second_guessing tender_square my former writing mentor sends an innocuous email with the schedule for the writers that are visiting the zell program in the next academic year and the spiral begins. i skim the list and don’t recognize any of the names. which isn’t surprising. i’m not one with the pulse of what’s moving the literary world. i subscribed to “poets & writers” for a year, after my former mentor suggested it would be good for me post-mfa, and i don’t think i read more than a single issue. i collected them with the best intentions, and then placed them by the curb last summer for someone else to enjoy. my teachers have stressed that you have to know what’s in the scene if you want to be a part of it. the only writers i read are on these red pages; my favourite writers live here. i haven’t made it through a single poetry book this year. i have only been able to manage one fiction title so far. the spiral makes me question my path, and i can’t tell if the nature of inquiry is genuine or whether i’m trying to shake off the specter of the writer i thought i had to be. i told myself i wasn’t going to submit to a single lit magazine or contest this year. and so far, that has been a fairly easy goal to uphold, the not doing for someone who is a doer; there have been so many other tasks i’ve had to take care of, and going through a very challenging time personally has made me believe it was best to have low expectations. yet, seeing this email about these gifted emerging authors made me less certain of that choice. these writers have their perfect books with studious headshots next to their “very serious” works and i start believing that i will always be a joke. i have never been one for academic poetry, and yet still there’s this part of me that wants to be accepted by the establishment, that fears that my logical and concrete approach to writing will not elevate me into someone with something important to say and share. (i mean, is a career highlight for me really being invited to an mfa program to speak about what i think writing is and trying to “teach” others? no fucking way.) fear finds a crack and worms its way into my heart. i can’t stand my voice; am i too adjective-heavy? do i not pick exciting verbs and nouns to do the heavy lifting? am i always capturing the same challenges and repeating myself? what am i even trying to say as an artist anyway? and now that i’ve insulated myself from rejection, there is terror with putting myself back out there. i have written so many blathes i have no real inventory of what i’ve done. i have not gone back and rewritten pieces to find out what they’re really about. i know there could be a book in here somewhere but i don’t have the energy to unearth it. maybe i’m not ready to face the full scope of what i’ve done. maybe i might not ever be. where does this pressure come from? i graduated fifteen months ago and what i can’t face is having been a writer with such promise who turns into the person who never releases something of substance again. 220807 ... raze i've been through this same thing, in my own way. wishing i could be part of a world that never wanted me. a world that saw me as nothing but a novelty with a short shelf life. feeling shut out of a community i never belonged to, though i fought like hell to be seen and heard. watching people who phone in barrels stuffed with hot air being rewarded for their supposedly incisive, meaningful work when they're nothing but artistically barren, morally bankrupt opportunists. doubting my own abilities. wondering what the point is. of anything. for whatever it might be worth, you're one of my favourite writers on the planet. your heart is in everything you do. your words rake my soul and burn the back of my throat. which isn't to say that what you're feeling isn't valid. but you're an incredible artist. and you've made your life your art in a way few people ever do. that's not nothing. it's everything. you're not a joke. you're a walking miracle. 220807 ... tender_square you know, you gave me the best advice raze. you said that i shouldn't push away whatever i'm feeling but write through it. that's what this blathe is; i was feeling empty and superficial but i knew it was important to try to capture the dimensions of that pain, even if it's temporary. because right now, the intensity is acute. and i know it's not the last time i will feel this way. i thought that writing about these fears could be a way of taking their power away. and i thought if anyone else has felt this way the could recognize a part of themselves here too; and knowing there's others makes it a hell of a lot less lonely. thank you so much for sharing what you've been through and for your incredible support here. i think you know how much i respect and admire you, both as a person and as an artist, and just how much you and your words (in all their forms) mean to me. 220807 ... nr tender_square, what you posted reminds me SO MUCH of when i worked in book publishing. i didn't work as a writer, but i worked with a lot of them, and all kinds of people in the business. in terms of needing to know what's in the scene... not to shame your teachers, but i think that's kind of bullshit. if people WANT to keep tabs on other writers in the scene because of genuine interest or building connections or getting inspiration, then power to them. but it's not what's behind the talent of writing for most people. i cringe when i think about those studious author photos and "serious" writings. the writing might be good, but it brings me back to a sort of old-money, old-white-man club. not to say everyone who markets themselves this way falls under that category, and again, to each their own, but i see it as a personal choice rather than a requirement or something "better." one of my favourite authors that i worked with has a fun author photo, and her book launch was at an old rep cinema. another author i worked with is a chatty energizer bunny who just has ideas coming out the wazoo all the time, so he comes out with book after book after book. i'm not sure how plugged-in he is to other works in the lit scene, but those ideas and creativity would come regardless. i don't know what it is about creative fields that makes cliques so common; maybe it's out of insecurity that you won't have a chance to be successful if you're not "in" with the known people who might make you so. (only about 10 percent of the super-cliquey people i worked with in publishing are still in the industry, hmm...) in my publicity job, i often felt i wasn't as aware of everything around me as much as others, especially those who'd be in the industry a long time. but one of those people, who worked in the office, told me i was one of the best publicists he'd ever worked with. so there, old-publishing cliques! i hope this didn't come across as a lecture; you just sparked some passion in me. but i agree that your writing is beautiful and real, and it is my opinion that you should do it when and how you want. 220807 ... epitome of incomprehensibility The worry about not living up to expectations - I feel this too much. I don't really have a solution, other than to remember that there isn't any clear-cut definition of "success." But sometimes it's friggin hard, y'know? I agree with nr that it's too much pressure for anyone to try to keep up with the "writing scene." For one, it's far too vast, especially if you're dealing with a wide category (people writing in English in North America? that's going to be, like, millions of pages a year). Or even if someone's trying to ferret out the best writing, the most innovative, the most prescient/trendy/whatever, people will have many different ideas of what that is. Following what interests you will be less pressure and you'll probably be more likely to open up new horizons just by following those threads than relying on what others have recommended. 220807 ... e_o_i My last sentence was confusing. What I mean isn't to ignore friends' book recommendations, necessarily (I've read some good books that way). Just to be skeptical of what's been curated as the "best of this/that" because no one has a magical bird's-eye-view of everything. Now that I put it into plain words, it seems obvious. In any case, your writing is powerful. And if you feel that you've been neglecting the publishing side, putting a toe into that might be fulfilling. If you want to, if you feel the time is right. My problem is kind of the opposite: I keep telling myself to submit to journals once a month, and then just do it every six months or so - not getting published at all these past few years, except with a small press that's associated with a regional poetry event (and has since mostly been dismantled, because of people moving and then COVID). But it does feel fulfilling right now to be working on a specific project, even if I have second thoughts about it on a regular basis and I need to add side projects because of how my mental focus works, or doesn't. 220807 ... kerry your writing is lush and alive and (in my opinion) what the whole process of the mfa stirs up (for most of us, in my opinion) is self-doubt and comparison instead of energy and curiosity. not that you don't have energy or curiosity, but those things can so easily be overshadowed by this sense of competition (with other people, with yourself). of course i'm biased not only because you're my friend and i respect you and your writing, but because i also find myself looking back and trying to find evidence of legitimacy to remind myself why i ever do any of this writing stuff in the first place. a prize, a story published in some magazine--even these things aren't as powerful as the doubt and second_guessing. i hope even a little of that made sense. 220811 ... past we were delayed getting home last night, the entire highway in both directions was closed for scheduled maintenance and will be into next week, forcing a meandering and clogged detour through some of the more maligned streets in town. this gave some extra time to talk and a lot of the conversation circled the themes of this blathe: comparing notes on publishing, getting research jobs, finding funding, and the whole lie of peer review (the worst system for determining merit, except all the others that have been tried). it is really easy to second guess oneself when in reality so much is based on luck: luck in terms of who agrees to review something (job application, piece of writing, grant proposal), luck in terms of the competition (and how they relate to the reviewers), luck in terms of the intersection (or lack there of) of personal and institutional needs. anyways, as a couple of "quitters" (from one perspective, or perhaps more healthily "people who moved on"), debunking pure merit has its advantages. of course merit exists and is important, but it's not everything and isn't even necessarily determinative. and, of course, every path is different and has value in itself. 220812 ... tender_square kerry, i think you nailed it with the mfa-as-self-doubt-generator argument; just because you may find your voice there doesn't mean that it comes complete with confidence and an understanding of what you're doing. and the evidence of legitimacy has never really gone away for me, sadly. i'm ashamed to admit this, but my husband says that i've already proved that i'm a writer because of being published and my answer to that is "yeah well, that was a year ago." even though i write every day, i am mostly labouring in the dark. i hate that it doesn't feel real to me unless it's being witnessed by a larger audience. and i think that's why it was important to take a year off of pursuing credits. because showing up here every day *is* the writing life; writing no matter what i'm feeling or where i am or what's going on has created a daily practice that will carry me through the rest of my life. everything else is extra. thank you for your kind words about my words, kerry. 220815 ... tender_square e_o_i, i love what you said here about finding what interests you instead of what's being raved about. i like to believe that the self-guided, intuitive way toward inspiration through the work of other writers is more exciting than following what's being prescribed by the gatekeepers. it's like we've discussed here already, there's no one path to define success, just like there's no one path to define what will enrich us as individuals either. 220815 ... tender_square past, i hadn't considered the ways in which this blathe could intersect with academia but it makes total sense. i had opted out of this system precisely because i didn't want those "benchmarks" to define what i was doing or what i was capable of. but now i'm seeing that those pressures still exert some kind of power and sway with me beyond that space when they don't have to. thank you for your words and for being here. 220815 what's it to you? who go blather from