Tuesday Evening Book Report

Poets and Writers Best Books for Writers

My friend Barbara Abercrombie's book is splashed across the pages of Poets and Writers as one of the best writing books.

A few years back I took several of Barbara's classes in the Writer's Program at UCLA Extension. She's a gifted teacher. A writer whisperer. Some of the pages for my book first came out of my pen as I sat in her classroom.

You can find those pages in her book. And in mine. Click on the sidebar link below if you'd like to buy it.

And here's the link for Barbara's book: Kicking in the Wall.

Jack Gilbert: Coming to the End of Triumph

I read my first Jack Gilbert poem in Barbara Abercrombie's UCLA Extension class Writing the Healing Story. It seems overstated, perhaps, to say that now, a decade later,  I can conjure up the classroom, where I was sitting, and many of the faces around the tables that were arranged into a large hollow-centered rectangle. Barbara's writer-whisperer style of teaching often meant that she would use a poem as a prompt, and while this poem by Jack Gilbert did not wrench a premonition from me about the not- so-distant demise of my marriage, time stood still long enough for Gilbert's words to settle into me. Reading it again just after the poet's death on Tuesday, it felt all the more moving as a perfect description of how my marriage didn't end.


Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of triumph.

If you'd like to read more about Jack Gilbert, you can find a piece  here and here. 

The image at the top of the post is a Peter Paul Ruebens painting.

Writers, What do you do with your rejection notices?

Last night was the final class of "Submitting to Los Angeles Literary Magazines," a course I took through the UCLA Writer's Program. The teacher was Michelle Meyering, editor of The Rattling Wall, a journal that published an essay of mine last spring. I'd prefer various forms of torture to driving across the pot-holed, broken-streetlight wasteland that the City of Angels has become. I'd prefer being harangued by phone solicitors to paying UCLA's exorbitant $11.00 parking fees (unless you want the close-by parking--that's $18.00.) But, in an effort to organize the practicalities of my writing life, I endured the 90-minute drive and blew $111.00 in addition to the tuition. I'm glad I did.

Until I learned of Michelle's seasonal submission plan, I'd been trolling the usual submission calendars and email subscriptions to find places to submit my work. I read the lists. I made notes. I tried to figure out what to submit where. Tweaked it. Reduced the word count--or not. Tried to make this deadline with one piece, and that one with another, and that one. And seldom did.

It turns out that many literary magazines have similar seasonal submission deadlines, and Michelle scheduled her class to coincide with the April 1st deadline that is on the early end of the spectrum for spring. So last night, after 9 weeks of studying guidelines, interviewing local lit mag editors, working on log lines, short bios, cover letters, and polishing a single submission, we all showed up with stamps and envelopes. This morning Michelle took our work to the post office and mailed it. My essay is now chugging its way to 15 different literary magazines from across the country. This means rejection, of course. And maybe there'll be an acceptance in the somewhere, too. But what I'm happiest about is that I honed in on one piece and sent it out.

I'm done now. I'm going to read. And read. And read. When I'm ready, I'm going to write. Come fall, if I haven't been rendered completely insane by moving and getting my mother across the county and getting us both settled in my new house, I'll polish another piece and send it out.

To everything
there is a season
And a time to every purpose
Under heaven.


Writers, what do you do with your rejections? Keep them? Flush them? Light them on fire?