What a Teaching Writer Does When She isn't Writing

94º ~ feels like 105º ~ in official Heat Advisory mode now, and as much as I love being warm, even I have the A/C going today with a dewpoint of 75º...swampy


As a young writer and then a grad student, I had no idea of all the ways being a teaching writer would expand my world and my community. Sure, I knew about conferences. Sure, I knew that most books had blurbs on the back cover. Sure, I knew that writers formed friendships across geographic areas and exchanged letters or emails (yes, in my early grad school days, personal email was just becoming the norm and we all had dial-up accounts that took FOREVER to load). However, as I was struggling to simply embrace the craft of writing poetry, I rarely thought about what my working life would look like once I secured a teaching position.

In order to lift the veil a bit for future writers, here's a hodgepodge or what I've been up to while also putting in drafting time.


** Editorial work
I serve as a co-editor for Heron Tree, an online poetry journal, publishing one poem a week with a collected annual print edition. At Heron Tree, we are three people, all sharing in the tasks of running the journal. Until last week, we were reading submissions from our Jan 1 - May 1 submission period and holding weekly editorial meetings to select poems for publication.

My year-round work with Heron Tree is in PR/social media. I post on our Facebook page twice a week to help promote each newly published poem, and I work with outlets like New Pages and the CRWROPPS-listserv to promote our reading periods.

This week, I fulfilled another role. We publish our print edition in the early fall, collecting poems published on a roughly academic year calendar (2014 - 2015 this go-round). I spent a few days reading and re-reading all of the poems that will make up our third edition, and I "ordered" the poems into a rough draft. Next week, we three editors will meet to iron out what will become our latest print annual.

** Blurbing
In the past few weeks, I've been working on a blurb. Whenever I'm able, I try to say "yes" when asked to blurb a collection, perhaps out of a sense of paying it forward for all those who blurbed my work. When setting out to write a few sentences that will capture the essence of a collection, I read the work twice. On the first round, I read the book, cover to cover, rather quickly, only stopping to jot down big-picture themes. Next, and after at least a day has passed, I read much more slowly, often over several days, sinking into each poem with an eye for lines that stand out as representative of the larger themes. I dog ear these poems, and when I'm finished with the second read, I turn to writing the blurb, where I incorporate the themes with specific quotes to support my claims. Finally, I send the draft to the poet and ask for any revision suggestions. I'm serious. I don't ever want to misrepresent a collection or fail to capture a theme the poet thought necessary for future readers. I'm also fully aware that the press might cut my blurb at any time. This is life.

Being asked to write a blurb is an honor, and a gift, as I get to read a book well before its publication date. This most recent work has been with John McCarthy's Ghost County, slated for publication by Midwestern Gothic Press in 2016.  Y'all can just add this title to your "to-read" list now, FYI.

** Conference follow-up
In June, I attended the North American Review Bicentennial Conference at the University of Northern Iowa. That conference was two and a half days of non-stop poetry & writing extravaganza. I attended several remarkable panels on creative writing pedagogy, as well as getting to hear some wonderful readings. While in attendance, I was my normal, frantic note-taker self, filling up page after page of my journal.

Finally, today, I went through all of those notes and collected the pedagogy suggestions and exercises into one Word document that I can email to myself at school. I followed up with emails to a few presenters, asking for more information or simply continuing the conversation (oh, the joys of email's convenience). I took any writing inspirations and re-wrote them in my current journal, as the one from the conference was full in June. I also took the time to look up specific poems and essays suggested by presenters / readers. Now I see that I need to do this more promptly following such a great event, as a few of my notes had lost their meaning in the month's expanse since I'd jotted them down.

** Post-publication award for my new book
On tap for my next non-drafting work is to review a list of post-publication award opportunities for The Alchemy of My Mortal Form. Trio House has already made certain selections and we've worked out who will do what to get the book submitted. However, I love to make an Excel spreadsheet any time I can (it must be the accounting genes I get from my mom and my sister), and I want to be sure I haven't missed a golden opportunity. Note: Trio House has been wonderful and supportive about getting the book out to these awards, but I also know that a small press has a limit on the number of copies and the award fees it can allocate to any given title. I'm happy to pick up the extras for important possibilities.


What I notice, when I look at this list of work is how much a part of a community I've become. Some of this work might not pertain to folks who don't teach, but most of it centers on being an active poet in the publishing world. No, none of these activities are required to be a writer; however, for me, all of these activities help me. They help me become a better writer, of course, but they also help me become a better reader. In the end, though, they mostly help me feel not so alone, given that most of my drafting work happens in solitary focus on the page, which can drain my energy stores.

I hope this helps shed some light on what I do with my "poetry time" even when I'm not drafting. (And I've just realized that there isn't anything listed here about the collections I've been reading lately...but that's a whole other post entirely.)

Until next time...