Making a Literary Life

How I am feeling today: capricious

What I am listening to today: Flamingosis – A Groovy Thing

What I am reading today: Making a Literary Life (Carolyn See)

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I have once again picked up an old standard: Carolyn See’s Making a Literary Life. One of the better books of it’s kind on pragmatic suggestions for surviving day-to-day life as a writer in the early 21st century. I remember first reading it in grad school for a class called Aspects of a Writer, where we discussed how to cultivate a writing life that shattered the Romantic conception of the writer’s life as merely something full of spending all day at cafes and bars writing amazing first drafts. It was, and still is, certainly a text needed for all first year MFAs, and perhaps even those more precocious undergrad poets and authors.

While the deepest seeds of mysticism will never truly drain from my writer’s soul, I still found this text quite enjoyable and edifying. It is true that being a writer is about more than the words on the page or screen, and that in order to survive and be relevant in the writing world, let alone the artistic world, you need to be think of it as a bit of a business of skills. But I HATE the idea of having to market myself or create a writer’s brand (he says as he writes a blog post on his website created to do just that). Sadly, to an extent, it would seem that you need to strike a balance between writing in isolation and self-publishing (which is perfectly fine for some) and selling your soul to a publisher. It of course all depends on the kind of writer you want to be in this world.

For myself, I know that I should submit more writing to magazines, and even contests, but it isn’t always a priority. At least, not as much as honing my craft more and more. What I send out needs to be of the best quality it can be. This might seem obvious, but really it’s a frustrating endeavor for a perfectionist. When I look at a batch of poems that are all fifth or sixth drafts, ready to be sent off to magazines, I can feel a bit like Ken Watanabe’s character, Lord Katsumoto, in the Last Samurai as he looks at the tree of blossoms and says, “the perfect blossom is a rare thing. You could spend your life looking for one, and it would not be a wasted life.”

On the other hand, (spoiler!) it does take that character being moments from his death to realize that all the blossoms are perfect. So maybe it is time to let go of that false belief in the elusive perfect poem, relish in the discovery, and just put together a few chapbooks with all the material I have from the last few years, and send them off to contests already. Because if something I write and believe in doesn’t get published, I would rather it be because an editor tells me no, and not because I did.