Waiting and Writing and Waiting

When to put out, and when to wait.

“After all, it is like that: war often offers an escape or an alibi for the human being at the end of his rope, who can see no help in the future and secretly hopes for an external catastrophe to put an end to the unbearable situation.”

— Dola de Jong, The Tree and The Vine

This newsletter is about waiting and writing, but having just finished The Tree and The Vine, this line has stayed with me. It lands differently now that war has long lost its singularity, and everyone has a different war playing out in their head.

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A good friend told me in college that something I reliably did was not bring up the thing I really wanted to talk about until just before I left her dorm room or before we ended our hangout. More than ten years later, I still know that this is not the way to communicate with those you love, those you want to engage, or how to seek attention of any kind, but I don’t feel any closer to knowing how to change it. 

For a few years now it’s been helpful for me to remind myself while I’m writing that everyone can’t pay attention to me all of the time, and so it matters what I’m doing when no one is watching. This has helped me moderate my intake of social media, engage meaningfully behind the curtain in email and person-to-person interactions, and work to be okay with only being able to control the things I can control in my writing career. I can constantly be improving my own stories and style. I can nurture relationships with editors, booksellers, and other writers. I can gain clarity over why and how I write.

Most recently, for example, in working through edits from my publisher, I realized that I'm less interested in the psychology of my characters, and more interested in how their interactions with the physical and built environment shape their experiences, in part because I really do think that our relationships with water, earth, buildings, and rock are as big a motivator in our daily lives as our pasts. We just have no dedicated therapists to help us untangle those relationships (another idea for a story, yes?)

And again, here I am leaving what I really want to say for the very end: how do I switch gears after having been interior for so long? What do readers want to hear from me that I haven’t already put into the book? When I send out these newsletters I get the most response when I talk candidly about the writing and publishing process, and so I’m trying to do that more. But often it involves waiting for long periods of time and trying to distract oneself from encroaching thoughts of failure. I’ve gotten very good at waiting. I’ve also come to an understanding that as I’ve waited, my preoccupations have changed; I wouldn’t be writing and thinking about the themes I am now if I hadn’t been waiting for so long to publish, and for this I’m very grateful. I think the work is better for it, is what I’m saying.

What I’m Reading

Current before-bed reading is Authenticity is a Feeling: My Life in PME-ART, a memoir of creating experimental performance over the last 30 years by Jacob Wren, out from BookHug Press (whose list I’ve really been loving, having read Marie-Andrée Gill’s poetry collection Spawn earlier this year). I love reading whole books from people engaged in creating art in different mediums, and then thinking through how their results might be applied to literature. For example, early on Wren writes about the “post-mainstream” as theater that is “smaller or ambient, privileging an engaged amateurism over clear virtuosity, and was often made by groups or collectives as opposed to one genius director or choreographer.” To a writer, those possibilities are very exciting.

What I Wish I Was Reading

Who are the artists in other mediums who inspire you, and what books of theirs should I read? Tell me what you love about them!

Publishing Opportunities

Split Lip Press is accepting unsolicited essay collections, memoirs, and nonfiction-hybrid full-length manuscripts. Deadline December 1. $10 reading fee, but they will provide fee waivers no-questions-asked if you send them an email following their instructions (you love to see it). 

Paradise on the Margins is an anthology seeking submissions of essays, short stories, interviews, poetry, speeches, and visual art from trans women of color and trans femmes of color. Deadline July 2021.

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My book A Natural History of Transition, is available to preorder through Metonymy Press.

First time here? Subscribe below. You can find more of my writing at calangus.com.