Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers -- February 6, 2015 Edition

> Prolific writer Jordan Rosenfeld, in a video hangout with Estelle Erasmus, talks about how she churns out so many essays that get published in so many, many places. Worth the 14 minutes!

> Is being "sponsored" (meaning more or less not having to earn a paycheck) the brass ring for writers struggling to find/make/take enough time to seriously pursue their projects? Start at the Brevity blog with this post, and then follow the links back to the original Salon post that got the conversation started, and sideways to a number of responses, both yay and nay.

> Interested in exploring Canadian literary magazines and journals? Here's a handy round-up (the post date reads 2013, but it was just updated last week).

> The Freelancer offers 17 journalism conferences worth your time in 2015.  (Including the ASJA Annual Conference, where I'm pleased to be on a panel about writing groups.)

> Poet Jessica Piazza is submitting only to paying venues in 2015, and chronicling (tumbling?) her experiences (plus talking with other poets and editors) at Poetry Has Value.  (hat tip Erika Dreifus)

> Another great listening experience - Donna Talarico, founder/editor of the online creative nonfiction journal Hippocampus, on the Higher Ed Social podcast, discussing juggling teaching and editing, and some interesting Hippocampus behind-the-scenes re: submissions, selection, etc.

> Looking for "feminist/inclusive" places to submit writing? The Fem has a list.  (hat tip The Review Review)

> Finally, I don't know a lot about literary translation, but I know what's funny about words, and I love this: Idioms that cannot be literally translated into English. Well they can be, but hold no figurative meaning.  Like: "There's no cow on the ice" from the Swedish.

Have a great weekend!

Image: Flickr/Creative Commons (Filipe Soares Dilley)

Guest Blogger Shaun Hunter On Going Public With Her Memoir Manuscript

Shaun Hunter's personal essays have appeared in literary magazines and anthologies, including Embedded on the Home Front: Where Military and Civilian Lives Converge (Heritage House, 2012). Soon, she'll be contacting literary presses about her memoir, Under the Skin. Shaun lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where there are only 100 frost-free days per year. But on one of her trips south, we met at the Welcome Table Press essay symposium in New York City in 2011, where Shaun was one of the first writers to flag me down at a conference just to tell me she read my blog. Right then, I invited her to contribute a guest post, whenever she was ready. She's ready. 

Please welcome Shaun Hunter.

“You finish the book,” Janna Malamud Smith writes in An Absorbing Errand: How Artists and Craftsmen Make Their Way to Mastery. “It is time to reenter the world… It is tempting to turn around.”

I perch on this new place in my writing life: toes millimeters from the latest cliff edge, tempted to turn around. My book-length manuscript, five-plus years in the making, is “finished.”

I have completed other manuscripts – a graduate school thesis, and five biography books written for an educational publisher. Finishing those projects, I felt depleted, yet rewarded: deadlines met; degree conferred; contracts fulfilled. On to the next thing.

Not this time. After making the last edits to Under the Skin, a memoir about mothering, maternal legacy, and malignant melanoma, I thought I would feel buoyant, fired-up for the next leg of the journey. But the view from the edge of the cliff – a murky expanse fraught with rejection and indifference – is terrifying.

“Going public with your art,” author and psychotherapist Janna Smith explains, “is adulthood writ large: There is excitement, satisfaction, praise; there is also criticism, disappointment, and embarrassment.”

A mixed bag. The full meal deal of being a grown-up. A few weeks shy of my 52^nd birthday, I’ve been around the block. I can usually spot the bright-green shoots of my own illusions and prune them back. I have thickish skin. Why is the prospect of going public with my memoir so paralyzing?

Last summer, my twenty-year-old daughter went hang-gliding on a backpacking trip in Europe. I heard about her adventure on Twitter, hours after she flung herself into a Swiss valley. At the time, I was relieved she hadn’t alerted me to her plan in advance, and glad I found out after she’d landed safely, unscathed and exuberant.

I went paragliding today! It was by far the most incredible thing I’ve ever done.

After the news sunk in, I realized that this determined, self-aware daughter of mine had checked off yet another fear on her list toward becoming an adult.

           

According to Smith, when it comes to artists going public with their work, many finish but proceed no further.

What about me? Am I going to be content with letting a completed manuscript sit in a drawer, or am I going to do what it takes to get this 200-page memoir to market? I’ve toyed with the idea of giving up, “living as a civilian” as the poet Shawna LeMay calls it. Like LeMay, during this long Alberta winter I have considered “surrendering in the same way a person who has hypothermia wants to go to sleep in the deepening snow.”

Bury the manuscript in the drifts of paper in my office. Hole up and write only for my own pleasure, sheltered from the snow squalls of rejection. Suss out another line of work. I know in my bones that none of these options is viable.

For years, I have been inching toward going public: workshopping essays in classes and critique groups, and publishing a few; reading my work to strangers; and most recently, pasting my shining face on my first website that identifies me as a writer.

I know that ego is going to push me -- and my manuscript -- out the door. After a decade of trying to absorb Buddhist ideas about egolessness and impermanence after my cancer diagnosis, this is uncomfortable to admit. But Smith’s book about the psychological dimensions of art-making emboldens me: I want to be seen. I care about being heard. It’s not a fantasy about being famous, but the pressing human need to be recognized and valued. “Few desires,” Smith writes, “are as primal.”

Of course, a publishing contract would be sweet compensation for my years of labor on this book; I will settle for active, visible participation. In a society caught up with “showing and spending,” as Adam Gopnik writes in a recent New Yorker article, I want to be part of a community of artists “devoted to seeing and making.”

Janna Smith assures me I can learn how to navigate the gaping canyon between private and public. Cultivate your saleswoman self, she suggests. Clothe your emotions in Gore-Tex. Summon bravado.

Get in the game.

After my daughter’s trip, she showed me the picture she snapped in mid-glide: her feet in a pair of borrowed sneakers dangling a hundred meters above solid ground. I could feel the mountain air press against my face, hear the snap of the nylon wing above me, sense panic gusting through my gut. In that glimpse into my daughter’s adventure, I imagined what it would be like to soar.

I have finished my manuscript. It is time to reenter the world. I will resist the temptation to turn around. I will strap myself to a sturdy, wind-worthy sailing craft, and step off the cliff into my adult life.

Again. Always.

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, August 12, 2011 Edition

►Excerpts from books short-listed for the 2011 Man Booker Prize for Fiction, as well as those nominated for a number of other prestigious awards (such as the PEN/Faulkner, National Book Critic Circle, and Edgar, among others), can be found through this list of links.

►If you're planning to attend the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) conference in Chicago in 2012 (and even if you're not), you might want to check out their recently released list of just-approved panels, seminars, readings and other sessions.

►A lot of people may opt to take down their own status photo and upload something benign instead, after reading this piece about how facial recognition software and Facebook photos can lead to unsettling results.

►Mediabistro just announced an Authors Who Visit Book Clubs directory; writers can post their information, and clubs can search for nearby authors willing to make an appearance.

► Quill & Quire, which tracks the Canadian book scene, posts a links round-up once a week. The two most recent entries are here and here.

►The next U.S. poet laureate has been named.

►My sort-of-quarterly newsletter was just sent out. If you are not on the mailing list and want to be, please let me know.

►Finally, do authors sometimes get a little (or a major) attack of schadenfreude? You bet.

Have a great weekend!

Friday Fridge Clean-Out: Links for Writers, February 25, 2011

If you're new here, nearly every Friday, I post links to items of interest to writers that I've stumbled across. Enjoy!

►Over at The Writers Alley, Christin Taylor makes some good points about writers and the blank page.

►Buy the whole issue, or buy one short story. That's the idea behind Found Press Quarterly, a new Canadian digital literary journal.

►Speaking of Canada, you can get your fill of information about the literary journal world north of the border at The Literary Type.

►There is now a poetry blog at the National Book Foundation. A new original essay will appear each weekday until May. They began with the year 1950 and are working forward, paying tribute to the 51 poets who earned a National Book Award in poetry over the past 60 years.

►Though it wasn't often, whenever I was in New England, I'd enjoy Katherine A. Powers' column, A Reading Life in the Sunday Boston Globe. Now the column's been cut, but according to Galley Cat, I'll be able to find her at the Washington Post and Barnes & Noble Review. Here's an interview with Powers, from December.

►Finally, just for fun, A Book Inside looks at the unique and sometimes oddball rituals of 20 famous writers.

Have a great weekend.