Adventures in Rejection: Self-Rejection

Hey, it's Valentine's Day, so why not talk about rejection for a minute? But this time, it's different, because it's all about you and something you should know.

It's okay to reject your own work.

Literally everyone who has ever taken a creative writing class has heard that phrase, "Kill your darlings." Usually it's in reference to a line or two that you really love but which don't quite work in the poem or story you're writing, or sometimes it's about characters who don't belong. But sometimes we have to take that saying to the next level.

Kill entire manuscripts if you have to. Don't think of it as abandonment or murder. There are pieces we've created that are either too amateur or too personal to share with the world, and no one is going to stop you from burning those pages. Or don't burn them. Stomp on them. Shred them. Vent your frustration and scribble all over them. Whatever it takes.

Although we as writers don't necessarily always know when something is working without someone else's input, there are times when we know in our writerly guts that something is wrong. Maybe you had an idea that turned out to be a dead end. Maybe a particular topic is off-limits after all. These are the times when it's okay to listen to that instinct and pull the plug.

And try not to worry too much when you do so. because there will always, always, always be another idea for you. I promise.

-Cate-

Turning the Lazy Susan

All right, let's talk about something for a second: this horrendous phenomenon of retelling stories from another character's perspective.

When I say this, I don't mean the Wickeds and Grendels of the world, those being mainly original works that expand upon their source material. What I'm referring to, rather, is something along the lines of E.L. James' Grey or its forerunner, Stephenie Meyer's never-finished Midnight Sun.

Not familiar with either of those titles? Consider yourself lucky. I will admit, right here and now, that I read all four of the main Twilight books as well as Midnight Sun, which is available via Meyer's website. I kept waiting for them to get better, or for something truly intriguing to happen; neither of those things came to pass. By the time I got to Midnight Sun, I was no longer hopeful, but like a knight who has undertaken an impossible mission in the name of his king, I felt I was duty-bound to take one last stab at giving Meyer a chance. That, I don't mind telling you, was a mistake.

It turns out that retelling Twilight from Edward's perspective was a terrible move because it made him seem even more irredeemably creepy, even more like an unrehabilitated stalker. And, frankly, it was a waste of time.

Because Meyer had already told this story. Revisiting it with another character as the narrator wasn't groundbreaking, and it certainly wasn't an improvement upon the original. Rather, it was an exercise in laziness. This is the kind of project you undertake when you're working on your first or second draft, playing around with voice and point of view. It's not the sort of thing you do once a project has been completed. To me, that says you're out of other ideas and can't pull yourself away from the thing that made your name.

Since Midnight Sun didn't make it to book form, though, it doesn't seem as brazen as Grey, which looks from where I'm standing like a pure money-grab. Because Grey is nothing more than a retelling of Fifty Shades of Grey from Christian's perspective. (No. I have not read any of the Fifty Shades books.) EL James, rather than moving on to new writing projects, has simply retooled her "original" trilogy; I say "original" because it started out as Twilight fanfiction. And now she's selling it, milking yet more profits from her cash cow, which is a disservice to fans of her writing as well as the craft of writing itself.

Of course, you can make the argument that nothing is ever really new and all that. But in these cases, there is literally nothing new. We owe it to ourselves as writers and readers not to support such endeavors, which lead to stagnation among consumers and our output. Instead, we should be exploring entirely new territory and expanding our horizons by seeking out more original works.

Don't let this become a full-blown trend in the publishing industry. We all deserve better.

-Cate-

Process, or, Cate Hates Craft Books

Thanks to some excellent teamwork between Dunes Review, the official publication of Michigan Writers, and Traverse City's Brilliant Books, the unofficial coolest bookstore around, I was recently able to participate in both an in-store reading and an online interview as the author of a poem--"Rn (86)"--featured in the most recent issue of Dunes. Caitlin Marsh, the social media manager at Brilliant Books, gave me the option of answering some or all of the questions she posed, and I exercised my right (write?) to ignore a few of them, because I didn't think I had good answers. They were all about the writing and manuscript-sharing parts of being a writer.

Turns out I hate to talk about process, because it's boring. Not unimportant, mind you: mundane, uneventful. This is probably why I rarely made it to the end of any craft book ever assigned to me (five years out of grad school, now I can say things like this with impunity). Except for John Gardner's On Becoming a Novelist. Fuck that book, which I stopped reading on its own (lack of) merit.

This is undoubtedly coming across as a little hypocritical of me, seeing as how much of my blog content stems from me trying to give advice about how to write. But I'm doing it in a way that makes sense to me: a little at a time, one topic at a time, not unlike the way Writer's Digest and other periodicals address craft. Too much, and it feels either preachy or stifling.

But I recognize two things here: first, that process IS important to all of us who write, and we can't ignore it. Second, that writers are lucky to have people who can--and are willing to--talk about it so we can deepen our understanding of the writing life. Many thanks to those people (yes, even John Gardner). You do important work, even if some of us are stubborn about addressing it.

-Cate-

From Whence You Came

My father recently asked me a question that I have sometimes mulled over privately, but which I never expected to have to answer for realsies, given my level of absolute non-fame: do you consider yourself a Southern writer?

First, some background. Some of you know that while I was born in North Carolina, I was raised in Michigan, yet I have also spent the bulk of my adult life living and working primarily in the South (specifically, North Carolina and Louisiana). As a result, I've often--sometimes inadvertently--been immersed in the world of Southern literature or Southern writers. However, I've also spent a great deal of time around New England (particularly Boston) writers because of my grad school experiences.

Also, there is some debate about what constitutes Southern literature, because there is much debate about what actually constitutes the South. The Line isn't always the most effective way of answering this, because there are many out there who will swear to you that Kentucky, Virginia, and even North Carolina aren't really Southern states. Then there is the issue of Maryland, which is tricky because it is now Northern in character but historically was considered Southern.

So how do we categorize someone like Edgar Allan Poe? Personally, I don't consider him to be a Southern writer, but I suspect that he would categorize himself that way, given the opportunity. Meanwhile, I absolutely consider Mark Twain to be a Southern writer, although he spent most of his life in Missouri, Connecticut, and various Northern cities (with stops in California).

As far as that goes, who do we consider to be American writers? Sylvia Plath provides a good example for this question: undeniably American (born, raised, and partly educated in Massachusetts) and influenced in part by other Boston Writers (such as Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton), yet entrenched in British life (studying and living out the most prolific part of her career in England) and surrounded by English and Irish writers (Ted Hughes and Seamus Heaney) while still communing with other expatriates (like WS Merwin). Most people would probably categorize her as American, although there is also a case to be made for her as an English writer.

A similar debate can be had about Gertrude Stein, another famous expat. She was American by birth but dwelled in France for much of her life. If anything, I would think the best designation for her is international, as she spent her time moving in artistic circles populated by people from many countries, including America (Ernest Hemingway), France (Henri Matisse), and Spain (Pablo Picasso), among others.

My basic response about my own situation was, "I don't think anyone has ever accused me of being a Southern writer, and I hope they never do." This has nothing to do with my opinion of Southern literature, which I appreciate and sometimes even love (here's looking at you, Faulkner). Rather, it has to do with my perception of myself as well as my priorities and my style. I would categorize myself as a Michigan writer, and a proud one.

What other people call me is, ultimately, their business, I suppose, but I feel like I would be vocal about this one thing, were I in a position to do so, because I do have strong feelings about it. But on the other hand, it's nice just to be called a writer at all, even if I sometimes have trouble giving myself that designation (in spite of my enormous ego and repeated declarations on this blog). 

-Cate-

DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMIN' OUTTA MY MOUTH

I found myself in an interesting position at work the other day, and by "interesting," I mean "frustrating." A woman shanghaied me into demonstrating multiple iterations of the same product, and in the course of this, she asked me a question that made clear how skeptical she was of my expertise. Although I outwardly answered her in the politest way I could, in my head, I went, "The fuck you just say to me?"

And that right there is the thing I want to focus on today. Not the customer's demands, but the response I had and how it is reflective of the difference between a writer's personal life and their recorded words.

Let's parse this out. "The fuck you just say to me" is hardly a correct sentence; if you replace the missing words, it reads, "What the fuck did you just say to me?" I've discussed my Midwestern dialect before on this blog, and it's something of which I've become increasingly aware over the years, particularly after spending approximately a third of my life living in the South. My speech patterns differ from those of the people by whom I've often been surrounded, and on occasion, they have called me out on it, which is fine. 

What I've been more self-conscious about, however, is the disparity between the way I speak and the way I write. Any time I have a meeting or an interview, I start to freeze up partway through, because I know I could respond to questions or make my own points far more coherently on the page, and my anxiety kicks into overdrive, thereby further garbling my speech. I hate this aspect of my personality, and I do try to rein it in, but it's tough. 

In a perfect world, I would have the ability to speak clearly and elegantly at all times, but that's simply not the case, and I suppose it's a flaw I have to accept in myself. Also, I feel like this is a common theme among writers, at least based on conversations I've had with my compatriots and live readings or discussions I've seen throughout the years.

This being a far from perfect world, however, I have to work toward filtering myself better at the outset, and at thinking more quickly so I can form those beautiful sentences I want to utter. Another self-improvement project, then, but at least a (reasonably) worthy one. This way, everyone will someday be able to understand the words that are coming out of my mouth.

-Cate-

Pleased to Meet Me?

"Who am I? Where am I? Why am I?"

These questions were often rhetorically posed to me by one of my former supervisors, who asked them with a dazed look on his face meant to mock the undergraduate students who were seemingly unable to comprehend their coursework or lives. On the one hand, he was onto something, as we didn't always encounter the brightest minds of our times. On the other, "Who am I" is a question as old as humanity, one we often struggle to answer for ourselves, let alone for other people.

Walt Whitman declared that "I am large, I contain multitudes." Here, then, is a man who acknowledges that he is not a single thing but is comprised of many personae, from a patriot ("O Captain! My Captain!") to the ghost of his childhood self ("Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking") to a lover  ("We Two Boys Together Clinging") to an unabashed voyeur ("Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"). Being Whitman, though, he was completely willing to expose all of his inner selves to the world, because he loved us and wanted to share everything.

For the rest of us, it's not always that easy. Sharing our authentic feelings and showing our true colors can be intimidating, especially for introverts. When it comes to writing, though, I find it easier to be open and honest. Yet a dilemma remains: how best to present myself? Or, put another way, what voice am I meant to use here?

Dinty W. Moore puts it best:

Although the personal essay is a form of nonfiction, and thus the self you bring to your essay should be an honest representation of who you are, we are in fact made of many selves: our happy self, our sad self, our indignant self, our skeptical self, our optimistic self, our worried self, our demanding self, our rascally self and on and on and on. But in truth, if we attempt to bring all of these selves to every essay that we write, we run the risk of seeming so uncertain, so indecisive, that we merely confuse the reader.

Here, he's specifically discussing personal essays and memoirs, but I think it can apply to any form of writing, particularly poetry, and even fiction: if you simply take this advice and apply it to a first-person narrator, you will be able to construct a character with a consistent voice throughout your novel or story. 

For my part, I've never spent much time thinking about my blogging persona. Perhaps I have a  singular attitude that comes naturally to me depending on the topic I'm discussing: passionate, skeptical, excited, literary, and so on. When it comes to writing essays, however, things are different. I struggle to make myself coherent. The form somehow affects me, puts more pressure on me, whether it should or not.

So I'm going to take the advice Moore lays out elsewhere in his piece and examine my motivations and the things I'm trying to convey when writing essays so I can share myself more effectively with the reader. After all, a writer is nothing without an audience, and garbling your message can drive readers away.

-Cate-

Summer Book Report

Last year, I wrote a post about how I spent my summer vacation. While I'm taking a slightly different approach this year, I'd still like to report back to everyone on my literary-centric activities.

- Several months ago, I joined the Book of the Month Club, even though I don't need more books or even anyone suggesting titles to me. But on the other hand, their curated selections allow you to take a step back from the bookstore, which is a crazy thing for me to say, since I adore bookstores, but I recognize the value of this for people who maybe don't have time for shopping but still want to get at least one novel in from time to time. Definitely check out any deals they have, because sometimes you'll be able to get an extra book (or a tote!) for free.

- In July, I visited both locations of The Island Bookstore: Mackinaw City and Mackinac Island, MI. Both have good selections of Michigan titles, and the island location is surprisingly well-stocked with both books and gifts, considering their small retail space and the fact that the rest of the street is lined mainly with souvenir shops and fudge makers. 

- Also in July, I made return trips to both McLean & Eakin in Petoskey, MI, and Schuler Books in Lansing, MI.

- And once more in July: the first annual Detroit Festival of Books was held in the Eastern Market. The event featured local authors and booksellers, and the turnout seemed to be good. While there, I picked up a title from The Porcupine's Quill, whose cover stock was absolutely gorgeous.

- In August, Dad and I went to Literati Bookstore in Ann Arbor, MI to see a panel discussion about  the new anthology And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing, 1917-2017, which was a good time. Sue Harrison, M.L. Liebler, Phillip Sterling, and Keith Taylor were on the panel, and I appreciate their answers to a question I posed after the reading! (For an interview with Keith Taylor, check out the Brilliant Books website!)

- As a side note, Bookriot has released a list of the best bookstores in every state, and--whaddaya know--Brilliant Books, Literati, and McLean & Eakin are all represented in the Michigan section!

- Through my mother's generosity, I was able to enroll in an online course offered through GrubStreet, the popular Boston writing center. Six Weeks, Six Essays was taught by Grace Talusan, whose prompts, resources, and feedback were great. Although their summer courses are almost over, the center's online offerings for the fall are already listed on the site, so check that out if you'd like to brush up on your creative writing skills but don't want to go back to school.

- As you may have noticed, I actually took some time to blog this summer! Wow, what a concept: keeping up with my own project for once? Never saw that coming, tbh.

- If you haven't seen it yet: I wrote a(n almost) 2,500-word essay here on the blog about Sylvia Plath that is messy and ridiculous and fraught, but it felt good to write something approaching critical territory again. It's rare for me to engage in (nearly) academic composition, but it seemed like the thing to do at that particular moment, so there you have it.

- And to wrap things up, here's a cautionary tale: when I first moved home, the majority of my books were still packed up, so I ran over to the local Barnes & Noble to grab a couple of titles to tide me over. While browsing, I decided I needed more Chuck Klosterman in my life (which is perpetually true), and I bought a copy of I Wear the Black Hat to satisfy myself. I read it, and it was good, and I set it aside to be shelved later. Two or three days after that, I was looking for something in a box and found the book, but I couldn't remember having left it there. Lo and behold, I later saw the book on the bookshelf in my room. 

Yes, kids, I made the mistake all serious readers have made at least once in their lives: I bought a copy of this particular tome sometime in the past (I suspect it was last summer), forgot I had it, and then bought a new copy later. This is, I think, the second time I've faced such a dilemma, and I fully expect it to happen again in the future. #failcatefail

-Cate-

What We Talk About When We Talk About Plath

When we talk about Sylvia Plath, we talk about Ted Hughes, the poet-husband who nurtured and tormented her. We talk about the way she died, and occasionally the downstairs neighbor she nearly killed in the process. We talk about her overbearing mother and monolithic father. We talk about her confessional style and how this relates to Anne Sexton and Robert Lowell. We talk about her infamous mental health issues.

What we discuss less often, outside of criticism and academia, is how formidable she was as a writer. The personal struggles she faced have eclipsed this fact in popular discourse, and as a result, the public keeps Plath pigeonholed. Hers is the domain of madwomen in the attic (or, in her case, the basement), mothers needing their little helpers, females who act out when they are spurned. While she was certainly aware of her own issues--she was often medicated and had a close relationship with her therapist--she was far more than a depressive girl crying huddled in her room. 

Just after they met, Plath wrote a poem about Hughes called "Pursuit," in which he is a panther. She knew then that Hughes was dangerous. What she neglects to mention is that she was a God-damned tigress.

*

Tracy Brain, in her essay "Unstable Manuscripts: The Indeterminacy of the Plath Canon," featured in Anita Helle's anthology The Unraveling Archive, makes a compelling case that the reader and/or scholar cannot fully rely on Plath's published works--particularly Ariel (including the Restored Edition) and The Collected Poems--because Plath's archives reveal typographical discrepancies between manuscripts and "finished" products as well as Plath's own working manuscripts and notes, and those notes especially reveal contradictions and changes we can't fully understand, as Plath was dead by the time the bulk of her work fell onto editors' desks.

While this issue shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, we are, thanks to Ted Hughes, largely left to rely upon printed material as "definitive." Even if we can never know whether "Edge" was truly the last poem Plath wrote (Hughes seemed to think so, based on his sequencing in The Collected Poems, but the argument for "Balloons" is equally valid), we must work with what we have been given and rely on Hughes' judgments.

"Her attitude to her verse was artisan-like," he tells us, and "if she couldn't get a table out of the material, she was quite happy to get a chair, or even a toy." This is not the idle speculation of a husband who took walks as his wife scratched away with her Shaeffer pen. It's the keen observation of someone who often wrote by her side and who trusted her with his own words, both as typist and workshopper. He knew her prowess with words, and her capacity to wound with them: he was the subject of many of Plath's more powerful poems ("Daddy," "Burning the Letters," "Words heard, by accident, over the phone," and more), and though he was in a position to suppress their publication, he chose to go ahead with them and make sure that the world knew her name.

*

No one has ever written a truly "authoritative" biography about Plath, because her legacy is complicated. 

Ted Hughes, by his own admission, destroyed her final diaries after her death, eliminating the possibility of scholars gaining personal insights into her final, powerful poems. 

Aurelia Plath, Sylvia's mother, worked diligently to expunge certain unfavorable communiqués from the record when she published Plath's collected Letters Home. (Not coincidentally, this is the same reason Plath delayed the publication of The Bell Jar so long: to spare feelings.) However, the originals remain largely intact, mainly in the Lilly Library at Indiana University but also elsewhere; the first volume of Plath's wider collected correspondence is set to be published this fall. 

Olwyn Hughes, Ted's sister and the executor of both estates until her death in 2016, was notorious for refusing to cooperate with anyone who might criticize her brother too much. Plath herself was not a fan of Olwyn, but Hughes trusted her implicitly.

The net result of this is that most biographies of Plath lean heavily in favor of either her or Hughes, depending on who the author cozied up to during the research process. Aurelia died in 1994, but not before she assisted Paul Alexander while he collected information for Rough Magic. The biography is problematic in some ways for the reasons listed above, yet it remains the best available overview of the poet's life.

Fans of Plath almost uniformly come down on her side, and her grave was repeatedly vandalized; rather than gravediggers, she was disturbed by headstone editors, who would rip the "Hughes" off the marker so it read Sylvia Plath rather than Sylvia Plath Hughes. They would rather Ted Hughes be punished in perpetuity, Plath be rid of him in death.

For my part, I think Hughes made some mistakes. Undoubtedly, a few of them were even cruel and contemptible. And he had no right to do what he did to Ariel prior to its publication, though he was, in general, a capable advocate for Plath's work. And as a poet, he is unassailable; his work is not my style, but he knew what the Hell he was doing.

Further tangling the matter of biographical scholarship are two obvious figures, one innocent toddler, and a much-maligned woman: the Hughes children, Frieda and Nicholas; their half-sister Alexandra, called Shura; and Assia Wevill, the most widely recognized of Ted Hughes' affair partners. Frieda Hughes has gone on record, sometimes in verse form, to criticize those who are obsessed with her mother and who have fired shots at her father. Nicholas Hughes committed suicide in 2009 after pursuing his love of nature and ecology, no doubt following his father's example (Ted Hughes' fascination with the outdoors is one of his trademarks); the younger Hughes was always reluctant to discuss his mother publicly. 

Shura died at the age of four in her mother's murder-suicide. As for Wevill, it's no secret that she was married to a poet (David Wevill, a respected Canadian writer) before meeting Plath and Hughes and later chose gas as her weapon of choice when she killed herself and her daughter. These are not mere echoes of Plath, and Wevill is often a reviled figure in the Plath mythos.

But again: these are things people always discuss when Plath comes up in conversation. Except for the most casual readers, everyone knows at least that the Plath-Hughes marriage was torn asunder and that Hughes' actions after Plath's death--all the way up to his own demise in 1998--led to controversy. What they might better discuss is how each of these people appeared in print. (Shura, born two years after Plath's death, is exempted.)

*

Aurelia  Plath became the focus of a few of her daughter's works, as any parent of a serious writer might expect. Yet she attempted to be even-keeled about the matter, at least publicly. "One observation I can make," Aurelia wrote in 1983, for a piece in Paul Alexander's anthology Ariel Ascending, "[...] involves Sylvia's tendency to fuse characters and manipulate events to achieve her own artistic ends." In truth, this statement might apply to every writer who ever lived, and I believe it is both a fair assumption on Aurelia's part as well as her fervent wish as a parent that it be completely true.

Plath could be cutting when she directed her words at specific individuals, however obliquely. And Aurelia did feel that sting: "[...O]ther poems [...] involve the mother figure as the whipping boy, so characteristic of the Fifties." She also mentions that in The Bell Jar, Plath "transformed personalities into cruel and false caricatures." However, as one might expect of a mother, she asserts that "I had faith in [her] genius."

No amount of faith, though, can change the fact that the title of "Electra on Azalea Path" contains a name that sounds awfully like Aurelia Plath, nor the fact that Mrs. Greenwood in The Bell Jar is, in the main, a character who hews closely to Aurelia as Plath experienced her during that electroshock summer.

*

Ronald Hayman speculated in The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath that Plath intended to kill her children when she took her own life in 1963, but this is based on a reading of some of her final poems, including "Edge," and not supported by the documented facts of the incident. And anyway, the opposite argument can be made using different pieces; Plath often wrote about her children, in pieces like "Nick and the Candlestick" and "Morning Song." It's likely that she did this for the same reason another writer might: they were readily available subjects, like their father and grandmother.

If you subscribe to the notion that turnabout is fair play, it's worth keeping in mind that three out of those four had their own say in various works published later, as we see above. Call it a literary circle of life.

*

In the main, Assia Wevill has been unfairly castigated. Yes, her final act--killing Shura--is unforgivable and must have been the source of much anguish for Ted Hughes (who later dedicated Crow, his 1970 collection of poetry, to the memory of both Assia and Shura). But in life, Wevill was no different from a million other women: a little bit wild, prone to making mistakes, desperately in love.

Of course, one can also understand why Plath despised Wevill. She was a woman who committed the highest form of girl-on-girl violence: man-stealing. But Plath wasn't utterly unreasonable; she also laid the blame at Hughes' doorstep, where it belonged. (Ultimately, neither Wevill nor Hughes can be held more culpable than the other, but Hughes' betrayal was worse, as he broke the vows he made to his wife.) 

As in other cases, though, Plath was vicious in her descriptions of Wevill, particularly in "The Fearful." And Wevill was not unaware of Plath's ire. She--like many others--ended up haunted by the specter of her (ostensible) rival. But like Plath, she was also haunted by her own past and by the invisible scourge of mental illness.

*

I know what you're thinking: "Cate, please. You've only given us examples of poems about Plath's family. So why SHOULDN'T we snoop around and learn things about her personal life?"

And that's totally fair, if you didn't listen to the thing Aurelia Plath said about situations and characters transforming in Plath's--or any writer's--imagination. And again, it's totally fair, if you're willing to ignore Plath's craftsmanship and Hughes' statement about it. And sure: it's totally fair, if you're willing to ignore the criticism Frieda Hughes levels at everyone she feels has co-opted her mother's legacy.

And once more: it's totally fair, if you're willing to forsake all other possible critical responses to Plath's work, or the multiple angles the biographical method could use: an American woman living abroad, a scholarship girl coming up in a privileged environment, a pre-feminist powerhouse, a deeply academic personality, a poet living with and surrounded by other poets. 

This is about so much more than just mental illness and interpersonal drama, and we must acknowledge that, or we are doing Plath, and ourselves as readers and critics, an enormous disservice.

*

Sometimes I wonder if Plath deserves better than us: the avid, trenchant fans who think she is somehow a projection of ourselves and that--as a result--we can claim some ownership of her. I attempt not to be that person, but I admit it: I get defensive of her, and I am often dismissive of those I deem clichés--the sad girls dressed in black trying desperately to be serious--even though I am exactly the same. On the other hand, fame (especially the posthumous kind) comes at a price, and devotees are one item on the bill of sale.

And sometimes I wonder if we deserve better than Plath: a woman who was nearly always on the edge of becoming unhinged, who threw Holocaust metaphors around to describe her own pain, who once destroyed some of Ted Hughes' manuscripts in a vindictive bonfire. On the other hand, if we threw out Plath, we would have to get rid of the Conrads and Hemingways and Fitzgeralds of the world, as well, to avoid committing the double crimes of sexism and hypocrisy.

*

I spend a lot of time thinking about Sylvia Plath.

It's true that I arrived at her doorstep, as most of us do, when I was a moody teenager struggling to fit in. This is a detail I can't help and won't deny. But I think it's worth noting that the bulk of the time I've spent with her was in my early 20s, near the end of my college journey, at a juncture when people were starting to refer to me as a woman rather than a girl. As it happens, I was also about the same age Plath was when she made the suicide attempt later immortalized in The Bell Jar.

It was a time when I loved boys and eyeliner and the idea that my future might actually turn out the way I wanted. But I resembled Esther Greenwood, the protagonist of The Bell Jar, too much for my own comfort, so I chose to focus on Plath's poetry instead.

Years later, I return to her work again and again, and I do so happily. And if I didn't know all the things I know, it never would have occurred to me to write about her now.

I composed this essay, as I compose so many things, in fits and starts between other activities, and it took me about a week and a half to draft. My memory of facts learned over eight years ago was surprisingly solid, which I take to mean that Sylvia Plath has never been far from my mind. I did have to retrieve my collection of books by or about Plath (and Hughes, and Wevill): 18 in all. 

For a complete accounting of my Plath collection, see the list following this post. Some books are either out of print or difficult to locate; many of my volumes came from Better World Books or Thriftbooks, both excellent online sellers for academics searching for titles your average used bookstore doesn't carry. There are many, many more titles out there that I've never seen or read; Plath has her own cottage industry now.

I do encourage readers to seek out resources that will illuminate Plath's craft, as well as those which properly contextualize her in both American and British history as well as in the continuum of literature. There are so many things to explore in her work that lie outside the confines of biography.

And when you talk about her, remember that she was both human and hard-working.

*

Resources

About Plath
Ariel Ascending: Writings About Sylvia Plath (ed. Paul Alexander) 
Chapters in a Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Judith Kroll)
The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath (Ronald Hayman)
Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage (Diane Middlebrook)
Rough Magic (Paul Alexander)
The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (A. Alvarez)
Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life (Linda Wagner-Martin)
The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath (ed. Anita Helle)

By Plath
Ariel: The Restored Edition
The Bell Jar
The Collected Poems (ed. Ted Hughes)
Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams
Letters Home (ed. Aurelia Schober Plath)
The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath (ed. Karen V. Kukil)

About Hughes
Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet (Elaine Feinstein)

By Hughes
Birthday Letters
Difficulties of a Bridegroom

About Wevill
Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love (Yehuda Koren and Eliat Negev)

Feeling Ragey

Last month, I was very angry about something.

Although I'm loath to discuss the situation itself here, I do want to talk about that anger and how it affected me. More specifically, I want to explore the impact it had on my writing.

For one thing, I find myself veering away from poetry and toward non-fiction (which is--mostly--to say, this blog). I've made an attempt to write the most uplifting stuff possible to counteract the ire, although I admit I'm not awesome at that part. But the biggest advantage is that it makes me more honest.

That's not my way of admitting I'm a liar. There are, however, times when all writers shy away from the toughest parts, whether that means telling a difficult story or facing a hard truth about oneself. I think I'm pretty good at admitting shit to myself, and sometimes to others, I suppose, but that's not totally the kind of honesty I mean.

Rather, it's honesty about my basic feelings and about the things that matter to me. Trust: you wouldn't be reading posts about the similarities between Madonna and Walt Whitman if those two people held no significance for me. I guess the anger forces me to reevaluate things, in a way. And I'm okay with that.

What I'm less okay with is the anger itself, and I'm working on it. Little by little, I'll calm down and get back on track--even if that track is a new one. And it will be, out of necessity. I hope I can still be so honest on the other side and suppress myself less and less.

-Cate-

Writing the Stress Away

For the past month and a half, I've felt more depressed than normal, with many of the symptoms you'd expect: lack of motivation, fatigue, tearfulness, et cetera. Functioning well is a challenge. One day, my crying was so hysterical that even my dog thought I was being too extra, so she left me in favor of a quieter spot elsewhere in the house.

One night, I was faring particularly badly, even though I'd watched a fun movie and taken special care to shower well, have a marginally proper meal, and clean my room a little. Uncertain of what I should do next, I finally decided to sit down and write a blog post about something I'd thought of earlier in the day.

And I felt so much better when I was writing.

This isn't always the case. But on that occasion, it worked. I'm not surprised; after all, writing has long been recognized for its therapeutic value, along with art (at this point, I must pause to give my alma mater, Lesley University, a shout-out for their excellent expressive therapies program). In fact, I seriously considered studying writing therapy myself, before other interests eclipsed that one--and after I decided I didn't want to take a statistics class, obviously.

My academic history aside, writing can prove to be a useful outlet for all sorts of people. In my case, it's not something I've ever pursued for that purpose; rather, it's an imperative, something I have to do. But I encourage anyone who might be looking for a way to blow off some steam to pick up a pen and see what happens. It might just be the prescription for which you've searched.

-Cate-

The Best Part of Being a Writer

As you may know, I'm an official Goodreads author, and one of the coolest functions of an author's profile, as far as I'm concerned, is the part where we get to answer questions. Recently, Goodreads sent a question to me that piqued my interest in such a way that I wanted to take an entire post--rather than a short paragraph--to discuss it: what is the best thing about being a writer?

This question is so wide open as to lend itself to debate, and indeed, I can think of several options that may be worth exploring. But for me, the best part is having the opportunity to move people.

For many years, I resisted poetry because I was taught by teachers who espoused some variation on that old saw: "This is the only valid way to interpret this poem." I wasn't about that life, and it put me off the idea of verse. When I was in college, however, new ways of approaching all types of literature, and especially poetry, were available to me. It was then that I decided something important about my own work: as long as the reader gets SOMETHING out of it, I have done my job as a writer.

This doesn't mean that I don't have my own ideas about what an individual poem or story says. Obviously, I know what I was trying to convey. What it DOES mean, however, is that I want to hear what others have to say about my work, and my biggest wish is that they will be able to make some meaningful connection with any given piece. 

Because if I'm putting my writing out into the world, there is no point whatsoever in producing it only for my own sake. There is (I assume/hope) a reader on the other end who may have an unexpected reaction to my words, and that's okay, and I want to hear about it, too! If you're having a bad day and feel relieved because one of my poems let you know that someone else was experiencing the same thing, great! If you're in love and one of my stories speaks to those feelings inside you, fantastic! Even if you're reviled by something I've written, I have still elicited a reaction, and I want to know about your disgust. 

Basically, I most enjoy having the chance to interface with others. As an introvert, it can be incredibly difficult for me to make new friends or even acquaintances, and readers help me as much as I aim to help them. Other writers may say they most love creating their own worlds, or the thrill of seeing their name on the cover of a book, and nothing is wrong with either of those motivations. I'm simply approaching it from a more humanistic perspective.

Read on, y'all. And tell me what you think about my words!

-Cate-

Adventures in Rejection: Writing, Merritt Tierce, and Reality Checks

Once in awhile, an article comes along that resonates so profoundly I have to share it and add my own thoughts. In this case, it's Merritt Tierce's September article for Marie Claire, "I Published My Debut Novel to Critical Acclaim--and Then I Promptly Went Broke."

Tierce is the author of Love Me Back, a novel that was well-received by critics and blurbed by the likes of Roxane Gay. According to Tierce, she sold around 12,000 copies in two years, which was not enough to earn back her advance. Now, she is struggling to pay her bills and is suffering from self-doubt and lack of writing time while "hustling" freelance pieces to the best of her ability. Tierce has no desire to work in academia, which she is qualified to do but might tear her even farther away from family and writing.

This is the stark, terrifying truth of life as a writer in this day and age. Even when the acceptance letters arrive and the publication contracts are signed and the galleys are approved, there is no guarantee that your book will find any sort of success. If you primarily write poetry, your audience is exponentially smaller and the chances of earning money from your work are so slim as to be nonexistent. To date, I have made somewhere in the neighborhood of $250 total across ten years of actively seeking out publication.

But those of us who are serious about it--that is, the craft of writing--have accepted these facts, as unsavory as they are. If you are very lucky, you will see a handful of novels or poetry collections published in your lifetime and perhaps win some awards. If you are less lucky but still diligent, stories, essays, and poems will appear in any number of print or online literary journals, and perhaps even be anthologized. Even if you take steps toward publication, you may be able to achieve little more than one or two placements.

Do I dream of winning a National Book Award, being touted as the next Sylvia Plath, or being legitimate enough to have someone like Nikky Finney blurb me? You bet your ass I do, and if any writer tells you they don't have similar (hopeless) aspirations, they are lying. But for the sake of my own sanity, I have to shelve those fantasies. If I didn't, I would descend into despair with each new rejection letter and give up hope altogether. And I've worked too long and too hard to abandon the written word. 

I commend Merritt Tierce for telling the truth, and I wish her all the luck in the world. Her struggle is that of most writers, and I don't want that for any of us.

-Cate-

Adventures in Rejection: When Literary Magazines Die

In this wild world, where large publishing houses are closing or consolidating and small presses face huge hurdles to keeping their doors open, it should come as no surprise that literary magazines often fail. 

And yet, somehow, that feels like the worst rejection of them all.

It's one thing to see an individual poem turned down for publication. But when an entire lit mag tanks for whatever reason--lack of funding, low readership, the demands of the editor's day job--it hurts me. Even when an outlet has declined to disseminate my work, I like to see them succeed, because it means that other writers are getting exposure and that other readers are discovering new pieces that move them. If a lit mag shuts down, those opportunities are negated for everyone involved.

Is this because of a lack of interest from the larger public? Because no one has surplus funds to donate? Because the editors are being crushed at their other workplace (let's be honest: most people are doing this as a passion project, a side gig that is often thankless)? I can't say. What I do know is that it makes the literary world a less diverse place, and that is never a positive thing.

-Cate-

Your Adverbs Are Literally Killing Me

It would seem that I have not published a true writing post in some time, and I would like to address that deficiency! Here, you will find my opinions about the use of adverbs in fiction (and, I suppose, in poetry).

If you've taken a creative writing class at anything beyond the beginning level, you have heard that adverbs are bad for your writing. But why is that true? Another adage that writing instructors employ is that old one we all get sick of hearing: "Show, don't tell." By combining this with the directive to avoid adverbs, we have our answer.

Consider the following sentences:

1) She walked swiftly to the edge of the field, breathing heavily.

2) She jogged to the edge of the field, her breath coming in short bursts.

Which seems more informative to you? The one where the adverbs are doing the work, or the one where the verbs and adjectives take the reins? If you think the answer is the former, you may need to reconsider your affinity for adverbs.

You see, "walked swiftly" could mean a few different things: power-walking, a slow jog, a panicked shuffle, and so on. Jogging, on the other hand, indicates a specific type of movement. This is why precise verbs are more important than modifiers, which are often vague.

The same is true in the second half of the sentence, where "breathing heavily" may mean panting, gasping, or over-filling the lungs. Replacing this with "short bursts" clarifies the picture for the reader.

Next time you're writing, keep this in mind. It will help you weed out weaker spots and improve your sentences!

-Cate-

The Little Things

Over the summer, I read this really excellent article about how awesome chapbooks are. It's called "Small Is Beautiful: The Importance of Chapbooks," by Michael Young, and it was published over at The The Poetry back in May.

It's been a long time since I read an article that I connected with so well. Chapbooks ARE beautiful, and they are something that not everyone understands. 

In poetry, the goal is often to see a full-length collection published. Officially speaking, "full-length" is anything over 48 pages, and you'll usually see them in the 80-100 page range. Some, but not all, publishers require--or at least hope--that a chunk of the individual pieces have already been published elsewhere, as in literary journals, in a sort of vetting process. Assuming one poem per page, that's a huge, time-consuming undertaking. 

But the full-length collection is not always the best route to take, as Young rightly points out. He name-drops William Blake, whose most famous works, Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, were both well within the chapbook range. This is a form that essentially allowed Blake to curate a streamlined poetic experience, with no concern about extraneous poems that might weaken his narrative arc (and make no mistake: narrative arcs are entirely possible to create in poetry collections). 

That is what draws me to the chapbook form. My first book, Miles, was a chapbook, and I remember spending endless hours paring down the pages, rearranging the works, and agonizing over any little thing that felt out of place. Having been 22 at the time, I was, of course, not particularly awesome as a writer, but even so, I feel good about what I was able to produce, and I am glad that I was limited to so few pages. And even now, I recognize that my poetry is stronger when the opportunity to ramble is removed from the equation.

So I would encourage you all to check out chapbooks, either as a reader or as a writer. You may find that they leave you with a stronger sense of who someone is as a poet, or that they give you the freedom to be precise with your own work. 

-Cate-

And Just Like That, I've Done It Again

So.

Remember how I just got done talking about how I was going to be much, much better about not taking unintentional hiatuses? Obviously that plan is working out for me, and I in no way failed to blog for the past four weeks.

It wasn't the normal stuff this time--the depression, the anxiety. It was actual work that kept me from blogging, or doing anything much in the way of writing. Things got a little wackadoo in that part of my life, and in the interest of, you know, earning my paycheck or whatever, I decided it would be wise to focus on my job for awhile.

But I'm back, however temporarily. And it's good to see this text box again.

-Cate-

American Success Stories

Although you're seeing this post sometime in August, I'm in the past, writing it on July 4, 2016, some 240 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. I mention this fact because it has a direct bearing on what you're about to read.

Earlier today, I had my iPod on shuffle, and Desi Arnaz's "Babalu" started playing. I'm a fan of I Love Lucy, and, having seen the entire series several times through, I can't help but know a few of Arnaz's more famous tunes, including this quintessential one. The song itself, though, isn't what interests me right now. Rather, Arnaz himself does.

He was what I consider to be an American success story. Born to a prominent family inn Cuba but thrust unexpectedly into straitened circumstances during a revolution, he found himself in Miama as a youth and then took up the business of entertainment. He of course met and married Lucille Ball a few years later, and the rest--as they say--is history. Everyone in America must know his name, or at least his face, by now. Not so bad for an immigrant, a non-native English speaker, and a man who dared to marry a white girl and (gasp!) flaunt their relationship on national television.

Thinking of Arnaz leads me to Richard Blanco, another Cuban making his way in America in another, but still contentious, time. Blanco was born in Spain and brought to America by parents who, like the Arnaz family, were fleeing political issues. A civil engineer and writer by training, Blanco was selected to recite a poem at the 2013 presidential inauguration (Barack Obama's second time swearing in). This was an excellent choice for several reasons: not only did Blanco give a flawless reading of his "One Today," but he also represented the changing face of America. For Blanco is an immigrant, yes, and a Latino, but also a gay man. This was a truly monumental moment, and again, I consider Blanco to be an American success story.

In keeping with the artistic bent of these musings so far, I turn to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the nearly inescapable face of Broadway in 2016. While born in America, Miranda comes from Puerto Rican stock. And he is a man who has done a few things all at once: brought attention to musical theater, triggered discussions about American history among people who might not otherwise find it an interesting topic, and dedicated his stage to the showcasing of non-white talent. Moreover, he has gotten away with all of these things through a combination of talent and commitment, which are rare enough personality traits in the public sphere nowadays. What could make his American success story more successful? Maybe only getting his face on a Wheaties box.

You've surely noticed a trend here: each of these men is Latino.

I believe in inclusion. American culture overwhelmingly privileges white people and can be ridiculously appropriative, and diversity of any kind often seems to be an impossible dream. But the United States would not be what it is today without the contributions of people from every racial, ethnic, and sexuality-based background. Unfortunately, for each person calling for a wider variety of viewpoints and a higher level of tolerance or activism, we hear another voice full of vitriol and anger, blaming non-whites--and particularly immigrants--for the perceived woes of our society.

This is unacceptable to me. And it should be unacceptable to you as well. This is America. It's meant to be the land of the free. So why are we, as a nation, working so hard to suppress diversity? We need the white people, the brown people, the black people, the blue people, the gay people, the straight people, the Christians and Jews and Muslims and Democrats and Republicans and even the anarchists, probably. Because we the people are all people, supposedly born equal (or made so as immigrants) under the law.

I've only given three examples here, but there are countless more worth researching and promoting. Those breaking down barriers, crossing lines that represented certain death in the past, marching in order to make themselves and their brethren heard, speaking out when the opportunity presents itself, fighting for what they believe is right, working to recover what was taken from them.

In the event that you haven't looked at a calendar recently, I would like to remind you that it is 2016. And it is long past time to let everyone be heard, respected, and included, and I cannot stress that enough.

-Cate-

Dear Joanne

I have very clear memories of the night Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows was released. It was July 2007, and I was home for the summer. My mother had pre-ordered a copy from Border's (RIP), and she sent me and my father to pick it up. Being a big-box store, there was a ton of floor space. Yet no more of it was available, and bodies spilled out into the lamp-lit parking lot.

Dad stared at the crowd, confused by the spectacle before him. "What is going on here?" he asked me.

I swept my hand around, indicating the throng engulfing us. "This is pop culture."

The moment was an important one, I think, both for me and Dad. As far as I was concerned, it was unspeakably exciting to be present for a historical literary moment. Meanwhile, Dad finally had some insight into what I had been doing with my life (both as a creative writing major and a pop culture semi-scholar). It was tinged with sadness, though, as THE TIME had come: that instant where every devoted fan realized that this was the last time we would tear through the pages of a Harry Potter book in unbridled anticipation of how his story would turn out.

Or was it?

Since that night, the series' author, J.K. Rowling, has been expanding the Hogwarts universe at a regular clip. We've witnessed the arrival of Pottermore, her interactive online community; although the book itself was released in 2001, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them is coming to a theater near you this November; The Tales of Beedle the Bard, an important piece of the Deathly Hallows puzzle, was given its own standalone book in 2008; Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, not written by Rowling but based on a story she wrote, lands on the West End stage this week to be followed the next day by a published version of the script; and revelations about Ilvermorny, Hogwarts' North American sister school, have come to light via Pottermore in the past month. 

I understand that Ms. Rowling has spent a great deal of her life immersed in the world of Harry Potter. (She is hardly alone in that, as her rabid fan base has proven.) But I also understand that she is in danger of failing to move on to other artistic endeavors, which we know she is capable of doing--witness The Casual Vacancy, as well as the Robert Galbraith/Cormoran Strike novels. And this is one of the deadliest activities in which an artist of any variety can engage.

Leaving aside the appropriative issues surrounding Ilvermorny and North American wizardry (I am looking in your direction, stereotypical assumptions about "mystical" Native Americans), which are distinct from the ongoing additions to the Potterverse, I think it would behoove Rowling to take a break from Harry James and his friends. There are so many other stories to tell, and I for one am interested to see what else she can give us.

-Cate-

The Randomness

Do you ever feel like there's no way to explain your life, not because it's a mess but because strange things just happen to you on occasion? That was me in February, when OF COURSE TSA checked my bag the day I was traveling with three random books and some canned okra. (Side note: I felt vaguely like a criminal for transporting okra across state lines.) But here's the great thing about the randomness: you can absolutely use it in your writing.

We all know the old adage that "truth is stranger than fiction." This is why I encourage you to tuck these little incidents away for future reference, when you may need a bit of comic relief in your novel or even simply a bit of characterization. Why NOT write about the girl who packs okra in her suitcase? Maybe there's a good, solid reason for it. Or maybe that's a wacky thing this character does because she's afraid of eating anything that hasn't been canned. Either way, there's a story in there somewhere.

So embrace the randomness next time it happens, and see where it leads you. 

-Cate-

IT'S HERE, 2.0

Gods in the Wilderness is now available for purchase! If you're interested in ordering a copy, please see Amazon or my publisher, Pink. Girl. Ink. Press.

 

Happy reading!

-Cate-