Sawdust in My Gas Tank

I did not ask my therapist this week if her other patients are being as strongly emotionally affected by domestic news events as I am. Did not, but wanted to. I retreat deeper into my creative life and further away from what's out there, and I feel ever guiltier about it. I know myself well enough to know there isn't another choice, and that what I really think, it's not a good idea to spread it around. I was wrong about Melania, I think - not all the way wrong but mistaken about her willingness to be used politically - so it's probably best not to use my brain on such things. I'm okay being wrong; I'm not okay being in a state of hyperalert despair all the time.

can't sleep, CNN'll eat me

That said, the news from the creative side is largely good. I'm relieved to be running slightly ahead of schedule on books for review - have read all the July and August releases in the pile, have reviewed almost everything with a deadline, am working on reading and placing September and October releases now. With two exceptions, one of which is 450 pages and already out, one of which is 530 pages and due in August. So I'll be okay, but I can't exactly relax.

I wrote a tripartite essay that I've been prevaricating about since January, so I feel great that it's done (though not without whining). I'm waffling on whether to try and write another one before July 5. There's a deadline that day that suits the essay very neatly, but I really don't know if I can put it together in a week.

A crème de la crème publication expressed interest in a pitch but is taking an anxiety-inducing amount of time to get back to me about the finished piece. A publication that's a big goal of mine for essays accepted a review pitch. (Subtopic: I feel weird about saying in bios and pitches that my work has appeared somewhere when it's a review, and the pub is best-known for a specific genre. Especially a genre in which I write. But it's technically true.) A publication that's almost as big a goal of mine accepted a regular pitch and I'm deeply afraid I'll fuck it up. Two! two! editors responded to my pitches saying they'd read my reviews. My response was this tweet:

Swerving between feeling bigheaded with proof that my writing strategy of the past six months is working, and feeling naked and weirded out and terrified that I probably just put sawdust in my gas tank and it's going to sputter and stop any time now

— Katharine Coldiron (@ferrifrigida) June 25, 2018

And for the past couple of weeks I've been participating (very badly) in the #1000wordsofsummer project, where Jami Attenberg writes us a note of support every day and we hold each other up on Twitter. I thought this project might, at least for a couple of weeks, get me to work more consistently, instead of the way I do it now, where some days I write morning and afternoon, some days I read in the morning and write in the afternoon, and some days I read both morning and afternoon and don't write at all. And it isn't predictable or dependent on a schedule, it's just what seems like the right thing to do that day. I also hoped that I'd be writing purely creative stuff for all of the daily pages, preferably all on the same project.

None of which happened! I didn't write every day, I "cheated" by writing reviews on some of the days (it's way easier to make myself write reviews than creative work), and I varied what I worked on, depending largely on fancy. I think this might've been my last major attempt to train myself to write every day. My one half has tried to teach my other half that I'm untrainable in this regard many, many times. Maybe this time my other half will goddamn listen.

But I did finish that essay during the two weeks, and wrote something fun about Celine Dion. It was a helpful exercise to participate even as much as I did, much more so than not doing it and being petulant and snotty about it, which is what I always do when NaNoWriMo comes around.

Out in the world:

This month's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) was with Eileen G'Sell, whom I admire a lot for her astounding fashion game as well as her skill with words. Check it out.

I reviewed my mentor Dr. Haake's book for Anomaly. I filed this review in late 2017, but delays on one side and then another have pushed it to now. I think it was worth the wait.

I reviewed a fascinating thriller for LARB, The Captives, by an author who can boast a gap of 20+ years between her first book and her second. The gap reminds me of Tillie Olsen, but the book sure doesn't. It's an extremely good thriller and I'd love to mail you the ARC if you want it.

KBO

Some months ago I listened to a five-year-old interview from the Longform podcast. I believe that a lot has changed at Longform since October 2013, which was when the interview was conducted, and I'm certain that a lot has changed in the life of the subject, Elizabeth Wurtzel. So I can't really guarantee anything about how this interview went, or could be interpreted, except for what I got out of it.

Wurtzel is a tricky figure. She ripped the lid off mental illness with Prozac Nation, made it a topic that was no longer taboo (even if it's still not as easily discussed as it could be), and then she did a whole lot of drugs, wrote some weird books, and behaved really weirdly on the public stage. She seems like she's a difficult person, generally, and that her solipsism has been nurtured in an unfortunate, almost pathological way by her early fame. As a writer she is not someone to rely upon, or even admire, but I believe she's always going to be someone to watch.

I listened to this interview because Prozac Nation meant a lot to me when I was in my late teens and early 20s, and I wanted to know what she'd sound like. She sounds weird, is the answer. She self-contradicted a lot, and when called on it, used slippery rhetoric and arrogance to elude admitting she was mistaken. She redirected or restarted her sentences more often than not. She said some generally insulting things and threw her weight around inordinately.

Nevertheless, there's a certain quote from this interview that I've been mulling over since I listened to it. Which was when I still had a day job, so, like, in March or before. I can't stop thinking about it.

E: I also did not stop bugging people. I mean, people don't know how to do that anymore. They think that you can get things done with a text message. You can't get things done with a text message.

Q: What does bugging people mean to you?

E: It means asking people if you can do something until they say yes. I mean, you just have to ask until they say yes. 

The context had to do with how to get opportunities as a writer. She emphasized that you have to beat doors down and be insistent and annoying before you get the kinds of opportunities you want.

I've pitched reviews to a certain editor at a prominent publication at least a dozen times. Probably closer to two dozen. When I was about to give up on his publication a couple of months ago, he wrote back, with the email subtext of a heavy sigh, to tell me that he'd ask his colleague if they had anything for me. He never got back to me with an assignment, but even that email was proof that being persistent was closer to the answer than giving up was. I mean, you do risk being annoying enough for an editor to block you or ignore you or continue turning you down forever. But as soon as I think in that direction, I think about this Wurtzel quote.

To break it out a little further: a) Giving up is not going to get me closer to a yes from that editor, or any other. That's a guarantee. No one who gave up has reached the top of any mountain. b) Every editor interview I've ever read that talks about the submitting styles of men and women says that generally, men keep trying forever, while women give up after some variable amount of rejection. Considering that, men are statistically more likely to get published. That's not a VIDA thing, that's a pure numbers thing. Men try more, so they succeed more. The person who keeps trying is statistically more likely to get up the mountain. c) It's possible that being too annoying is going to get me no further than giving up. But I don't know that.

That means, if only in percentage, not even considering what feeds the soul, there is less harm in being persistent than there is in giving up.

So I'm going to be persistent. I'm going to keep pitching that damn editor, asking him if he has anything for me, bugging him, until he says yes. I got a third rejection from a women's mag the other day that said "please keep pitching me." Early last week I got a nibble on a pitch at a super-snooty publication, and that guy didn't write me back after I sent the full article, so you better believe I'm gonna ask him about it early this week. If he didn't like it, I'm going to try it somewhere else, and somewhere else, and somewhere else. Until it lands or becomes irrelevant, I'm going to keep trying it.

So thanks, Elizabeth Wurtzel, for giving me the words to whisper to myself every day, staring at the inbox. Just keep bugging them until they say yes.

Somewhat related: I got started on writing 1,000 words every day on Friday. I really wish this had not started on a Friday, but it did, so I got going. I picked up where I'd left off on the Citizen Kane essay and I have a pretty good trajectory for what's going in next. I'm a bit worried that the ideas won't all hang together once I'm done drafting - more so than I have been on a trifecta essay thus far - but it's early yet to be judging.

My ARC pile is juicy right now, and everything is decently far off, so I'm happy. Full measures of good and bad in the past week in terms of writing news.

Out in the world:

VERY IMPORTANTLY: I wrote a long, wacko essay about Sean Penn and Amanda McKittrick Ros, and the Millions very gracefully accepted it. I am sharing this piece everywhere, persistently, annoyingly. I love and am proud of it and perhaps I'll tell you why in another post sometime. Though I did already write this about it.

I interviewed Kelly Sundberg for TRUE. Her memoir, Goodbye, Sweet Girl, is a stunning piece of craft with an amazingly confident voice for a first book. Grab it before it becomes the next Wild and you're mad you didn't get in on it early.

Scraps from an Off Week

Let us say that this week included multiple self-inflicted setbacks. One of them involved fire. Not a metaphor.

Onward: I signed up for this cool thing Jami Attenberg is doing where we're all together supposed to write 1,000 words per day every day for two weeks in late June. You can sign up for it yourself here. I signed up with the idea of knocking out a substantial chunk of the Casablanca novel, but now I'm not sure. I have a lot of little projects I'd like to get done. My plan from last week to write an essay every day this week didn't pan out; see the short paragraph above. Maybe next week I'll do the little stuff to make way for something bigger.

I don't usually get upset about celebrity deaths, but losing Anthony Bourdain leaves a big hole in culture shaped exactly like himself and no one else. We'll be sorting out his legacy on gastronomy, travel, encountering the Other, and a smattering of other cultural matters for a long time. It'd be nice to've had him around to help us sift through all that.

I've got a music memoir on my ARC pile, so I pitched a handful of prominent music mags this week. They got back to me lightning fast - all with passes, but friendly and encouraging and unbelievably speedy ones. Part of me wishes I'd followed my college-era bliss and become a music journalist after all. I'm sure there are downsides to that profession, but at the moment I can't think of any.

Some days I want to stop doing this altogether, particularly when the reasons I do it are so esoteric. Higgs once assigned us a paragraph about why we write, to be handed in the following week. It took me longer to do it than assignments of many, many pages. And then he forgot to ask for it, so we never handed it in. For me it's not as simple as self-expression or leaving something behind or ego; elements of all that, sure, but it's more about communication - the hope that someone is out there reading, needing me to write exactly what I've written for her brain to hum in just the way she likes. Still, the confirmation that I'm communicating with people who want that hum is rare, and the sense that I'm sliding down into a muddy pool hole filled with dead bodies is frequent.

I cannot more highly recommend Ghost City Press's summer microchapbook series. I've been getting it in my email for two weeks now and YOWZA. It's free. Sign up. Start every day (through September!) with cutting-edge contemporary poetry.

Out in the world:

I reviewed a wonderful novel, a lovely deep-dive novel-type novel, for the Arts Fuse. It's about these two badass Surrealist artists who went on to spread propaganda against the Nazis at great risk to themselves. I loved it. And I think I'm going to read the rest of Rupert Thomson's work, now, too.

I also reviewed a hard-to-pin-down book of cultural criticism for Cleaver. It will interest a really small slice of the population, I think, but it was worth reading.

Hobby Without a Horse

Even though the oppressiveness of a San Fernando Valley summer is nigh, I'm really happy it's June. May was terrific, full of good fortune and joy, but for whatever reason it felt LOOOONNNNGGG. June is exciting for at least two of the bylines that'll appear. One in particular.

Matt asked me the other day how often a piece gets published that I'm genuinely proud of. I told him it was something like one in 20, which feels like a really low estimate, but one in 10 isn't right either. I put a list of them on my website under "Favorites," but the reasons I am proud vary. Some have to do with me being able to write about something I am particularly passionate about, or something that I feel like I have knowledge of that few others do. The piece I wrote about Encircling, for instance; I don't know that a lot of people, no matter what kind of reader they are, have read all the multivolume books I've read, or would draw the same conclusions about them that I do. That makes the piece fairly uniquely mine. (It also makes its appeal pretty limited - how many people care about an obscure Norwegian literary trilogy? - but I can live with that.) The June byline I'm excited about regards one of my favorite hobby-horses, and it makes me burst with pride that other people are going to read about me riding it. Even if only a few others care.

hobby meets horse

Ideas are flowing but I'm feeling less excited about them, because it's starting to seem like I won't have time or interest enough to execute them all. During my freakout a while back I asked Lucas if he thought I should take a few days away somewhere (same place I went last April, I thought maybe) just to write, to wring all the ideas out of my head and then see which ones were viable. He said he didn't think so, in part because I have all day now alone in my apartment to write, and clearly the ideas aren't motivating me enough to put them down.

Here's the thing, though. The piece I'm so happy about coming out in mid-June - I sent twelve pitches on that piece, and no one wanted it. But I knew it was a good idea, so I wrote it. The accepting editor called the finished piece "epic." Certainly I think I'm at my best in full form instead of when pitching, but also, for some pieces, the execution is simply better than the idea. A handful of my pitches have gotten nibbles but nos, and I am just as sure as I am for this June piece that they're good ideas. I think I ought to just write them and see what happens. But getting a pile of rejections on the pitch is discouraging enough to kill a piece's appeal in my mind.

My review deadlines are pretty far out at this time, though. Maybe I should spend next week just writing, putting short essays down, one after another.

There's one essay that I really have to write, because it does have a deadline, but I don't remember if it's July or it was April, and maybe the kind person who set the deadline wasn't interested enough in my work to tell me when the deadline passed, and I'm too scared to look at the email to find out for sure. I wanted to finish it by the end of May but that didn't happen. (Hire me! I'm not paralyzed by deadlines at all!)

Otherwise, as hinted above, I'm slowing my pace a little bit on reviewing. The pile of books is getting further out, datewise, and shorter. I'm sneaking in books for my own pleasure instead of reading only for review. Last night I started reading Samuel Beckett's Molloy, and even though that sounds hard, I found it kind of soothing, the rhythm of it and the simplicity of the words. Between January 1 and May 31 I read 57 books. Counting them up helped me realize that it's okay to feel a little fried.

Pitches are landing fairly well, but I am 0/7 on residencies/fellowships/contests this year. And those are just the ones that've been announced. I alternate years for when I feel optimistic and when I feel fed up on residencies/fellowships/contests, so in 2019 I won't apply for flippin' anything because to hell with you and your application fees. And then in 2020 I'll be like "but maybe..." and Hedgebrook will get my money yet again.

Out in the world: 

I reviewed MEM, by Bethany C. Morrow, for Locus. I think this book is going to be part of school curricula in the future, so get in on it now. It's great. 

May's Books I Hate (and Also Some I Like) interview was with Sassafras Lowrey, a fascinating writer. 

An interview with me about my short story "C-a-l-l-a-s" went up at Luna Station Quarterly.