Tag: writing

Revising after Rejection: Re-Seeing, Re-Listening, Re-Hearing

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

Like most necessary things, writing is hard.  Communicating mental images or flashes of memory or triggering smells with tools that are, themselves, none of those things, takes work.  Doing so in ways that makes sense not just to you but also to readers takes even more work. 

I submitted some things to a great journal a few months ago.  Even though the work I shared wasn’t ultimately accepted, I’m quite pleased with the feedback.  Having given myself some time and space, I’ve come back to the piece they particularly liked with new eyes and ears.  (Revision is always, literally, re-seeing.  But it’s also re-listening and re-hearing.)

I greatly appreciate what the editor here is saying, and the time he took to say it, and the time he and the rest of the team take thinking deeply on these things:

We are writing with mixed news. While we are not accepting these poems, your submission made it through multiple editorial rounds. We particularly enjoyed “[title redacted]” with its exploration of anxiety and attempts at self-soothing. Our main concern, ultimately, was that there were moments when the piece felt too expository. We’d love to see the entire piece rooted in the wild imagery of the last third of the poem.

We recognize how much talent and skill went in to your submission, but we can only publish a small percentage of the work we receive. In the final round of selections, we start looking for the smallest of reasons–reasons in line with our own personal tastes–to reject a manuscript. This part of the process, we understand, is so very subjective. So we want you to know that while we are not accepting this manuscript, we were pleased with your submission, it was a joy to read, and we hope we’ll see more of your work in the future.

Fourteen Pounds of Books and Gift Receipts

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I order ordered books from Powell’s. 

When the box arrived on Monday, it weighed 14 pounds.

Saul Bellow, D.H. Lawrence, and Joseph Conrad top the list.  Some things I’ve read before but had not previously owned, and other things that will be new to me.

Reading as a writer, that is, reading to uncover craft, is a much more pleasurable thing to me than what we sometimes mean when we self-consciously say we’re reading for pleasure.

A side note: My used copy of Sons and Lovers has a gift receipt from a Barnes & Noble in Costa Mesa, California from December 19, 2004 inside the cover and a remnant bit of Christmas paper still Scotch-taped to the back.  It was processed into the Powell’s system last January.  Where else has it been?  How did the receipt and the wrapping paper stay connected to this edition for 14 years?  Did someone unwrap it, like it, keep it, and then get rid of it last year?  Or has it been in circulation longer?  The mind already reels, and we haven’t even made it to the Table of Contents or the Timeline of the World of D.H. Lawrence.

I don’t know if that’s of any help to you this Black Friday, but I do recommend buying books.







John Steinbeck on Telling Stories

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Today, around your Thanksgiving table, I hope you’re able to hear and share good stories.  Meaningful stories.  Stories of how it is and was with you and all your people.

John Steinbeck, from this piece in The Paris Review:

“A man who writes a story is forced to put into it the best of his knowledge and the best of his feeling.

The discipline of the written word punishes both stupidity and dishonesty. A writer lives in awe of words for they can be cruel or kind, and they can change their meanings right in front of you. They pick up flavors and odors like butter in a refrigerator. Of course, there are dishonest writers who go on for a little while, but not for long—not for long.

A writer out of loneliness is trying to communicate like a distant star sending signals. He isn’t telling or teaching or ordering. Rather he seeks to establish a relationship of meaning, of feeling, of observing. We are lonesome animals. We spend all life trying to be less lonesome. One of our ancient methods is to tell a story begging the listener to say—and to feel— “Yes, that’s the way it is, or at least that’s the way I feel it. You’re not as alone as you thought.” Of course a writer rearranges life, shortens time intervals, sharpens events, and devises beginnings, middles and ends. We do have curtains—in a day, morning, noon and night, in a man, birth, growth and death.

These are curtain rise and curtain fall, but the story goes on and nothing finishes.

To finish is sadness to a writer—a little death. He puts the last word down and it is done. But it isn’t really done. The story goes on and leaves the writer behind, for no story is ever done.”

Seeing Poetry, Looking Away

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

I think I first became familiar with the work of Stanley Fish in a literature seminar at Yale taught by the late Lana Schwebel.  The course, which focused on the work of John Milton, was cross-listed at the Div School, where I was a student, and the English department. 

One of the other students had just come from Chicago and could not stop talking about Stanley Fish.  Strangely, this student didn’t seem at all familiar with Leo Strauss.  He couldn’t seem to accept that someone had, perhaps, influenced his own academic hero.

Stanley Fish has a very popular piece I like to share from time to time called “How to Recognize a Poem When You See One.”  I haven’t returned to it lately, but, as what Milton called the “winter wild” draws near, and this “the month, and this the happy morn” with it, I think I will add it to my short list of recommended re-reading.

There are few things more frustrating than a poetic image that won’t fully reveal itself to a writer, or one that reveals itself too easily to a reader.  There’s a Milton-inspired poem sitting in another tab on my browser that I just can’t seem to finish.  I love it.  I hate it.  It’s brilliant.  It’s awful.  Maybe it’s not a poem at all.  I wish I could re-see it.  I wish I could un-see (undo) the reasons it exists.  I wish I could delete it.  I know I never will.  It’s terrible.  It’s awful.  It has one or two good images.  It’s intensely personal.  It’s too personal to mean anything to anyone.  It’s too sentimental to mean very much to me.  But there it sits.  There it stays. Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s an epitaph.  Maybe it’s a tombstone.  Maybe some things can just be what they are.  





Good to Be Seen

~ Chris Cocca

I was at a reception last night for an organization I care a lot about (I also serve on the Board).  It was a great community event, and it reminded me, again, that no matter how good it is to be in the flow of the creative process, it’s also good to just be out in public.  People often say, “it’s good to see you,” and sometimes we say back “it’s good to be seen.”  That’s not just a cliche.  It’s true.  It is good to be seen.   And it’s good to see.

Like everyone else, I balance a lot of demands.  In some ways, I’ve been trying to slow my life down. It doesn’t always work. 

Two people shared very kind, unsolicited thoughts about my writing and my life in general in the course of conversation.  They know who they are, and I thank them here again.  

As one of them might remind me, with respect to Leonard Cohen, don’t fret about your cracks.  That’s how the light gets in.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in



Literature, Fandom, and Fantastic Beasts; Stan Lee and Sherwood Anderson

~ Chris Cocca ~ 1 Comment

I finished a new short story last week.  I’m mentally preparing for the next one by doing some reading and by catching up on other kinds of work.  Tomorrow, I’m going to start a story inspired in part by Sherwood Anderson’s “Godliness: A Story in Four Parts.” 

Yesterday, I posted a short, positive review of Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald.  Had Flannery O’Connor written “Godliness,” I suspect that David Hardy’s arc would bear more of a thematic resemblance to Credence Barebone’s.  

Since posting my Grindelwald review, more of the negative hot takes I was expecting have started coming in from people who are paid to write about these things.  So have some positive ones.  One critic is arguing that JK Rowling should not have been allowed to write the Fantastic Beasts movies, because George Lucas.

Some of the negative reviews boil down to consternation over seeming violations of Rowling’s canon.  I wonder what people who have those kinds of issues make of the countless retcons and reboots we see in the comics medium.

This post is something like six years old, and is woefully out of date.  It’s also one of the most-read posts I’ve ever done.  Why?  Because most readers understand what Bill Maher doesn’t: comic books, sci-fi, fantasy, these myth-making genres and their creators, don’t really stand outside and apart from the Andersons and O’Connors of the world.

Graphic Policy shared this quote from Lee, which is apropos:

“They take great pains to point out that comics are supposed to be escapist reading, and nothing more. But somehow, I can’t see it that way. It seems to me that a story without a message, however subliminal, is like a man without a soul. In fact, even the most escapist literature of all — old time fairy tales and heroic legends — contained moral and philosophical points of view…None of us lives in a vacuum—none of us is untouched by the everyday events about us — events which shape our stories just as they shape our lives. Sure our tales can be called escapist — but just because something’s for fun, doesn’t mean we have to blanket our brains while we read it!”

With respect to Potter or Star Wars or Star Trek or other properties fans attach themselves to and imbue with personal meaning, remember that  Marvel and DC reboot entire mythical universes every other year.  Fans grumble and complain.  But the iconography of Batman, Superman, and Spider-man is never tarnished.  Their continuity has become a sort of choose-your-own-adventure, and these characters, far older than Rowling’s or Lucas’s or Roddenberry’s, are all the richer for it.

Graphic Policy shares another timely quote:

“Finally, what does Excelsior mean?  Upward and onward to greater glory!” 

That’s what Stan Lee had in mind for his readers.  Not a glory of overmen and jingo, so common in modern politics, not some fanatical appeal to the real-life analogues of Gellert Grindelwald’s “greater good.”  Rather, to the making of big, important stories, life-giving tales of love and justice.  Those are the things that resonate in print, on screen, on mix-tapes.  In comic books and any other thing called literature.