Writing

Little Known Horrors of the DIY Book Signing

Kathy StevensonLeave a comment

(You can read a “companion” to this essay, a humor piece about book signings from 1/16/17.)

I was at a Barnes & Noble recently, and I saw that there were folding chairs set up for an author reading and signing that evening. It was an author I had never heard of, nor had I heard of her book. Nor did anything about the signage promoting the event make me want to hang around.

Then I felt bad. Who was I to judge? Then I had a flashback to book signings of my own, and felt a mixture of pity for the author, mixed with a bit of nostalgia, and maybe even a little envy. This author had birthed a book! And she was putting herself out here in the cold, uncaring world of the mall bookstore. Continue reading →

The Art of Place

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(Every story takes place somewhere… In my work I often go back to Golden, Colorado, where I spent most of my childhood.  Here is an excerpt about Golden from The Queen of Everything.)

The town of Golden still has a nicely kitschy sign arching boldly over the center of Washington Street, the main thoroughfare that runs north to south, paralleling the Coors brewery. It states Howdy Folks! Welcome to Golden, Where the West Lives!

To our family, hailing all the way across the country from Plainfield, New Jersey in our cruise-ship-like Plymouth, this Howdy Folks! sign was exciting and exotic stuff. We had left the gritty, grimy, graffitied city life behind; left behind our Irish and Polish relatives, and arrived in the Wild West.

Lookout Mountain rises hugely and majestically out of the western plains that slope immediately upward out of Golden’s city limits. The Table Mountains – North and South – form flat, dusty sentinels on the town’s northeastern and southeastern edges, and the powerful fist of Castle Rock looms over the sprawling Coors plant. You can see the outline of its distinctive shape on cans and bottles of Coors beer.

Our family took a collective breath of the clear, piney Colorado air and noticed something else. Another smell. Something slightly yeasty and malty, cloying and sweet. This odor, the distinct odor of the brewery, belching out steam clouds of its processed hops and barley into the dizzyingly thin mile-high air, was a sense memory my sisters and I would forever associate with Golden, and with our childhood there.

That day though, that first day, the brewery – a few blocks east of downtown – was just part of the exciting sights, sounds, and smells of our new Golden life.

How Writers Deal With Rejection

Kathy StevensonLeave a comment

First of all, I changed the name of my file where I store my rejections, to “returned.” I know I’m only fooling myself, but I choose not to live as rejected. (Dejected, maybe, but not rejected…)

Second, I look the returned piece over (whether it is a poem, short story, or essay) and then do more research on where I might send it next. By this point I feel as confident as I will ever feel that it is good piece of writing, or I wouldn’t be sending it out. I have been writing and publishing long enough that I think I have a sense now of when something is good.

I don’t really spend that much time sending work out, because most of my writing time is spent actually writing. Or reading, or researching, or attending author events, or tweeting, or writing blog pieces. However, every couple of weeks I set aside a day, or a big chunk of a day, to do what I call a “blitz.” Wherein I do a major perusal of my unpublished work, and try to find a home for it by researching potential publications.

Many of my essays were published by the first places I sent them to, because I had developed relationships, over years of writing, with op/ed page editors. Or I had a regular gig as a columnist. Or I just hit the right chord with the right editor.

It’s hard not to give up on a piece that you love and have faith in, and I’m not sure how you know when to stick a fork in it. I have had several stories and essays that have been rejected (“returned”) after at least twenty or thirty tries. For real! I think you have to keep your faith in your work, or you just couldn’t do this for too many years.

If you want to read a humor piece that appeared in The Writer magazine (“Thoughts on Rejection in the Middle of the Night”) go to my posting on Jan. 17th, or go to the category “Writing” where you will find other essays I have published about writing and publishing.

Here is a note I got years ago from an editor at The New Yorker (when I once had the nerve/guts to send them a short story). In writer pep talks, they always say that a handwritten personal note means something. I still haven’t figured out what…

Bloom (a short-short story)

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(Published today in the online literary journal Cease, Cows. Read below or follow link.)

http://ceasecows.com/

BLOOM

She had been waiting nearly a year for her pass to the Repository, or the Repo as most people called it. The line was long, as all lines were now, but it was moving. Her senses yearned toward the building itself, as it housed so much that she had almost forgotten. People her daughter’s age had lost nearly all of those memories because they had been so young when these things had disappeared.

The disappearance had been gradual. In the day-to-day, one thing slipped away, then another, but it was never enough at one time to cause true alarm. It was more of an erosion, grain-by-grain of something solid that had always been there. One day you noticed something was half-gone, then it was not there. Continue reading →