novelette

ART STUDENT

/ janpriddyoregon / 6 Comments
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The Brahma Teapot with the lid off and tipped back to show the bull. I made an entire teaset (the goldsmith who commissioned it did not want anything representational) and dozens of mugs in this style back in the day. The clay looks like porcelain, but is only a low-fire white clay. The patterns are underglaze and protected by clear fired glaze.

Back when I was an art student, I thought I might earn money, if not actually a living, from my art. I envisioned a dramatic difference in my life compared to how I was raised.

I was first a Ceramic Art major at the University of Washington. In the clay side of the Fire Arts Building, we were divided into throwers and handbuilders. I was a handbuilder and our work was primarily sculptural art. It was gallery stuff and I did eventually exhibit in galleries and museums (Bellevue Art Museum and Tacoma Art Museum), but selling was what throwers did because they were in to “production.” That is, they made many of a single shape and sold bowls and mugs and so forth. The year of the first University Street Fair in 1970, I had still been in high school, but I sold handbuilt work. I did that again after I had studio space in the Fire Arts Building, in 1972 perhaps. I took over firing the Skutt kilns with everyone’s work, and completed dozens of handbuilt mugs for sale. A year or so later I juried in to the Bellevue Art Fair. I handbuilt entirely different mugs, dozens of mugs in the style above, and I was disappointment when a friend came along with her ceramic-handled flatware and sold more than I did. I mean: crushed with envy, destroyed. Of course, she is still making a living with her art, so she had the better instincts even then.

Long story short? Selling my work became a painful experience. I gave work away. I traded a teaset for a stunning 8″ gold stickpin. I completed two other pieces on commission and was shafted one of those times. I should focus on success, but I wanted then (and still today) to be the best or not at all. Selling, despite my day job in retail, remained a frustrating and unsuccessful experience, a reflection of failure, inadequacy, foolish hope.

But here I am, weaving shawls for sale. A stack of three quilts, unpriced but intended for sale. And my stories too.

I was still almost young when I began writing seriously. I had a fantasy of selling my first novel and making enough money to create that coveted dramatic change in my fortunes. I would quit teaching and write full time. I would pay off my mortgage. I had the same fantasy about the second (also unpublished) novel.

The first time I made actual money from a story was just a couple of years ago with “If It Were True Owls Dream” which was a fantasy story. My first fantasy and first cents-per-word payment. It made me laugh. I did not need the money as I felt I had and no longer had delusions about fame and fortune. By then I was beginning to wonder about how to construct a story where (nearly?) all sources of conflict were absent. And I thought that perhaps I could make some money selling SF/fantasy. Maybe. Or not. Did it matter?

But then Trump and covid19 and rejection from publishers. I send essays off to Dinty Moore and he is kind enough to publish them in the Brevity blog. Mostly recently I wrote an essay about the creativity we will find after much of what we assumed was true about the world, how things work, and ourselves is unraveled. That essay goes live next month. Does anyone think this will be over next month? Convince me.

And then I decided to serialize some of the story that has consumed my writerly imagination for a long time, years. That is why bits of “Butterfly Fontanelle” showed up here. A little at a time goes up as I work through the only draft I could find on this computer. There is a 37k word version someplace, I think. I am working from the fourteen thousand word version. It’s growing a bit. Each day I work on it, I am a little bit surprised at what is happening. I am trusting that by the time I put up the 15th or 18th installment, it will end properly, that it will have gone someplace. I honestly cannot recall how this one ends. Not for sure. Maybe. We’ll all find out together.

And I have retired from teaching. The mortgage is paid. And here is a dramatic change to my life.

DONE/NOT DONE

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Eight hours, then six hours the next afternoon, then a day off, then another seven hours revising my 2016 novel after working my paying job. I have queried it more times than I am willing to admit and under four different titles. (The husband of a friend suggested the title last week that I think has stuck.) I have written eleven drafts of this novel. It has drifted up and down between 75 and 82 thousand words. Two agencies are interested. I just queried another agent, and I have sent out 22 story submissions this year. In March, because clearly I have too much time on my hands, I committed to writing a 40-page novelette and a new poem each day in the month of April.

Ask me how that’s going.

I have a few lousy poem drafts and 21 pages of a science fiction short story that is already too long and does not want to be novelette. (We’ll call it the “pigeon” story, because it does actually have a pigeon in it for about a page.) I really do want to put the pigeon story aside because it gets more strange and complicated every time I think about it. And anyway, it’s done. Isn’t it? Sixty-five hundred words is long enough and I should stop. Shouldn’t I? Or maybe it’s only that I do not want to give it another 20 pages. It’s a lot more work for a story that is strange without being actually horrifying, and which no one will like, right? Maybe I am even afraid of what will happen if I do write more? That is entirely possible. I am not sure if there is a market for stories this long, and the story itself is creeping me out more than a little bit.

Like so much of what I write, this one, the pigeon story, starts with a story about birds. I have another creepy bird story that already wants work. It has crows. Maybe I can set this 21-page pigeon story aside and work on the crow story for a few days. The owl story is going to be published. I am afraid to look at it again. Heaven help me, I know I would begin to revise.

My husband and I went on our first actual vacation in fifteen years last month—all the way to Victoria in Canada. Both of us are familiar with Vancouver Island and Victoria from our youth. Gary had Unitarian friends there when he was a teenager and I used to show dogs and stay with friends on the Island.

We did not take a device capable of accessing the internet with us to Canada. For three nights and four days, we were out of touch. Even the flip phone did not work since we were out of the country.

I had been busy sending out work before we left and several pieces were being held—short-listed for further review. I did not think about them. We napped, walked, ate, looked in shops, talked, admired views, and napped some more. I finished reading two books, but I did not even write in my journal or take photographs. It was a lovely time, and I fell asleep in the car while my husband drove most of the way home.

As we neared home, I took over driving because the bridge over the Columbia River is four miles long and he Gary hates driving across. I confessed to him that if I did not have some sort of positive response to my writing when we got home, I was going to be sad. He replied with suitable gravity that he expected that.

While I was reviewing two hundred unread emails, I found the good news I hoped for. And while responding to acceptances of the owl story and the crow essay (not the crow story, which is something else), a request for a full manuscript of my novel arrived from an agent I have queried in the past.

Yes, a very good day. I was happy and I congratulated myself and my husband and I drank a full bottle of sparkling wine. Yes. Yes, we did.

And without in any way dismissing the glory of this good news, these three successes, I do not believe I “have turned a corner” in my writing life. Everything will not go well from now on. It may immediately go back to mostly unsuccessful. For example, no journal will choose to take the story that three journals are currently considering—even though each has held it twice as long as they usually hold work. (The longer they have it, the better—it means that a first reader liked it well enough to pass it on, and the second reader too.) It’s likely that all three of the editors thinking about liking my story will decide they do not like it enough to publish it. That happens all the time, often enough that a website online tracks not just the text of form rejections, but also the text of “higher tier” rejections. I mostly submit to journals and magazines with an acceptance rate somewhat below 1%. I am submitting to journals which show hundreds of submissions but no acceptances at all in the stats at Duotrope where I track my submissions. Yes, I could make it easier by sending work to smaller journals, but if I wanted easy, there are other things I could be doing rather than writing stories with birds in them.

Nothing is changed because I have recently had a story and an essay accepted. My mother always warned me about getting my hopes up. I have been up there before.

There was the year I won a Literary Arts grant, was accepted into an MFA program, and had a story published by Calyx. This was followed by hard work on my MFA and then . . . nothing. My mother died. I could not write at all but dwelt on one story day after day without making any progress. Three years passed.

There is no corner a writer can come around and find everything easy and neat. Writing is not like we might have hoped, like maybe the man in the White House thought everything would go his way, once he won the electoral college.

Real life, even if you get away with telling lies or you write fiction, is messy and out of control. If you told the truth or wrote nonfiction, it would still be messy. Poetry? Messy, messy, messy. Right up to the moment the poem sings.

This is what I know about success:

  • success does not last, but good writing does
  • acceptance is glorious—celebrate when it comes
  • nothing good can last, but neither will the bad
  • count rejections because they will come anyway (I already have 33 this year and my goal is to have 100 for 2018)
  • sometimes the “dream market” is the only one with readers smart enough to appreciate your best (A prize-winning story of mine was rejected by tiny journals before finding publication with a better one. This happened twice.)
  • failure was at the beginning and so it shall be at the end

Almost 400 years ago, Hobbes claimed life is “nasty, brutish, and short.” Writing should not be like that. But the struggle is long and exhausting. Reward seldom comes when we need it most. People misunderstand, but I know for certain that I am never certain about what I am doing. The writing is messy and personal and haunts me awake and asleep.

In case it’s hard to tell, I am enjoying myself quite a bit just now.