I was thinking this morning about what to do with the
girl show manuscript that has landed once again in my lap, possibly a couple presses and contests I might like to send it to...(I had given Ghost Road the first look, so I never really sent it out to anyone else..)I am also grateful that I'm not freaking out about the whole thing in the way I would have been years ago, which perhaps shows how much I've matured and gotten a bit more perspective on things than I initially had when I was younger (I've also lost some of the drive, which may be a bad side effect, but maybe it's just my energies are more diffused among various things and not all fixated on publication of my own work and moreso on the press and the shop.) It was dissapointing news, for sure, especially since it sort of sat there under contract for two and a half years when I could have been doing other things with it. However, as pissed as I was when I read the e-mail and was planning on ranting to whoever happened to come home first, my sister was layed off from her job that morning, so I felt a little silly being pissed over a measly little book that wouldn't be published when she could like..well..starve (okay, not really, but you get my point.)
I've had a weird relationship with writing from the beginning, since it has always felt like something that doesn't necessarily fit into my "real life"--there is "poetry life" where book contracts and rejections have weight, and then there is "real life" (work,family, my personal life) where those things all seem really small and insignificant compared to the things you do to live, to survive. To be honest, people around me have gone through some serious shit (illness, job loss, legal battles) and all my little poetry woes and triumphs seem so unimportant alot of the time when seen in the big picture. Or maybe it's that the poems still feel like they're important to me personally, the writing itself, but the writing world is less so. And it's not that I've lost pleasure in them necessarily, but more that I've stopped
needing for them to be so woefully important. Poetry and the things you do to get poetry out there should be fun, not angst ridden. Or maybe I've just mellowed as I've gotten older.
