Tag: writing

The Summerset Review’s Recommended Reading Can Help You Take the Slushpile In Stride

~ Chris Cocca ~ 5 Comments

You’ve finished that short story. You’re sure it’s ready. You send it off into the world. It comes back void.

You let it sit. You read, you write. You question your life choices. You pull the story down and edit with new eyes. You start to submit. You are developing thick skin.

You wash and rinse. Repeat.

I don’t know of any shortcuts. I asked the #WritingCommunity folks on Twitter how many rejections they have in their Submittable accounts. The answer was almost always hundreds. You have to keep going. You have to edit. You have to re-see your own work. You have to keep submitting.

We all know the folk definition of insanity, but we keep going.

Why?

Well, for one thing, it’s not like we can stop. You know what I mean.

But we can, as people say, fail better.

We can read more. We can do a better job reading what’s already out there. Not to copy, not to steal, but to be better writers. To be more patient, empathetic. To cut ourselves some slack.

Most journals say to read an issue or two before submitting to get a feeling for who they are and what they publish. The idea isn’t for you to reverse engineer your work. It’s to help you see if you’re a fit, which, among other things, can damper disappointment. Of course, if you really don’t like the things a given journal tends to publish, you’ll have to decide if it makes sense for you to submit there. Editors change, tastes change, and maybe you’re doing something novel. But go into the submissions process knowing what to expect (hundred, maybe thousands, of rejections) and realizing that there are many brilliant, brilliant writers working just as hard as you are.

With that said, The Summerset Review offers a recommended reading list that not only helps writers know if their work might be a fit, but also curates the craft in general. Reading deeply and widely always helps.

In the time it took me to write this, I got a new rejection. It won’t be the last. And that’s okay.

We could do easier things, but that’s not really who we are.

Journal of the Day: Paperbark

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

From the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in collaboration with the School of Earth and Sustainability, the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, and the UMass Libraries comes Paperbark Literary Magazine. It has a very clean and modern-looking website and a compelling mission:

“Paperbark Literary Magazine is an expression of the intellectual and artistic currents working to shape collective consciousness about issues of sustainability in the information age. Born in New England, Paperbark draws on the unique heritage and culture of the region to support and stimulate creative engagement with progressive ideas. Rooted in themes of stewardship, innovation, and possibility, Paperbark’s content is motivated by a desire to trace the connections between science, culture, and sustainability. Paperbark lives at the confluence of imagination and critical inquiry, and is an integral tool for the promotion of sustainability initiatives on the University of Massachusetts campus. The magazine strives to illuminate the impacts of human society while nurturing our intrinsic capacity to catalyze positive change.”

Check them out. Send them love!

This Isn’t a Writing Retreat

~ Chris Cocca ~ 4 Comments

I’m not sure, but I think a lot of people who follow this blog are writers.

If you are, I’m curious: do you find it harder to write right now?

It’s true that people can do incredible things in isolation. There’s a sort of romanticism, too, in the trope of the artist, alone in the woods, emerging with some Great Work.

I doubt most people reading this have the luxury of using the current situation as a working vacation. I’m assuming most of us have day jobs and family responsibilities. Children to help and be present for, parents or siblings or friends we’re worried about. Bills to pay.

Don’t be too hard on yourself when this ends and you haven’t produced The Great Gatsby or Leaves of Grass or Death of a Salesman or Rent.

Do what you need to do for you and the people you need to care for.

The work will be here when this is over. The slush pile will be here. The acceptances will be here, too — still fewer and farther between than we’d like.

Some things will change. At least I hope so.

What do you hope will change? What do you long to go back to?

What needs to be left behind?

Discovering New Poetry and Fiction Markets

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

If you have the time, resources, energy (or general privilege) for self-improvement during the pandemic, you may be looking to get some writing done. You may be looking to get some writing submitted. You may be looking for some new journals to read and reach out to.

Creativity may be an essential way you interact with the world, and you may be frustrated because there’s not a lot of time or energy for that right now. You may be experiencing trauma. You may be exhausted, even though it feels like you’re not doing much.

But you’re probably doing a lot. This is what trauma feels like. It’s real, and it’s important to recognize.

I have a dozen tabs open, a dozen journals I’m going to submit to. At some point. At some point today. Maybe after I finish this post. Maybe after I take a walk. Maybe after I take a few minutes.

Here are some I have discovered recently:

Cream City Review

Midway Journal

Blood Orange Review

Contrary

Little Fiction Big Truths

Alien

Kissing Dynamite

Orange Blossom Review

Porter House Review

The Stinging Fly

Salt Hill

Jellyfish Review

Submit yourself to staying home. Submit your work if you can.

I Was a Kid in the 80s

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I realized, like a week ago, that there’s a whole new decade coming up. I was born in 1980, which means I get to start my own new decade, too.

In 1990, when I was ten, I told my mom it felt like nothing new was being invented. We had phones, cable tv, remote controls, space shuttles. She said “let’s see how you feel in ten years.” In that interval, of course, everyone got PCs, modems, screen names…looking back, all that innovation, which gave rise to smart phones and social networks and blogs and everything we spend time on now, was not was I was looking for. If you had told me, then, that by the time I turned 40 we’d have little devices on our wrists with more computing power than ENIAC, I would have said sure, but will there be jet packs and artificial gravity for our bases on the moon?

I used to read a blog called Paleofuture. It’s still out there, somewhere. One day, Paleofuture posted a picture of someone’s 70’s vision of an 80’s space station. Yes, every time I see a ’57 Chevy or googie architecture, I wonder why the future Walt Disney invented for the Boomers never, ever came. But I was a kid in the 80s. The picture of the space station was a sort-of writing prompt. This is from around 2012.

I was a kid in the 80’s and got to go to EPCOT.  I used to read Popular Mechanics and try to make crap out of batteries and magnets and draw fighter jets and space stations and curvy future cars and build paper ammo wristbows from rubber bands and hangers.  I did The Jason Project.

I remember when the Challenger blew up because the lady teacher had a kid  my age and my family had an Aerostar the first summer they came out.  After it happened Ford pulled the commercials that showed how the nose of their new mini-van looked just like the Shuttle.  I broke the sliding door with my first GI Joe and burned my arm on an interior light and it scabbed and cracked and leaked all summer and I’d touch the puss with the fat tips of my fingers to see if it would hurt.

My grandmother made me watch INF when I was 7 so I could say that I’d seen history.  She didn’t say it but in 1987 you had no way of being sure you’d see more big human moments.  Imagine living like that for 4o, 50 years, thinking about the button, building schools with fallout bunkers, doing drills. I remember the first time I saw a plane, it was Wednesday, 9/19, 2001.  I went to college near a  power plant with two cement torch chimneys so these things made me nervous.  I imagine living like this for 40, 50 years, collecting history for my son just in case it stops.  Waiting for the break, the thaw, the perestroika. The Western glasnost Gorbachev and the Dubai-Vegas-Beijing Red Dawn white trash show.  Waiting for the INF bombs to come in off the market.  There is no end of history, Francis Fukuyama. There is history or nothing.

Obama will close Gitmo but will hold enemy combatants indefinitely without trial on the mainland.  Semantics must be justice. There are pictures of Pelosi toasting Cheney and Shepard Fairey laughing, obey, obey, obey, obey the giants and their posses.  I was a kid in the 80’s.

I thought we’d have more now:  sustainable communities instead of social networks.  Colonies in space.  We got personal computers, personal accessories, personal devices, vanity, vanity, vanity, rah rah trips to ISS but lazy outward pushing.  If Richard Branson brings the heavens we should fill them.