The Egatz Epitaph

Kids, don’t try this at home. You’re about to read the worst advice a young writer can ever hear.

For the past decade, or so, I’ve rarely submitted unsolicited writing to publications of any kind. I feel pretty fortunate some editors seek me out. The ones who do are the ones who’ve published me better than 90% of the time for the past ten years, or so.

As the poet Thomas Lux said to me, “Ronnie, editors are not going to come into your home and open your desk drawer to search for poems.” Even spending an hour a week getting your submissions in the mail is critical (if you’re ready to be published), but my track record proves I’m incapable of even that.

Something broke in me somewhere along the way. It was hard enough to get the writing down all those late nights when narratives and how I built each one was all that mattered. I don’t make a good secretary, and I never employed one to keep track of submissions. I know several writers who have wives, girlfriends, and interns who do this for them. For me, the creation was enough. Then more people invited me to read, and things, as the cliché goes, began to snowball.

All this by way of saying I recently was surprised to receive in the mail an envelope with not only my handwriting on it, but it was from the past. Four years in the past, apparently. Forwarded twice from a place my wife and I lived three addresses ago, my handwriting was undeniable, but there it was: my old address written in my hand with the black ink I prefer. There was no return address, which didn’t surprise me, as whenever sending a return SASE, unsolicited or not, I don’t write the name and address of the publication.

This envelope, apparently, came from The Chattahoochee Review. It’s been a huge amount of time since I shipped that submission off to Tennessee. The SASE came back to me with just one of four poems I submitted. There was no mention of why they weren’t returned. There was no mention where those four years went. There was no mention of anything.

This is what writers—ready or not—do. We ship our words off in hope someone’s interested in them. Poetry, short stories, and novels are just about the hardest types of writing to get published, but that’s what I’m largely interested in. That’s what I read instead of watching reality television. My wife and I are working together on some exciting nonfiction projects, but there’s nothing like seeing characters develop, situations arise, or just feeling the emotion of a well-built lyric-narrative poem. Although we’re working on nonfiction together, we read fiction aloud before falling asleep. It’s a cozy thing, and better than television.

Editors have their own thing going on, of course, and presumably, they are doing what they do because they love literature. Hopefully, writers send their work to a publisher after checking if their work has similarities to what the agent handles or what the magazine or publisher puts out into the world.

Running a literary magazine or small press is a rough ride. It’s essentially an unpaid job, but that’s okay because no one does it for the money. Magazines run out of universities rely on unpaid student labor which changes from year to year, sometimes from semester to semester. Things get lost in the shuffle. I understand.

The romantic in me is prone to fantasize someone at The Chattahoochee Review loved my work and was unable to part with it, despite the fact a senior editor hated it. The realist in me knows my submission was just waylaid until some new volunteer found part of it and threw it in the SASE and sent it off.

My wife and I recently had dinner with a brilliant couple whom I’ll keep anonymous. She is a painter, and he is a multi-disciplinary scientist and professor who has dabbled in poetry his entire life. They surprised us by revealing they bought two copies of Beneath Stars Long Extinct, one for each of their homes. We spoke briefly about the book, and I felt both fortunate and a little embarrassed. I didn’t really have much to say about my book, but it was a great night. One of the things we touched upon was which poems in the book may be both nonfiction and about my wife. Jenny gave that wry smile I’ve loved for so many years.

For a long time I felt writing was more important than anything else. As the poet Dick Allen likes to quote Rilke, we either choose the art or the life. I put my life on hold for decades while working on the art. My wife likes the balance we’ve found between what we create individually and together. It feels pretty good, I must agree.

It’s amazing when you find someone who cares about the words you put down on a piece of paper. To be asked for an autograph after a reading still astounds me. Those things are icing on the cake, and very sweet but humbling icing, at that.

Strangely enough, the harder part seems more gratifying. The discovery and journey of writing and rewriting good poems always meant more to me than getting published. It’s the secretarial stuff I can do without. The student editors at The Chattahoochee Review probably feel the same way.