In almost quite but not really publishing news...

So a press, I'm not sure I'm allowed to say which one, what is the etiquette here b/c the email was private? let me know that my MS placed as a semi-finalist in their first-second book award contest. It doesn't mean anything in real terms, but they are the first press to do so.

And so I am encouraged to begin sending out again, after the long LONG spell of not-sending during my full-on grieving period.

Am I in my half-way grieving period now or something? Why do I write these things?

Anyway, I'd badly needed a human being to acknowledge that the MS was worth a second look to anyone. They want to see it again.

I think I'll keep the name of the press private, but let's just say I would be really proud to publish with them.

And I believe that that envelope (or electronic submission) was the latest version of the MS's maiden voyage. There's nowhere else that version is at right now. Time to start sending it.

Here's a painting:

Taking stock halfway through the year

It's about quarter after four in the morning. I can't sleep because the cat has parked his large self in front of the window a/c and is taking up all the good cold air. Why, you may ask, do I not just toss him? Because he is older, and his kidneys are iffy, and he sort of has this grudge against the world, and I am his favorite person, and he only lets two people pet him besides me. He is a huge cat, with large intimidating fangs that he has used in the past. I can wrap my arms around him, play with his paws, look in his ears, feed him unpleasant things. He will snuggle with me in the bed. Not at my feet like many cats, or in the crook of my knees, but he wants his back against my chest. His head under my chin. And then he purrs.

It is rather flattering, in an odd way, to be the preferred, nearly exclusive  company of such a... I don't want to say unpleasant, because he's not unpleasant to me... such an idiosyncratic animal. I know that he wishes he were the only cat in the world, and that I were the only human. He's really neurotic. The vet says he should maybe be on prozac. But I've held off. I worry about him in the heat. He's spent most of the last two days wrapped around the water bowl. I'm scared that somehow the heat is going to make his kidneys go south. I will dip my hand in the water and spread it over his ears, his head, down his back to cool him off. I am probably the only person he would let do this. So he has discovered the window a/c we've turned on for sleeping, and he's, like, RIGHT up in there. And he is a huge cat. Long, tall, broad, muscular. Some people think he's overweight but I don't think he technically is any more. Still, he takes up all the damn room. So I can't sleep. I came down to get an ice pack for my neck, which has been in pain since this afternoon. Oh bones. Oh muscles. Oh delicious cold.

What does one do with insomnia? I don't have it too-too much anymore since the med switch. Years ago, I used to do dishes in the middle of the night. Ha! not anymore. So of course I just sit in the dark and think and think and think and think and think.... and apparently tonight I blog.

June just ended. It's halfway through my year of not-working. It's easy to go down the vortex of rumination tonight.

A surprising envelope arrived in the mail yesterday. Shocking, really. After I politely declined to teach this past spring (which was really really really really hard to turn down), *and* they took my picture off the adjunct faculty page (you can see a little blank space in the web page where I used to be), lo, do I get a contract for the fall. Mind you, I've never spoken with anyone about my schedule or whether I was teaching in the fall. The contract just mysteriously showed up.

It's still sitting on my desk.

The familiarity of it, the structure, the certainty of what I would be doing, is appealing. Without teaching, somehow I don't feel legitimate --although I am starting a temporary CW teaching gig on Monday that makes me super-excited (not comp! not comp! not comp!). But, my neurotic brain says, it's not at (cue choir of angels) the Almighty University. I don't know when I'm going to have another university job. I don't know when I'm going to want said job. Adjuncting was absolutely draining for me.

And, I'm going to say this next part out loud (well, type it out loud) even though it scares the crap out of me: I don't know, with the combined forces (forces? sigh. it's 4:30 am) of my multiple disabilities, if I will ever be able to handle the rigors of a full-time university job. But I probably won't ever get to teach anything but comp without one. Thinking about this for too long takes me to a very bad, lonely, anxious place. I cannot predict the future. So I just need to not go there.

[I push off with my feet so that my desk chair rolls to the low spot in the floor --this house is 100 years old; nothing is plumb. Away from the monitor, I can't see anything in the absolute darkness of the living room except the amber globs (globs?! it's 4:55 am) of the streetlights, or maybe those lights are from the cemetery...]

I think about turning off the monitor and lying on my back on the floor in the very-dark. Sometimes my back likes the unyielding wood surface. But the other two cats will think this is a game. They will come and climb on me. After 5 now. It's their hunting time. They amuse each other but I am the ultimate amusement.

I am trying to keep the following things in mind. Since January (the start of my year off)

Sent to 45 journals. 34 rejections, 9 pending, 6 acceptances, with 13 poems taken.
4 MSS sent. 2 rejections, 2 pending.
Readings given: 4, with another one tomorrow night. And I have another tentative thing lined up for September.

I always want more than I have. I always know I could be doing more. Those journal subs fall short of my goals. I should have sent way more than 45 by now! And the MSS total... sad. The damn thing will never get published. I rarely pause and think, how great this is. I've accomplished more in six months than I did in six years of adjuncting.

I will turn off the monitor now after I press the "publish" button. I will lie on the floor in the dark to ease my back and neck. And the fucking cats will think it's awesome, and I will not think they are awesome. And I will stay there for as long as I can stand it. And then I'll get an ice pack, de-hair my shirt, and try for more sleep.

Cane Coming-Out Day

So I've been trying to integrate the long white cane back into my life. When I lived in Columbus, it was easier to do so. There was so much disability awareness around campus, and well, campus and its adjacent neighborhoods made up most of the parts of the city I hung around in. In Pittsburgh it is not as easy, especially in my neighborhood. People are free with their comments. Sometimes (most of the time) I don't want to be noticed for my cane, or to be a one-woman disability education-service (e.g. "Not all people who use a cane are completely blind...")

But the cane needs to come back. I'm just safer when using it, not only at night, but in the rain, in bright sunlight... lots of lighting and terrain conditions are made easier for me when I use it. Also, cars and people tend to stay out of my way. It's taxing to my identity though. I can't "pass" any more. So yesterday there was supposed to be this really cool reading / talk at Pitt about / from the Beauty is a Verb anthology. I was so stoked to perhaps meet Jennifer Bartlett (if I was lucky) and to maybe have her sign my book (double lucky) and to maybe even have a five-minute conversation with her (triple-extra lucky). With this emotional energy bolstering me, I vowed that yesterday would be Cane Coming Out day. Kind of like the opposite of cold turkey. I was going to give a big push to my psyche and just start using it. Every day. All the time when outside. Like I did when I lived in Columbus. I wasn't going to share my little goal with anyone, but my reward for the first day would be to go to this awesome reading.

And then Pitt canceled both their events. I heard they postponed them until September. The University has been plagued with bomb threats (if you didn't hear) and I had this shivery-up-and-down-my-spine feeling that they were canceling the event on the potential of a threat because of the idea of evacuating so many people with disabilities. And I didn't like to dwell on that thought, or what it implied, because it put me in a very-much-NOT Cane Coming Out Day headspace. I talked to a friend on the phone about it fifteen minutes later and she also brought up this thought (that they canceled it because of the idea of evacuating, etc. etc.). I do wonder if the reading had been some "ordinary" poets, and not had a draw specifically for people with disabilities, if it would have been canceled. To repeat: there was not an actual bomb threat made.

But I kept to my goal and used the cane for the whole day. It was a reallllllly emotionally taxing day though. I talked about anger so much in my therapy session that I felt like beating things and whipping rocks at houses I passed when I got out. But then the anger dissipated. And, double-yay, no one gave me any shit about the cane.

I did run into a gaggle of neighborhood girls on last bit of the way home, walking up my hill. Long child-legs in shorts. Hair braided with springtime colors of beads like bright greens and pinks. They were the cutest. I would guess they were somewhere between 8 and 10 years old. I'm bad at guessing the ages of children.

Our sidewalks are really narrow, plus cars park on the sidewalks because the street is narrow, occluding half the narrow sidewalk. There's lots of awkward walking situations on my side of the sidewalk up to my house because of the cars. They came toward me in an oblivious (?) wall. We all sort of stopped in a heap, because no one could go into the street on account of an SUV or 3 was parked, blocking us.

I said, "excuse me" in a tiny voice. I'm rather shy. I know they're just children but there were so many of them. This one girl looked up at me incredulously and said, "are you blind?" like she was observing a solar eclipse or something. It was so cute; it touched my heart because she was small. I said, "a little bit." Then, "mostly." They parted and let me pass and they were on their way and I was on mine. I hope I didn't sound mean. I felt very tense. But little kids get a free pass, especially girls. Yes, a blind person can look like me, I will be happy (genuinely) to let you know.
*******
This morning everything is making me cry. I'm crying about submitting another MS to a contest because of the money. $20 here, $20 there. Since January I've felt really tense about money. I'm crying because I'm thinking about going outside again and who will be out there. In Oakland people didn't seem to notice, which is fine with me. But the South Side is where I get hassled in general, mostly by guys who like to say things to petite young women walking alone.

Just a note: If one person comments and says "just let it roll off you," I'm going to work out my anger management issues on you, or your blog, or your Facebook wall. If I could "let it roll off me," I wouldn't be blogging about it. I'm thinking about one specific person here. My brain lasers are trained on you.

But.... but I am going to try to breathe through it. And make my aura big.

oh damn

I was just writing the submission tracking details on my new hard copy of revised MS when I discovered revisions that had fallen through the cracks —meaning they were made after 12/22 and before the old laptop was stolen… and I thought I’d caught all of those! Mostly because I’ve been revising poems from The Sheaf (all the crap I’ve been writing since January) and not the MS. 

You know, the MS I just sent to Ahsahta. 

I mean, those revisions weren’t… I guess they weren’t crucial to one’s appreciation of the poem. Well they sort of were. It was more than tweaking of verbs or line breaks. But it was only two poems in a whole MS. 

FUCK.

REALLY????!!!!!!

Every time this happens I have a moment (more than a moment) where I am back standing in front of my desk and it’s like ghosts have miraculously whipped my laptop into another dimension. I’d actually thought I was hallucinating. Like: psychotic break time. Nope, it was really gone. I feel that disorienting, spinning… every time I find something I’ve lost. 

I can’t believe I didn’t check the electronic copy against the hard copy. Ugh. There are just so many pages. But poems, unlike prose, are modular. They go out in small batches to journals. They go out in a huge chunk as the MS. They squirm and worm around and their state is changeable. I thought I had everything up-to-date and good. 

This is going to obsess me now. 

Perhaps there needs to be cake.

exhale and pull the trigger

So I just submitted to Ahsahta. This was the first time I’ve used an electronic submissions manager for a full-length MS. They want you to remove all personal info, acknowledgments, bio, everything from the MS so it remains anonymous. It’s kind of nice, really. I feel less pressure like: omg, what if my pubs are LESS AWESOME than someone else’s. It makes the work stand alone. 

That said, it’s hard to have anything but idealistic hope about MS contests. But the poetry market has nooooo money, so how else do you get published? They need the money from reading fees. It’s hard to feel like you are anything but a drop in the sea though. Like the research job I applied for, after which I got an email saying they’d gotten a “groundswell of applicants.” I’m sure for every contest, there is a groundswell. Also, when I first picked this press, I thought it was an intro (first book) prize, but it’s not. That would have narrowed the pool somewhat. At least, to carry on the analogy, I get to show my work. 

can't sleep; do work

So this morning I got up at 5:55 and starting working because my brain turned on even though my body was still tired. It was bothering me that I hadn’t placed the poems from the chapbook into the new manuscript yet. It had been on my list from yesterday. Instead I did a whole mess of house chores to avoid it. I say “new” manuscript but it feels like this thing is so old, like it’s dogging me, it’s that houseguest who happily occupies the couch for a year. 

Somehow when I replaced less strong poems with some from the chapbook, the MS got longer by a page. I double and triple checked. Ugh. And adjusted the spacing between the title and start of the poems so they were absolutely all the same. Now it’s ready to go for the next round of submissions. Deadlines: March 1, March 15, March 15, and March 31.

Since we’ll be in Vegas for a chunk of March I’d like to get this all out of the way ASAP.

The good thing about reformatting, rearranging and tweaking was that it made me fall in love with my houseguest all over again.