Tag: publishing

So We Had a Wake

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This is a story about a dream, or a memory of a dream. It was published years ago at another ghost town called Slingshot.

I think these pieces leant themselves very well to the the kind of online writing that was emerging in the late 00’s. It’s a shame so many of those venues, many of which were very good, are no longer around. Pour one out for each of them, I guess.

So We Had A Wake

You came over in red high tops from a yard sale and your old bandana with a Rubbermaid trunk of things for me to keep. Your Junior Legion plaque. Records from the bank you worked at one summer, but you never worked at a bank. You worked in a furniture factory and a Bible software company. There were toy baseball bats that I thought I might let my son play with but would maybe keep wrapped forever, a baseball with funny faces, binders from Seminary and records. “Have you heard any news of any kind?” I asked, afraid of why you were doing this. “I haven’t heard,” you said and I tried to remember how I felt when you were given back to us. I don’t remember what I said when I found out, like I’d missed the news but still knew it, like I coveted the chance I must have had to jump and yell and strip and beat my chest. I should have bruises there like butterflies, their brown shadow wings spreading from my sternum. My knuckles would be burger meat, my lungs would break my ribs, my throat would cut and chafe on the impossible proclamation, would scab and petrify, vanity, I’d bleed the truth out in a dribble. If you hadn’t really died, once, if I found out they had been mistaken, a clerical error, even a resurrection. What they can do with medicine, now. But I don’t remember. 

I think you better leave me with the trunk, too, so I have a place to keep this all just how it is, you know, and I don’t say just in case because just in case is doubt and doubt kills t-cells, eats your organs. You have been so positive. You smile at everything you show me. “I probably shouldn’t have taken these,” you say about the jump drives from the bank that are branded with Jerry Dior’s batsman. “They might be interesting.” 

I wonder if you were lucid all those mornings you slept through class, if you were conjugating Greek declensions, parsing Hebrew in your dreams. I wonder if you parse me now, if first and second person are constructs of the living. If your Thou to my I is only feltboard Jesus. 

I understood that you were private, but I understand now, after our visit is consumed by things I don’t sleep through — my wife calling after church to wake me up for lunch, my son in the background saying “Hallelujah, Daddy!” — why you didn’t want a funeral. You couldn’t say goodbye and wouldn’t let me, either. And so when you visit in the morning, as often as the intervals in which I’d always seen you, we don’t have to talk about how we miss each other, I don’t have to ask if the end hurts or know how scared you were to go. The night is hypothetical and it seems we both are only sleeping.

Evensong

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Another early piece. This was published at elimae when Cooper Renner was the editor. It was a very good journal. This story is 100 words long.

Evensong

Thaddeus, age 3, set the Evensong in shallow water. Small waves rose and fell, and, retreating, carried Thad’s small ship further from the shore. Squealing and on pigeon toes Thaddeus retrieved it, and, safely back, he cast the tiny schooner headlong into the sea. His father’s strides were long and easy and for a moment Thad was sorry for the rival ocean and the fight he’d picked. His father bent low and pressed Thad to his chest and from tall grass on the bluffs above, they watched a red sun sink behind the green and Thad said, “Bring it back.”

How All Literary Rejection Letters Should Start

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

This lets you know right away that the rest of the email is not about your Pushcart nomination.

After the salutation, the very first word of the first sentence should be “unfortunately.” This saves writers from having to scan the rest of the text for the word. It also means that if the writer’s e-mail service shows body text previews, the writer doesn’t even have to open the email to know they’ve been slush-piled. I still recommend reading the actual rejections just in case there are specific comments or requests for more work.

This message has been brought to you by the editors of a review somewhere in the formerly industrial Midwest. Remembering which story I sent them four months ago is pretty tough, and it looks like they forgot the title, too.

Since many of you visit this blog looking for bits and pieces about the MFA process and the nuts and bolts of trying to get pieces published, I thought I’d share the secret hierarchy of rejection letters.

1: The standard form letter like the one seen here.  Not very gratifying, but don’t take it personally.  You’re busy, they’re busy, and that’s just how it goes.

2: The form letter with your name and the title of your piece.  Pretty standard practice.  I think I get more rejections with this level of personalization than without.

3: The personalized rejection letter with a personal note telling you how much they liked your story, even though it’s not for them, and encouraging you to send them more. In the super-competitive and completely subjective literary world, this can feel almost as good as an acceptance.  When you’re at this point with a specific piece or a specific market, you know that the editors really looked hard at your piece, thought about it, and saw enough promise (or whatever they look for) to personally encourage you as a writer.  No one owes you that, so when you get it, it’s a good thing.  Follow up with a thank you.

The most important thing to remember?  We’re talking about subjective responses to art.  You will “fail” often, especially in the beginning.  The thing is persistence and, very often, revision.

Books are People, Too

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

Not mentioned when I wrote this post originally?  It was also my 30th birthday.  Almost a decade later, we still have books.

In the course of looking for a cover image of They Don’t Dance Much, I came across Book Worship.  You need to check that out, especially if you’re one of those people who isn’t made sick by the (looming?) death of book-as-object.  I get sad about the death of cassette-tape-as-object, so you can probably figure where I come down on totally paperless publishing.

Book Worship reminded me of this awesome Flickr set I found a few months ago.  There’s something about this mid-century design aesthetic that makes me want to write better.

Penmanship, the Engine of Democracy!

~ Chris Cocca ~ 6 Comments

In 2009, I was very considered that we’d soon seen the end of physical books.  10 years later, I’m not.  I think we’ll have books for a very long time.  Concern about privacy, censorship, and surveillance has not similarly abated.

Every other day I read something about how books will stop being physical objects and exist only digitally.  Publishing houses are producers of information, not artifact, etc.

I love to read, but you’ll never hear me say that I like to do anything like snuggle up to or get cozy with a book.  But the continued existence of books as objects is extremely important.

From the beginning, at least in the West, books in book form have been subversive. The Gutenberg Bible was subversive.  Common Sense was subversive.  More to the point, the printed word as printed word on paper is an historic engine of unrest, access, and change.  All those pamphlets and papers. These things being swapped and smuggled and shared.  Tyrants burning them.  Schools banning them. People reading them anyway.

We talk so much about going “off the grid” in terms of energy consumption.  We long for it.  Can you imagine not being able to do one of the most basic human functions (read) off the grid?  The concept of a bookless society makes even less sense than that of a cashless one.  Subversion (and I don’t mean violence or lunacy), education, self-improvement without censor, these requires objects that can’t be deleted when political winds change, even as the economy depends on the 1 or 2/3’s of it operating off the books.

I’m not a publishing professional so I won’t pretend to understand all of the economics of the industry, but I know these aren’t exactly fattened times.  I’m not saying the general trend won’t be toward electronic publishing and distribution.  It probably will.  But if we need books, we also need books to be books, physical objects we can hand, physically, to others.  Things we can physically protect and need to.

Of course, much of this discussion is moot.  Let’s imagine a bookless society.  It should be easy to imagine that in this society, some branch of some government somewhere manages to track, or, even worse, decide what we read.  Not very far-fetched.  Maybe every computer even gets a patch that scans everything you send to your printer and uploads it to some database.  When the things people want to read are banned, deleted, or otherwise made unavailable, people will pick up papers and pens and start writing.  They’ll make their own presses and they’ll post their bills and broadsides and leave their chapbooks and pamphlets in donut shops and laundrymats and in hotels like the Gideons.

Unless, of course, we stop teaching kids how to make  letters and numbers by hand.

Penmanship, the engine of democracy.