many drafts

sharing our work

/ janpriddyoregon / 11 Comments

A writer I know recently asked for opinions about sharing writing in public or with the public. It’s wonderful that writers share work. It’s extraordinarily helpful to have feedback and to use that to encourage further work in revision or something new. Pure glory to have our work well-received.

My thoughts about sharing drafts begin with the goal, which for most writers is to improve our writing. I hope that’s the goal. We need an objective reader or listener to help us locate weakness and strength and to ensure the writing is accomplishing the work we hope it is accomplishing. Most of us hope for praise, but if that’s all a writer is looking for, the rest of what I have to say will not be helpful. 

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1 one

/ janpriddyoregon / 3 Comments 
Crime tenting cities—my side, 
your side, my vision, yours.
Sometimes there is a right side. 
Sometimes truth clamors beside 
us, riding our hearts, crying, 
crying in the night to be heard. 

In the sweating darkness, 
the red lights scream brightness 
against the tender stars, the sirens 
and screaming, sweat dripping 
salty into open mouths, 
their righteousness unbolden. 

Is there never a time when violence 
does not excite, when tears 
fail to touch the rim of our glass? 
Everything shatters, everything ends,
is that the truth we long to hear
or the angels of our better nature? 

So dear to clearing fog, a mist 
rises before us as we walk north, 
and to the west there is a stone at sea, 
a waiting monument to patience,
a vision, a warmth of community. 
Our witness crowds the horizon.

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MY NOVEL

/ janpriddyoregon / Leave a comment

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My query-letter pitch:

Imperfect Patience*, a literary novel of about 76k words, follows a woman’s odyssey beyond grief. It is a novel of love overwhelming adversity.

Thena Justice was building a new life near Seattle after the death of her mother and breakup of a terrible marriage when her former husband murders the neighbor-babysitter and their daughter before committing suicide. Lost in grief and guilt, Thena first hides in a friend’s converted garage, then in a tiny cottage on the Pacific coast, thrashing her way through anguish, apathy, anger, and routine. Instead of returning to Puget Sound, she moves to Portland, Oregon, the city where she was born, takes the bus to a retail job each day, and keeps her head down until a child crying in the night wakens her sense of agency and hope.

My work has earned an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship, Arts & Letters fellowship, Soapstone residency, Pushcart nomination, and publication in journals such as the Brevity blog, The MacGuffin, CALYX, The Humanist, North American Review, and anthologies on running and race. I have BFAs in studio arts, and an MFA in fiction from Pacific University. I live and teach in the NW corner of my home state of Oregon. My house has been home to six generations of my family, which like most has seen its share of tragedy.

I have written the novel I searched for when I faced my own life troubles, a story proving the pathway back from unimaginable loss. Women, especially, do this all the time. I have little faith in fairytale romance, but I do believe in grit, I believe in recovery, and I believe in love. I believe stories can sometimes save us.

Currently, I am writing nonfiction and science fiction, but later this year I will begin revising another realist novel—a completed draft that will go through several more drafts. You can also read more about revision.

*I have gone through several titles (at least five). If someone decides to represent this novel, perhaps they will help me name it too.