for high school seniors and college freshman and sophomores, and a Cynthia Whitcomb Scholarship for local teachers and students to attend our conference. Our Kay Snow contest is free for students in grades 1-12. We’ve had students and their families come to an awards banquet at our annual conference. We’ve even had some adult winners fly in from long distances to accept awards; people have told us winning a writing award was the highlight of their life. As more authors self-publish, we offer our members an opportunity to promote their work on our website, an email list, and our newsletter. We do a Books for Kids program that, via grants and donations, buys new books to donate to local organizations that serve children. We also collect gently used books to pass along. Our monthly newsletter is also a place where members can post news about publication or workshops.

Chelsea: What advice do you have for aspiring writers?

Bill: Mainly, don’t lock yourself into one style of writing. I started out writing science fiction short stories, wrote a few unpublished science fiction novels, then became a produced playwright, then a writer/director for video productions. Then I read manuscripts for literary agents and screenwriters in Hollywood, then became office manager of Willamette Writers. When a door opens, go through it. I ignored the people who told me I needed permission to open and go through doors.

Chelsea: What books inspire you?

Bill: When I was young, that collection of science fiction short stories had a huge impact on my life, and seeing a live performance of The Glass Menagerie on TV. It was mesmerizing. My young sisters were bawling as we watched. Kurt Vonnegut blew off the top of my head when I was in my early twenties. In terms of books, The Tin Drum astonished me. Most books, I have a sense of how an author wrote the book. The Tin Drum was beyond my understanding.

Chelsea: What cultural value do you see in writing, reading, storytelling, etc?

Bill: I see plays as the most primal form of storytelling. I see life itself as a story, and definitely things like politics as a form of storytelling. I’ve found in reading manuscripts that struggling writers often don’t understand the difference between writing for an audience and writing as a method to process their issues in life (emotionally numb authors write novels with emotionally numb main characters; authors who feel unacknowledged write novels with main characters who are acknowledged everywhere they go, while characters symbolic of the people the author feels in their personal lives who don’t offer the acknowledgement the author desires, often suffer violent deaths). In a larger sense, people can look back at the industrial revolution and marvel how people managed to survive going from living on farms for generations to crowded slums working in factories. A thousand years from now people will look back at the last twenty years and marvel how anyone survived going from an industrial to a digital society. Uplifting movies and sitcoms that help people relax and feel good about their TV friends are a part of how people survive in our society, for better or worse. The internet offers people a new form of feeling both connected and disconnected, but it’s the new world we live in. I’m not sure how this will play out in terms of storytelling, other than political campaigns and commercials being more sophisticated and compelling to a target audience.

Chelsea: What is the most important thing people don’t know about writing?

Bill: The difference between personal storytelling (stories written to transport the author or deal with the author’s issues in life) and telling a story to an audience, which requires a story, a plot, a main character who wants something, a point, etc.

Chelsea: Why do you think writers should join a group?

Bill: Writing can be a solitary profession, and for some writers personal contact with other authors is both affirming and inspiring. A few authors use networking to get where they want to go as an author (published, produced, etc). That said, some writers enjoy workshops, while others prefer to write intuitively and not explore their writing process. Writers should check out several groups to find the one that meets their needs.