publish_or_perish ovenbird When it came to the dictum to publish or perish, I perished. The hoops were too tight to squeeze through, too high to reach, too bent and twisted to even get a foot to pass through the aperture. I found that the endless tweaking and edits killed my love for my subjects. It became an exercise in crafting a key that would open the locked door of academic legitimacy. I failed. I once spent months working on an essay about Stef Penney’s book The Tenderness of Wolves. A professor was helping me polish it for publication. In the last stages of refinement he ghosted me. I recall creeping to the graduate school office to quietly put all the books and papers he’d loaned me into his faculty mailbox. I couldn’t bring myself to confront him. And I didn’t bother to submit the paper to the journal we’d chosen for it. I perished. When I finished my MA I didn’t read for an entire year. Words had lost their meaning. They were just reminders of what I had failed to achieve and how I was going to stand outside of the inner circle of literary scholars forever. I believed in stories—their transformative power, their ability to give shape to our terrifying, formless lives. I wanted to share that love with other people. I thought becoming a professor of literature would allow me to do that most effectively. Giving up that dream crushed me. I got an office job that ate huge handfuls of my soul every day. I got married. I got pregnant. I slowly returned to the practice of reading. I started a blog that no one ever looked at. I wrote hundreds of pages in my hand-written journals. I gave up on my own words ever having an impact on the world. Being here for over a year I have found that I have words again. They won’t be read by academics with the power to bestow accolades. They won’t be bound between shiny covers or grace the shelves of a local bookstore. They won’t make money or put my name on the lips of influential readers. They won’t be attached to my name at all. But the older I get the more I find that it’s not my name I wish to be known. It’s my heart. And a journal is no place for a heart to live. Red knows how to hold a heart. It IS a heart. Bloody and beating. There aren’t a lot of us here to witness its persistent contractions and I don’t think I’ll ever understand why so few are called to dwell in its chambers. But I know that it is vital and, in a strange way, alive. And I know that I am more alive for letting my mind echo here. There’s a difference between being watched and being seen. The academic world kept its eyes on me only to see how it could exploit my skills to enhance its own prestige. I won’t be going back. But Red is a place I think I can stay, with my eyes wide open and weeping. 260506 ... raze my formal education doesn't extend beyond a high_school diploma. but i feel this in my bones. it was mrs. broad, my last english teacher, who killed my love of words. for reasons she never explained, she made me a target and decided my writing was everything that was wrong in the world. i tried changing my voice to suit her sensibilities. nothing i did was good enough for her. it got to the point where i started going out of my way to fail every assignment i could. i scribbled bullshit about the care bears between the lines when i was supposed to be answering questions about "macbeth". i still passed and got my credit in the end. i'm not sure how. i didn't want to. a few years ago i found my grade twelve report card in the basement. in the comments section, mrs. broad wrote: "has ability but does not appear to be motivated." i had to laugh. it was this_place that gave my voice back to me and made me believe in the beauty and power of language again. while there have been moments when i've landed on a literary journal that spotlights flash fiction or micro memoir and thought, "hey, this is sort of what i do already, even if i can't write fiction to save my life anymore," the idea of being rejected by a stranger is enough to make me nauseous. having someone i don't even know tell me my words aren't worthy of staining their digital digest isn't an experience i need to have. i've got nothing but respect for the people who put themselves out there and get their writing published when and where they can. it's just not for me. i don't write for an audience. i write because i need to. because i wouldn't be able to breathe if i didn't. i would rather perish here, where i've faltered and fractured and still found a way to wring words from the desiccated husk of who used to be. where i've found some of the most important people in my life. where i've read things that exist nowhere else, that have moved me in places i didn't know were mine to move. i intend to be here for as long as my mind and my body go on living. i hope you will be too. 260506 what's it to you? who go blather from