Writing that last post got me thinking how I've often written about the YESes and small successes that were important in helping your carve out your poetry career (though this always feels like a strange word to use as there is rarely any money in this job, nor is there any definable way of charting success when achievements and goals are all over the map.) I guess I can speak for myself..those moments that felt somehow important in a slew of other good things, and they might not be the ones you expect. But as such, I've put together an informal list of moments or small successes in my creative life I felt like were somehow extra sublime to experience as a writer.
1. The time after a gallery reading when another Chicago poet told me that my work was like Sylvia Plath and David Lynch had a baby.
2. My first book signing at the swanky SAIC ballroom with the Poetry Center of Chicago after I won their contest in 2004. I was terrified with very little reading experience, and went with my little handmade copies of Bloody Mary and was somewhat aghast when someone handed me a pen and asked me to actually sign them. While winning the prize earlier in the year was very shocking to me, this experience sticks with me even more. You can actually listen to that reading at The Poetry Center site about halfway down the page here.
3. Reading for the biggest audience I possibly ever will at the Guild Complex's Gwendolyn Brooks Open Mic circa 2005, which made me feel like I was sort of out of my element as more a page poet than a stage poet, but loved the huge and energetic audience nevertheless.
4. The morning I received a phone call in late 2005 from Ghost Road Press saying they wanted to publish my first book, THE FEVER ALMANAC, then later getting to sign that very book at AWP in Atlanta the spring after it was released.
5. While the spring of 2007 brought many things, including my MFA completion, it was the little colllab project with Lauren Levato Coyne, at the hotel andromeda, based around our shared love pf Joseph Cornell, that feels like one of the projects I was most proud of, We debuted it that summer at WomanMade Gallery during a reading themed around collages with the late Maureen Seaton.
6. After my chapbook feign with NMP/Diagram was released, I ran into an author who talked about how she had had her class sit in a circle in the dark by candlelight and read portions from it, which seemed like the way all my poems should be read for best effect really...
7. One of the most popular things I've written was actually in some ways the most fun and ridiculous. In 2012, Sundress released my little series of missives to a James Franco to much attention. When I ran into Erin a couple years later at AWP, she told me that downloads numbered in the thousands, and I realized that may in fact be the most readers I had ever reached or ever will. Those poems would eventually appeared in my book with Sundress, MAJOR CHARACTERS IN MINOR FILMS.
8. After it had been dropped when my first publisher closed up, I had begun to wonder if my thesis manuscript, GIRL SHOW, would ever be published so was very stoked/relieved when Black Lawrence accepted it in late 2011, the first of three books they would eventually release in the coming years.In some ways, it brought me back to writing seriously after a couple years of writing very little and drifting.
9. In the year after my mother died in late 2017, I started a more strident daily writing routine, mostly to give myself a focused task to start each day with rather than spiral into my own thoughts. I was able to keep it up, and while I do take occasional breaks (no longer than a month usually) I have managed to keep a steady stream of output in the years since, which has resulted in 6 longer books of poems and 3 others in the works in just 6-7 years, over double what I was writing prior to that.
10. In the late summer and fall of 2019, amidst studio moves and general chaos, I got the chance to spend some research time and do a reading at the Field Museum of Natural History. I was charged with writing some work inspired by the museum, and wound up with a chapbook of poems, extinction event, that I really do love and enjoyed immensely reading from tucked amid the Hall of Birds (even though I had to pause the reading twice to let groups of pre-schoolers in school uniforms pass through hands all linked together..lol...)
11. In 2021 I published my first self-issued full-length collection, FEED, which turned out amazingly and was very rewarding to see through from start to finish. While I had to get used to doing the heavy lifting work of publishing like design and promotion that had been handled by the trad publishers I had been working with previously, there was something great about having full creative control on a project.
