Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:
We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot’s in the door.
--"Mushrooms" by Sylvia Plath
I reread Plath’s “Mushrooms” this week (plus a fun little article about it) as I nudged and shoved through a pile of deadlines. This included hurriedly writing a synopsis of my novel Grievous so queries can go out to publishers soon: stress!! It’s not a genre I’d written in for creative projects. Could you imagine one for a poetry collection? After a quick riff on living mycelially via an allusion to David Bowie’s “Heroes,” the unnamed main character struggles to care for her dying mother, who is wondering what to wear in a heaven she may not believe in. Spoiler alert, because these synopses include ALL of a book’s major plot points: Mycocosmic ends with a cheerfully plutonic villanelle.
I’ve also been wedging my foot in the door poetically while thinking, like Plath, that there are so damn many of us trying to push up through the earth. The poets are using Canva to design posts summarizing their busy AWP schedules: me too. The poets are announcing their publishing milestones via social media and MailChimp: me too. Mycocosmic was published a year ago this week and the “book birthday” post/ newsletter has become a standard publicity genre. That’s fine, poets deserve any little morsel they can scrape out of the attention economy, but it’s hard to do the work lightly. First and foremost: the US is in the middle of an illegal war because a reckless pedophile president needs to distract people. Even without apocalypse (are we ever?), it would be a tonal balancing act: here’s me putting a very slight twist on a “content” cliché. Now here I am asking you to pay attention to my book in a way that needs to be a little wry and humble, because no one likes a pushy writer. Then there’s the tech: good lord, I’ve spent hours trying to format a simple email, is MailChimp going to make me upgrade to paid now?! Curses.
My mantra continues to be mycelium. There will be obstacles, and unlike Plath, I’m very unlikely to inherit the poetic earth, but I should reach out anyway. Connections matter, and not in a businessy way, which I’m mediocre at in any case. Often unlikely conversations nourish me most: they’re the most salient memories from this past year, for sure. Think of mycorrhizal filaments branching through the soil, striving to network with plant roots–but mostly out of sight. I aspire to fungal persistence. I find it beautiful.
I’ve been persisting in ways that are ultimately more significant, too. I’m writing and rewriting. I visited my kids in the northeast, which was quite a feat during a blizzard. My New York reading a week ago today was super-fun, but the snow was already beginning to fall. We spent the next day in my son’s Astoria apartment cooking and playing gin rummy. So long, museum plans. News flash: lacking a baking pan in a twenty-something’s marginally equipped kitchen, you CAN bake banana bread in a cast-iron skillet. When I arrived home and the synopsis was deemed good, I worked on poems. I somehow got forms and documents to the necessary places; read Fungi magazine; watched How to Get to Heaven from Belfast; took walks in gorgeous weekend weather; and attended a friend’s birthday dinner. Tomorrow I finish getting ready for AWP and return to Shenandoah’s submission queue. I’ll report highlights from the conference here after I recover–this event, with its 10-14K attendees, always packs a WALLOP. So so so many of us.
Mar. 5-7, AWP in Baltimore!
- Thursday 2-3 pm: Signing with Sally Rosen Kindred, Kestrel, Bookfair T972
- Friday 2-2:30 pm: Signing of Mycocosmic, Tupelo Press, Bookfair 1137
- Friday 6-9 pm: Tupelo Press Reading at Fadensonnen Wine Bar,3 West 23rd Street
- Saturday 9-10:15 am: How Form Informs the Form: Received & Original Forms in Manuscript Organization, panel with Donna Vorreyer, Chris Santiago, Rebecca Lehmann, and Taylor Byas, Room 327, Convention Center Level 300
