My First Time: Jayne Benjulian

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is poet Jayne Benjulian, author of Five Sextillion Atoms. About the collection, Daniel Tobin wrote, “Diamond edged, fiercely honest, Benjulian’s work pulses with lyric intensity.” David Wojahn called it ”a highly distinctive and gripping book notable for the ways in which it combines the stories of family history with larger matters of public history ....Benjulian has terrific skills as a portraitist and satirist.” Benjulian served as chief speechwriter at Apple; Teaching Fellow at Emory; Visiting Professor in the Graduate Theater Program at San Francisco State University; Fulbright Fellow in Lyon, France; and Ossabaw Island Project Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in numerous literary and performance journals. For more about Jayne and her work, visit her website.

My First Editor

My first editor’s name was John. Bless his heart: he was a patient soul and young, though I was younger still. It was his second job. He had just arrived at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazine from The Chicago Reader. I proposed an essay on modern dance. I don’t remember what samples I showed him, no doubt several pieces from a now-defunct magazine called Brown’s Guide to Georgia, where I had envisioned writing travel articles as literary essays. My last assignment for Brown’s Guide had been a piece on Southern photographers for which I had driven around Georgia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee and North Carolina identifying little-known photographers and characterizing each one in an epigraph followed by a paragraph and examples of each photographer’s work. In every house in which I’ve lived since, I hang in my work space a black-and-white portrait of me with my feet up on my graduate school desk taken by one of those photographers. A viewer can see a window behind me, a bookshelf, dictionary, back of a desk lamp, notebooks—hard edges framing the curves of my arches and waves in my hair. That photographer disappeared without a trace—I thought—until I Googled him and found that old article posted on his website.

My strategy for examining modern dance was to interview my friends, who danced with me a in a small troupe called The Dance Group, also now defunct. I had a theory, which was that dance in Atlanta was primitive compared to dance in New York because it was held back by the dominance of the Atlanta Ballet and a conservative attitude toward arts in the city. I urged audiences to support daring work and choreographers to take risks with bodies and space the way I had witnessed choreographers like Trisha Brown doing in New York. Under John’s guidance, I re-wrote the entire piece at least four times. He must have seen something in me to make it worth his effort. Perhaps he decided if I was the kind of writer who would stay with the process of revision no matter how arduous, I was worth the investment. Why else would he have tortured himself? When the essay was published, he handed me five copies and told me what terrific work I had done. Now I want to call him and say, you did incredible work: thank you. I remember him, his red hair and freckles, but I can’t recall his last name.

I stashed my magazine copies in a trunk—I was close enough to my college experience to still have a trunk—and I didn’t look at the essay for a decade. The truth is, the gap between the glorious prose I had imagined and the essay I wrote made me sick. I had read Joan Didion, Martin Duberman and Henry James on American culture, and I had fallen short.

And thus it has been ever since. Once I publish a piece, I see that it has not lived up to my vision of what it might be, and I vow to make a leap in my next work. If I have matured as a writer, it is largely owing first to dissatisfaction with everything I write; and second, to accepting that the drive to approach closer and closer in execution to the work as it is imagined is the preoccupation of art.

The turning point in my thinking about creative dissatisfaction arrived much later in the form of Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland, a little book given to me by a painter. In that work, I read that the leap from one project to the next is precisely the space in which artists learn their craft. Making leaps in art is not so much about perfecting the painting/poem/book on which you are working but learning what you can carry into the next project, take apart, drill down into, blow up. Art and Fear saved my life.

When I am tearing myself apart for not accomplishing more in my first book, it is a gift to remember what I have learned while writing it. What if Picasso had been satisfied with his “blue” or “rose” period paintings? When we speak of artists, we are speaking of people who keep pushing against the boundaries of their own capabilities as distinct from those who find a formula that sells and are motivated to polish and repeat it.

For several decades after my Atlanta Journal assignment, I continued to write to make a living, moving from one feature article to the next, and then to copywriting and speechwriting. The pearl I kept was my insistence on revising, even if the task at hand was a headline. When I began to place poetry at the center of my writing life, I was already in the habit of relentless revision. I cannot always see all that might be changed or take a draft to perfect resolution, but I know when there is more work to be done. I cut without mercy. Sometimes, assessing what I have written and revised as pretty good and only pretty good, I drag it to my “bits & pieces” folder, the equivalent of stashing it in a trunk. But “pretty good” may be a condition the artist must tolerate in order to keep making art.

In “Education of the Poet,” Louise Glück illuminates the necessary place of dissatisfaction, uncertainty and fear in creation:

My father wanted to be a writer. But he lacked certain qualities: lacked the adamant need which makes it possible to endure every form of failure: the humiliation of being overlooked, the humiliation of being found moderately interesting, the unanswerable fear of doing work that, in the end, really isn’t more than moderately interesting, the discrepancy, which even the great writers live with (unless, possibly, they attain great age) between the dream and the evidence.

The poet and scholar Daniel Tobin told me that Yeats, among the most musical of poets, composed his first drafts in prose. The fact that Yeats began so far from where he ended is sustaining. I dream that I will feel the snap of recognition and discover in the closing lines of a poem something I did not know in the moment I wrote the opening lines. I dream that in the writing of my next book images murky and distant—events I hadn’t remembered, connections I hadn’t made—will reveal themselves...that subsequent books will unmask life the poet of Five Sextillion Atoms did not see. Some of these dreams will come true. Some won’t. I will wrestle with each new venture, and that wrestling will charge my brain in a way that public recognition does not. My first editor was a formative force for the editor that developed within me, the one obsessed with the orchestration of thought and feeling she will never achieve. It is not a great trait for making friends or winning over students who want their own work to be realized by workshop’s end, but it is an important quality for making an art that is fragile at the level of the word and line.

I did Google John + Atlanta Journal + Chicago Reader and found John Fleming. After leaving The Atlanta Journal, he worked as performing arts critic for the Tampa Bay Times. “Dance is,” he wrote in one of his articles, “probably the most abstract and therefore hardest performance to write about.” I understood then, why he had worked with me so fiercely: he had admired what I was trying and failing and trying again to say.

Sunday Sentence: Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

We have one life each and one death. What comes between birth and death is up to us.

Marrow Island by Alexis M. Smith

Friday Freebie: Emotional Rescue by Ben Greenman

Congratulations to Lisa Murray and Ben Gabriel, winners of last week’s Friday Freebie giveaway: Champion of the World by Chad Dundas.

This week’s book contest is for Emotional Rescue by Ben Greenman. Subtitled Essays on Love, Loss, and Life—With a Soundtrack, the book has garnered early praise from the likes of Questlove, who says: “Reading Emotional Rescue is like peeking into a stranger’s playlist when he’s not around, and then talking to him about it when he is around. Music is the kind of thing that should be felt, discussed, and digested, and Ben Greenman does that here—all the while making the case that pop music (all kinds of it, from hip-hop to country, from power-pop to blues) teaches us everything we know about human relationships. I have always known how much he cares about pop music, and now I know why.” Emotional Rescue will be released in early August but I have a hardcover copy available for one lucky reader now. Will it be you? Here’s more about the book....

What songs have made up your life’s soundtrack? Which have captured your every mood and deepest sentiments? Pop music, like no other form of entertainment or art, is capable of articulating our feelings, desires, joy, and pain. In a few soul-grabbing minutes, artists from every genre—from Little Richard to Lou Reed, Willie Nelson to Wu-Tang Clan, Sly and the Family Stone to the Rolling Stones—can help us understand our place in our own lives. This collection of short, sharp essays by New York Times bestselling author Ben Greenman (Celebrity Chekhov, Mo’ Meta Blues), organized around a thematic playlist of songs, serves as a reminder of the lyrical power of songwriting and the sonic ability of pop to capture the human experience. Greenman’s wit, insight, and honesty are as sweet and satisfying as the hits (and the deep cuts) at the center of each essay.

If you’d like a chance at winning Emotional Rescue, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on July 14, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 15. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Sunday Sentence: Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The guinea pigs, awake and nibbling, were making a sound like that of a wet cloth rubbed on glass in window.

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Friday Freebie: Champion of the World by Chad Dundas

Congratulations to Dona Bailey, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie giveaway: We’re All Damaged by Matthew Norman.

This week’s book contest is for Champion of the World, the debut novel by Montana author Chad Dundas. I have two copies to give away to two lucky readers. Listen to what Jeff Guinn, author of The Last Gunfight, had to say about the book: “Here’s one of the finest first novels in years, a gritty tale involving professional wrestling, bootlegging, and the byzantine strategies of cold-blooded conmen and desperate grifters. If the subject matter strikes you as too quirky, think again. My advice to anyone who loves brilliant storytelling is this: read Chad Dundas’s Champion of the World.” Keep scrolling for more information about the novel...

Late summer, 1921: Disgraced former lightweight champion Pepper Van Dean has spent the past two years on the carnival circuit performing the dangerous “hangman’s drop” and taking on all comers in nightly challenge bouts. But when he and his cardsharp wife, Moira, are marooned in the wilds of Oregon, Pepper accepts an offer to return to the world of wrestling as a trainer for Garfield Taft, a down-and-out African American heavyweight contender in search of a comeback and a shot at the world title. At the training camp in rural Montana, Pepper and Moira soon realize that nothing is what it seems: not Taft, the upcoming match, or the training facility itself. With nowhere to go and no options left, Pepper and Moira must carefully navigate the world of gangsters, bootlegging, and fixed competitions, in the hope that they can carve out a viable future. A story of second chances and a sport at the cusp of major change, Champion of the World is a wonderful historical debut from a new talent in fiction.

If you’d like a chance at winning Champion of the World, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. This contest is only open to readers with a U.S. mailing address. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on July 7, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 8. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.

Living in the Flux: The Glimmer Train interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly

I’ve been enjoying the latest issue of Glimmer Train Stories, reading it in small doses each day so I can stretch out the experience. (Full disclosure: one of my stories, “A Little Bit of Everything,” can also be found in these pages.) While many of the stories are outstanding, for me the real centerpiece of the Spring/Summer 2016 issue (#96) is Kevin Rabalais’ interview with Tom Franklin and Beth Ann Fennelly, the husband-and-wife team behind The Tilted World. Tom is also the author of the short story collection Poachers and the novels Crooked Letter Crooked Letter, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk; Beth Ann, a poet, is the author of Tender Hooks, Unmentionables, and Open House.

I thought I’d share some of my favorite portions of the interview because they have a lot to say about the writing process—especially doing research for historical novels (The Tilted World, Hell at the Breech, and Smonk are all set in times past). I’m at the very beginning of a writing project which is set here in my adopted hometown of Butte, Montana in the early 20th century, so Tom’s comments really resonated with me.

Here he talks about writing Hell at the Breech, which is set in Alabama in 1897:

When I read the newspapers of those times, I would get both high and low language. Whenever someone wrote an article for the paper, he was generally trying to show off. If they wrote for the paper, they were educated. So instead of writing that the passengers were “spitting” in the rail cars, the writer used the word “expectorating” just to show off a bit.

I think that a certain kind of research would only give you that surface quality. You have to go deeper into it and try to find diaries or letters. That’s where people talk the way they really talk. There, you’re catching people when they’re naked. You can look at old photographs and see the way people are stiff. Compare that with the way they sit on their own front porch. As a novelist, you need to write about your characters not as though they’re posing for that photograph but relaxing on their front porch.

*     *     *

Here’s Tom discussing Smonk, which he says is “my favorite of all my books and the one that sold by far the worst,” and how it compares with the composition of his earlier novel:

With Hell at the Breech, I started in the middle and wrote toward the end and then came back to the beginning. I did a first draft of Smonk in ten days, two hundred pages in ten days, and then it took me a year and a half to fix it. I’ve now learned that’s how to write a novel. Start and don’t look back until you get to the end, even if you know it’s all wrong. You can always fix it later, but you have to follow the momentum. You need to be able to judge the whole animal, which you can see and weigh as opposed to just having pieces of it. If you’ve got a whole big quilt, even if it’s missing pieces, you can still see how to fix the corners.

*     *     *

I’ll let Beth Ann have the last word. When Kevin Rabalais asked the couple “What keeps you both excited about writing and about literature?” she replied:

It’s the narrative impulse—simple, yet essential. That’s why we’re on earth. The world is this flux of events and noise. The writer’s job is to live in the flux but to perceive a shape in it, to find the story and to trace the arc of the human experience. Narrative gives shape and meaning to life.

Book Radar: Nancy Pearl, J. P. Monninger, William Jensen, Tara Ison, S. M. Stirling and Sarah Weinman

Book Radar rounds up some of the latest publishing deals which have caught my eye, gathered from reports at Publishers Marketplace, Galley Cat, office water-coolers and other places where hands are shaken and promises are made. As with anything in the fickle publishing industry, dates and titles are subject to change.

From Publishers Lunch, news of the following book deals...

Librarian Nancy Pearl’s GEORGE AND LIZZIE, a married couple have radically different understandings of what love and marriage should be. He grew up in a warm and loving family in Tulsa, Oklahoma, his father an orthodontist, his mother a stay-at-home mom; while she grew up as the only child of two famous psychologists who related to her more as an in-house experiment, than a child to love; it extends from their first meeting to more than a decade into their unlikely marriage. (Touchstone, publication in June 2017)

J. P. Monninger’s THE MAP THAT LEADS TO YOU, in which a recent college graduate traveling around Europe with her two best friends meets and falls in love with an enigmatic Vermonter a few years older than she is, who is following his grandfather’s journal to various cities around Europe. (St. Martin’s, publication in Summer 2017)

William Jensen’s CITIES OF MEN, pitched as Richard Russo’s The Risk Pool, Tobias Wolf’s This Boy’s Life and Richard Ford’s Canada. It’s billed as a Bildungsroman wherein a mother goes missing without explanation and her son sets out to find her. Along the way, the boy experiments with alcohol, violence, and vandalism, and he begins to truly know his father, a Vietnam veteran struggling with PTSD. Together, father and son drive around the hills of Southwest America in hopes of finding the most important woman in their lives.

Author of Rockaway and Ball, Tara Ison’s AT THE HOUR BETWEEN DOG AND WOLF, a coming-of-age novel of identity and the devastating consequences of war and prejudice, about a Parisian-Jewish girl who must hide out with French Christian villagers during World War Two, pitched in the vein of Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See. (Counterpoint, for publication in Spring 2017)

S. M. Stirling’s THE BLACK CHAMBER TRILOGY, set in an alternate history where Teddy Roosevelt regains the Presidency in 1912, kicking off a 20th century of even greater technological and social change than in our real timeline. (Ace, for publication in 2017 and 2018)

Editor of the anthologies Women Crime Writers and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives Sarah Weinman’s AMONG THE WHOLESOME CHILDREN, on the abduction and tragic life of Sally Horner, the real-life inspiration for Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. (Ecco)

Trailer Park Tuesday: The Fundamentals of Caring

Welcome to Trailer Park Tuesday, a showcase of new book trailers and, in a few cases, previews of book-related movies.

As the end credits began to roll, I turned to my wife and said, “So, what did you think?” She shrugged and said, “It was okay for a feel-good movie.” “Yeah maybe,” I said, “but I felt good watching it.” It’s true that the new Netflix original movie The Fundamentals of Caring may not pluck a sentimental chord in everyone’s heart (my wife is a particularly tough critic) and it certainly has its flaws, but there are plenty of things to love about it, starting with the two leads, Paul Rudd as Ben Benjamin, a newly-certified caregiver and grieving father, and Craig Roberts as Trevor, the mouthy teenage boy with Duchenne muscular dystrophy who is Ben’s first client. Casting Paul Rudd in a movie is always a wise move for any filmmaker. He’s got a downbeat Everyman charm that can carry even the lamest script to the finish line (not that The Fundamentals of Caring’s script is lame). Rudd is matched note for note here by Craig Roberts, a sullen (but witty) teen who dreams of one day being either sexually-pleasured by Katy Perry or taking a road trip to see the World’s Deepest Pit...or, ideally, both at the same time. Third on his bucket list is being able to pee standing up at least once in his life. The Fundamentals of Caring follows the typical road movie playbook with snappy repartee between the driver and passenger, shots of a van traveling down a winding interstate at sunset, and the additional of other quirky passengers along the way (Selena Gomez as a runaway girl and Megan Ferguson as an “any-day-now” pregnant woman). But it’s the fundamental story which makes all the difference here. Based on Jonathan Evison’s novel The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving (the movie circumcises the title for the syllable-challenged, apparently), this is really all about how Ben learns to forgive himself for past mistakes. I liked how writer-director Rob Burnett’s script slowly doled out the backstory, peeling away the layers of Ben’s grief little by little so that we never fully know what happened until the end of the movie. By the time Trevor tells Ben, “This is not about me—it’s about you,” we realize we haven’t been watching a by-the-numbers road movie, but a road map on how to be a good parent. At that point, The Fundamentals of Caring took on a richer, deeper meaning. And yes, it made me feel pretty darn good about watching it.

Bonus: the original trailer for Jonathan Evison’s novel.

My First Time: Brandon Davis Jennings

My First Time is a regular feature in which writers talk about virgin experiences in their writing and publishing careers, ranging from their first rejection to the moment of holding their first published book in their hands. Today’s guest is Brandon Davis Jennings, an Iraq War veteran from West Virginia and the author of two Kindle Singles: Waiting for the Enemy and Battle Rattle. Brandon received his Master of Fine Arts in Fiction from Bowling Green State University, and his PhD. from Western Michigan University. His work has appeared in Black Warrior Review, Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Berkeley Fiction Review, Ninth Letter, Monkeybicycle, Passages North and elsewhere. Brandon’s chapbook Waiting for the Enemy was Iron Horse Literary Review’s 2012 Single Author Chapbook Competition winner, and he is the 2013 winner of the Thomas J. Hruska prize in Creative Non Fiction. His first full-length collection of essays Operation Iraqi Freedom is My Fault is forthcoming later this year. Visit his website to learn more about his life and writing.

My First Time Never Happened

Back in the olden days, when I was still in my MFA at Bowling Green State University (a school I highly recommend to anyone foolish enough to want to be a writer), my submission strategy was to scour Duotrope for every magazine that existed and then shotgun-blast my terrible stories at every magazine that accepted simultaneous submissions; this is not an approach I recommend (nor employ any longer). An additional recommendation is that you should not write a story about a man who lives on a hair farm built on one of the earth’s ass cheeks. Even if the character’s name is Harry Moon, do not do it. That story, “Moon Gold,” the one about the hairy crack farmer, was never published despite being submitted to a number of journals; thank God. But if it had been, it wouldn’t have been my first time that never happened; which is what this is all about.

The story that was accepted at a now defunct journal was titled, “Derrick is a Big Man.” It’s about a pararescue guy and his buddies who were on leave and drinking their asses off in a dormitory. Why pararescue? I picked a job I’d never done and then used details about that job to build metaphors and add a layer of intrigue that I did not possess the skill to construct with a job like custodian or a dorm manager: not without adding some fantastical elements like the ass crack of the earth, for instance. I can’t make a mop exciting. I know because I’ve tried.

Some good things happened for me because of “Derrick is a Big Man;” it won me the Devine Fellowship at BGSU my second year and it was the story I submitted in my packet to Western Michigan University where I was accepted and where I then completed my PhD. Both of those things happened after the story was accepted for publication in a print magazine that is now defunct; a print magazine that defuncted (sic) before my story saw the light of day.

At one point while that story drifted in the purgatory between acceptance and publication, the editor emailed to tell me that the funds for the print magazine had dried up, but that they’d love to publish my story online. We have readers for you online, he wrote. I immediately said no to that proposition. Why? Because I wanted to hold a book in my hands that had my story in it. Why did I want that? Because everyone I’d ever talked to at the time thought publishing electronically was subpar. A story online was online because there is limitless space there (which is not true; Google it). Editors and readers care less about your story because it’s just going up online; editors don’t need to worry about editing or proofing online stories because they can go online and fix the mistakes anytime they get a wild hair or they can leave errors as they stand because no one is going to read the story anyway; it’s online. People hate reading stories on screens and stories published online will just fade into the abyss with all the other stories online, and your career will disintegrate right along with all those unread, unedited stories.

So I said, Nah, dude. No thank you. I will not allow you to destroy my career and my life by publishing my story online. I was a mighty MFA student with zero publication credits and zero prospects and zero confidence who told that editor of the now defunct journal that I was taking my story back, and that I’d seek publication in some other print magazine. I was sorry about the state of his print journal because if his print journal died, then surely his journal was doomed outright; no magazine could survive by being online alone. Everyone knew something that ridiculous would never happen. It was as likely as Antarctica breaking apart and falling into the ocean in huge chunks.

For more than a year I was embarrassed by this not-first-time. I’d told friends and family that a story of mine was getting published moments after I’d received the acceptance in the mail. I might have waited an entire minute after I’d ripped open the letter and seen that what was inside wasn’t another form rejection that to add to the stacks of form rejections in my already overfull filing cabinet before I called my friends. People congratulated me. I drank beers and cracked jokes because I was on my way. My one short story that was going to be published in a print magazine that no one had ever heard of was going to be the thing that turned my life around. I wasn’t going to be, as it were, a virgin anymore. But as you’re already aware, I was wrong. Just like the kid in Stuart Dybeck’s “We Didn’t,” I was not about to get what had at one time seemed inevitable. For months I waited to hear from the editor about when the magazine would be released and when to expect my contributor’s copies that I would stand on my coffee table to do my bragging for me. Yet no word came. After a couple months, people started to ask questions. “When’s your story coming out? What’s the name of that magazine again? Are you gonna call and ask them what the deal is? Aren’t you worried that something weird is going on?”

Yeah I was worried and angry and scared that people would think I’d just made it all up. My whole life had gone from Job’s life pre-God and Devil’s bet to a life much like Harry Moon’s at the end of his story “Moon Gold” where he and his entire farm end up covered in shit after he strikes “gold” in the valley between the earth’s cheeks (how else could that story have ended?) And this all started before I had a chance to say no. The unknown that accompanies submitting work for publication is something I’ve become more familiar with over time, and I am more numb to it now, but back then, the thought that someone would accept my story for publication and then never publish it seemed like a horror story. You work on something until it nearly consumes you, send it to some faceless god like an offering, and then you’re supposed to just put it out of your mind until they tell you they do or do not want to publish that thing. (In the case of agents, they might not tell you that they even received that thing: something that also took some getting used to.) And there’s no point in going much farther into this spiral of terror because, as you know, the editor did finally contact me, and then I did finally tell him no. And ultimately the story was never published in any magazine: print or electronic. On a hard-drive it remains, only remembered on rare occasions such as this when I wax nostalgic about the anxieties wedded to the world of submitting things that you love while hoping against hope that whoever is on the receiving end of your submission doesn’t send you back an email that says something like: “Every joke falls flat, and I hope your character isn’t named Derrick because this story is about the war for oil.” An aside is that I once submitted a poem and the rejection said that it didn’t have the “ness” of a poem. I won’t argue that the poem was good, but that kind of rejection is as full of ness as they come.

So why write about this not-first-time as my first time? There’s not a whole lot of good in talking about this writing game if we don’t talk about the parts that are most frustrating and how we overcame those frustrating parts. And sometimes those frustrating parts are caused by beliefs that are imposed on us by others, and not beliefs that we agree with if we take a few minutes to evaluate those beliefs ourselves. I cannot say for a fact whether or not having that story published online would’ve been good or bad for my writing career. And that not-knowing bothered me for a long, long time. It doesn’t now, though; which is not to say that other not-knowings have been as easy to overcome.

I feel lucky (some might say blessed.) I’ve had stories published in journals that I can hold in my hands and have a bookshelf where I keep them, so I can look at them if I am feeling particularly miserable about my current writing progress (I doubt this ever stops recurring regardless of one’s success). But I have also published electronically, and I feel just as good when I see a story or essay of mine online as I do when I hold one of them in my hands. If I didn’t feel that way, then I wouldn’t have two Kindle Singles right now. The main character in both of those books is Derrick Vezchek, a version of the character in my never-published “Derrick is a Big Man.” Those Kindle Singles might have never happened if “Derrick is a Big Man” had been published back when my first time never happened. Because that story was never published I was able to write new and better stories about that character. Some of those stories were published in print magazines individually. Then Iron Horse Literary Review published them as a chapbook called Waiting for the Enemy, and then when, by the grace of God, that chapbook sold out, it might have died like so many chapbooks do. Instead of accepting that, I submitted the chapbook to Kindle Singles, and it is now available online and will be until Amazon or the internet dies.

Perhaps you’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t write a novella.” I heard it a lot. Why? Because where on earth are you gonna get it published? There are a few novella contests (I was lucky enough to judge one of them last year), but novellas are tough to publish in part because they just aren’t economical for most publishers. And that sounds stupid to most artists because “it’s not about the money” (which is true until it is about the money). I’ve told people a million times that a story is as long as it needs to be, and I believe that. But I also know that is bad advice for someone trying to get a book deal. And what happened to me? Because I was so focused on a collection of essays that I didn’t have the energy to finish my second novel, I ended up with a novella. If I’d been afraid of electronic publications, that novella would be sitting on my hard-drive, maybe forever. Instead of that, I went back to Kindle Singles and they published the novella, Battle Rattle, a novella about Derrick Vezchek. What’s even more thrilling about it for me, is that it became a best-seller: which, sadly, does not mean I made a million (or even a thousand) dollars.

“Derrick is a Big Man” was my first time that never happened, and it made me anxious for a long time. I got it over, and eventually I published other stories in journals that are not defunct, and I had interactions with editors and a couple agents that were positive and inspiring. Because I am the luckiest man I know, my supportive and encouraging wife framed both Waiting for the Enemy and the issue of Crazyhorse where my first published essay “Operation Iraqi Freedom is My Fault” appeared. I am proud of those physical artifacts, but I am also proud that when someone types my name into the search bar on Google or Amazon they can find my work, and they can read the things published online. Because some of my work exists online, a couple of my essays were found and then translated into Czech. And because Amazon published Waiting for the Enemy, Eike Schönfeld, (translator of the likes of J. D. Salinger, Jonathan Franzen, and Kathryn Mansfield), is translating my chapbook into German. How could that have happened for an agentless goofball like myself without electronic publications?

I’m glad I grew up as a writer in this transitory period, and I’m glad that I didn’t choose the side of stubbornness over progress because it’s mostly been good to me. I’m excited that print and electronic publications are able to coexist in a way that so many people told me wouldn’t be possible. And I am glad my first time never happened. Because if it had, I may not have been as driven to write better stories and essays. “Moon Gold” might have been the end of my writing career, and what a crappy ending that would’ve been.

Sunday Sentence: Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

Simply put, the best sentence(s) I’ve read this past week, presented out of context and without commentary.

The fiddle players rosined their bows, and the piano player lightly touched the keys, and the bass player made his big fat strings talk in a deep, low voice, and then they exploded—and the music they played was like a giant bucket of water poured over a great tree, fully leaved, the notes dividing and dispersing themselves down, gradually growing smaller and smaller, joyously running, bouncing, flowing down, down, down from leaf to leaf as if racing one another.

Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler

Friday Freebie: We’re All Damaged by Matthew Norman

Congratulations to Renata Birkenbuel, winner of last week’s Friday Freebie giveaway: This is Your Life, Harriet Chance! by Jonathan Evison.

This week’s book contest is for the new novel by Matthew Norman, We’re All Damaged. Catherine McKenzie, author of Hidden and Smoke, had this to say about the book: “In We’re All Damaged, Matthew Norman has crafted a fast-paced, funny, and touching story. Comparisons to Jonathan Tropper and Nick Hornby will be made, and deservedly so, but Norman’s voice and characters are fresh and all his own. A winning novel that is sure to make you laugh, cry and nod in recognition as all the best books do.” Read on for more information about We’re All Damaged...

Andy Carter was happy. He had a solid job. He ran 5Ks for charity. He was living a nice, safe Midwestern existence. And then his wife left him for a handsome paramedic down the street. We’re All Damaged begins after Andy has lost his job, ruined his best friend’s wedding, and moved to New York City, where he lives in a tiny apartment with an angry cat named Jeter that isn’t technically his. But before long he needs to go back to Omaha to say good-bye to his dying grandfather. Back home, Andy is confronted with his past, which includes his ex, his ex’s new boyfriend, his right-wing talk-radio-host mother, his parents’ crumbling marriage, and his still-angry best friend. As if these old problems weren’t enough, Andy encounters an entirely new complication: Daisy. She has fifteen tattoos, no job, and her own difficult past. But she claims she is the only person who can help Andy be happy again, if only she weren’t hiding a huge secret that will mess things up even more. Andy Carter needs a second chance at life, and Daisy—and the person Daisy pushes Andy to become—may be his last chance to set things right.

If you’d like a chance at winning We’re All Damaged, simply email your name and mailing address to

thequiveringpen@gmail.com

Put FRIDAY FREEBIE in the e-mail subject line. Please include your mailing address in the body of the e-mail. One entry per person, please. Despite its name, the Friday Freebie runs all week long and remains open to entries until midnight on June 30, at which time I’ll draw the winning name. I’ll announce the lucky reader on July 1. If you’d like to join the mailing list for the once-a-week newsletter, simply add the words “Sign me up for the newsletter” in the body of your email. Your email address and other personal information will never be sold or given to a third party (except in those instances where the publisher requires a mailing address for sending Friday Freebie winners copies of the book).

Want to double your odds of winning? Get an extra entry in the contest by posting a link to this webpage on your blog, your Facebook wall or by tweeting it on Twitter. Once you’ve done any of those things, send me an additional e-mail saying “I’ve shared” and I’ll put your name in the hat twice.