a consideration

I was browsing in Bookshop Santa Cruz today, looking at Frank McCourt's new book, Teacher Man. Several years ago, I literally ran into Mr. McCourt as he was walking out of Palace Arts and Office Supply; I guess his daughter lived in Santa Cruz for awhile, and I saw him a few times here. I'm glad I didn't injure the poor fellow; I was walking fairly close to the door and McCourt came out and nearly walloped me with the door. He was very gracious about it. Anyway, the point is (there is a point to this) that Frank McCourt published Angela's Ashes when he was sixty-six years old. He had no idea it would be the bestseller it became--in fact, when it went to his agent (someone gave it to her) it was printed on horrible onionskin erasable paper. When his agent got to shopping Angela's Ashes around, publishers kept saying it was "just another soggy Irishman's sob story," but she persisted in getting folks to read it. Just shows to go ya.

A couple more tidbits from the Wide World O'Rejection: John Grisham had thirty agents turn down his first book A Time to Kill. The agents who rejected him have all been demoted to mailroom clerks (just kidding). Chicken Soup for the Soul was rejected by thirty-three New York publishers (maybe this was a good thing--but, hey, the books sell, and I even admit that I have a couple of them, though they were given to me by well-meaning friends and family). And yes, I have even read them.

If you click on the link for today, it will take you to a site called "rejection collection." Folks post their rejection slips and reactions to them here. It's nice to know we are not alone, and not in an X-files way. I would recommend looking in the "celebrity corner" category of that site and reading Arthur Golden's story of trying to get Memoirs of a Geisha published. The poor man was told this book (one of my personal favorites) was "too dry"--and he even got audited by the IRS! Talk about tenacious; I'm glad Lady Fortune decided to smile on him.

Yes, I do care about rejection--I wanted to amend what I said in my last post. They do bum me out, depending on my mood when I get them. Reading about rejections, famous and not-so-famous (infamous) often fills me with admiration of how folks just keep going in the face of all the odds. As for the tedious writer I mentioned (that I dated years ago), he was beyond the need to vent, or look for support, or whatever we need to do to endure the waiting process. This guy even signed a Christmas card with, "I am thirty-five years old and still have not published a novel. Merry Christmas." The reasons I dated him were silly and I spent three years after him voluntarily without a relationship at all, trying to figure out why on earth I wanted to devote fifteen minutes' worth of time to him, much less a year and a half. He then went on to date an agent--but I'd be better off today working on my book than plodding backwards down Memory Lane.

I see

I am starting to see the wisdom in multiple submissions to agents--I received an email rejection from Ellen Levine (again praising the writing--I do like these personal letters, even if they pass on the query). I still have three agents out there with queries (Suzanne Gluck, Diana Finch, and Molly Friedrich). Getting my first "rejection" from an agent a few months ago (not a rejection actually, but a request to see the work again when it's revised) really saddened me for a little while (I allow myself no more than an hour of self-pity before I get back to work--this looking-for-an-agent is, after all, a business. I also dated a writer whose self-pity was so tedious that it made me pray for someone to publish him, just to shut him up. I made a conscious decision long ago to not be like him--the whining and three-a.m.-angst is just too prima donna for my tastes). Anyway, a couple of months and a couple of rejections later, agent rejection is not a big deal, except that it makes me want to go into my office and get more queries out. Maybe if I go through twenty rejections, I'll feel more discouraged, but there are a lot of agents out there, and I'm not giving up. I'm used to rejection letters, to some degree (though I don't keep them--I satisfy pyro urges by burning them in my woodstove)--I've been publishing poetry and other work for 23 years--but was always opposed to making multiple submissions of anything. Still, I've started to do that, very judiciously, and usually not with poetry.

By the way, if you click on the link I added to this entry, you can see some rejection letters of folks who didn't exactly vanish into writerly obscurity. I often read stuff like this, too, when I've had a spate of rejections--though of course I am not on a part with Ayn Rand, or even Dr. Seuss--still, it's at least comforting to know that most writers have had to spend time in the trenches.

giving thanks, again

I had a wonderful Thanksgiving with my family; Mr. Strega and I cooked on both Wednesday and Thursday nights; we got everything on the table by 6:15. We had a 15-pound turkey, stuffing, 2 kinds of yams (I made candied yams, one dish with and one without marshmallows on top--I have reached the ripe old age of 46 without once ever having candied yams with marshmallows on top. My mother always scorned the marshmallow topping on candied yams, claiming this sort of thing to be "trashy"--she was pretty strongly opinionated about all sorts of things. Well, once in awhile, it's good to be trashy--the marshmallow yams were a huge hit). We also had Mr. Strega's cranberry/apple/orange relish (his mother's recipe, green beans with toasted almonds, mashed potatoes, gravy, and stuffed mushrooms. Plus, I made four pies, three pumpkin and one berry (the berry one was for for my fifteen-year-old, who hates pumpkin pie; the recipe comes out of an ancient, falling-apart pie cookbook for "farm wives" that I literally do not remember buying anywhere--it's one of those cookbooks that seems to have wandered into my collection somehow). Mr. Strega (who loves to cook, thank God) and I got everything on the table hot (it was a marathon worthy of Iron Chef), and I wonder still how my mother managed to host enormous Thanksgiving feasts for all the relatives and get everything on the table perfectly and piping hot, without the craziness of foil and padding with towels Mr. Strega and I employed to keep the food from cooling off, to say nothing of microwaving. Mom did seem to have a knack for timing everything and starting whatever she could a few days before.

When I was a kid, the weeks after Thanksgiving were cookie-baking and strufoli time, and our house was like a bakery, with my Aunt Anna and my grandmother coming over to help at least a couple of times a week. One incredible memory I have is of the time my Aunt Anna and my mother made homemade ravioli--our dining table was literally covered with one huge sheet of pasta! They rolled it out on floured muslin or something, using dowels my dad had gotten cut for them at a lumberyard. Jeez--were a thousand Italians coming over for dinner? I think actually it was the Thanksgiving my grandmother was dying and living at our house--all our relatives came from back East to see her one more time and we had some huge dinners. On Thanksgiving, my grandmother--very fragile and literally eight weeks away from death--told my aunt Ellie that she wished she could see the Thanksgiving table, even though she couldn't, at that point, eat any of the food and wasn't strong enough to sit with us (my mother had picked up some beautiful Waterford crystal goblets in a really lovely shade of soft rose, etched with tiny flowers, and my grandmother wanted to see them on the table--I know that's a little materialistic in some ways, but my grandmother liked pretty things like this). My Uncle Roland came into my grandmother's room (she wore a robe and slippers when she wasn't actually sleeping), picked her up, and carried her like a baby out to the dining room so she could see the table, all set and ready for Thanksgiving.

Well, back to what I did--I also decorated the living room and dining area with some candles and my collection of fold-out turkeys . I have three, two vintage and one sort of crummy modern one, the wings of which keep falling out of the honeycomb body. The vintage ones are the same kind my mother had; she apparently didn't think that honeycomb tissue paper fold-out turkeys were trashy. I think they are trashy in a funny way and put them out to be a little silly. My Christmas decorating gets pretty elaborate, especially with lights, but that is another story.

Anyway, I spent the last two days cooking (Mr. Strega and I lamenting, as usual, the lack of serving spoons, though I did manage to score a huge turkey platter at Long's last year after Thanksgiving for five dollars--it has the requisite ironically cheerful turkey in bas-relief--and is bordered with apples, pomegranates, etc., so we no longer have to cram fifteen pounds' worth of turkey onto a saucer)--so, now I am tired and am going to sleep. I wish I could have dreams like my elder daughter is having--she dreamed last night of my paternal grandmother, Annie Belle Cain McMillan, coming to her and telling her she was watching over her. I think I dreamed of mashing potatoes or something. Oh, well, c'est la reve. Bon soir.

sent again

There has to be something in persistence--I remember, years ago, reading something by Robert Dana in Poets & Writers about not giving up on writing, on sending one's work out, etc., that if you learn to persist, you will achieve as a writer. I have to remind myself of this as I send more work out to agents--I sent to a group of four this time. I am getting less afraid of simultanous submissions, especially with prose--it seems to take longer to publish prose than poetry. I think my queries are getting a bit better and more streamlined these days. I really appreciate all those who comment on the blog, even though lately I have not been able to get back and respond to the comments as much as I want to.

On the home front, our dog, Faustus (who is half golden retriever and half Chow, and looks like a big golden bear) ended up chasing a coyote through our neighborhood last night, into creeks and out. Mr. Strega was stacking up firewood when Faustus just took off like lightning down the street. Our neighbor Billy (who works night and day on cars in his open garage) told us that there was a coyote trotting down the street and Faustus just took off after him. Mr. Strega finally found Faustus and brought him home, full of burrs and mud. I commented that it's probably time to keep Faustus on the lead every time he's outside--it's amazing how dogs are like teenage kids, grabbing as much freedom as they can unless they're reigned in.
I saw the film Capote the other night (I love the Nickelodeon theater in Santa Cruz--small theaters seem so rare and special to me). Aside from a stunning performance by the lead actor, it really showed the work of a writer's life--the observancy, and the sheer laboriousness of it (one of my favorite scenes is one of Capote slowly and carefully writing in a spiral notebook, sitting up in bed, surrounded by cardboard cartons of paper, which are his notes. His lover, Jack Dunphy, comes in and quietly puts a cup of coffee down on his nightstand (a gesture I really like--Mr. Strega does this for me once in awhile). I think one has to be okay with solitude to be a writer--at least, I've had to get used to it. Besides, being with the work isn't really solitude.

Gotta go drive kids!

pitfalls of reverence

On my recent trip to see family in L.A., I discovered that a couple of my relatives absolutely revere my grandfather, John Indrisano (his IMDB bio and info about him is here: http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0408565/bio. One relative even wanted me to write a biography of him--I have little to no interest in doing that and I told her that some other family member was welcome to do that. To be honest, I find his energy to be terribly frightening and--strangely enough--I have all kinds of accidents in my writing room whenever I write about him, usually involving things shoved off my desk when nobody's been in the room (okay, it could be the cat, but it's strange).

I told my relative that the book focuses a lot more on my grandmother Mary--John still has a lot of fame in certain circles, and my grandmother has almost nothing to show that she ever lived--there's some jewelry in the family, pieces of her dish set that I own, a short obituary in the LA Times that tells nothing detailed about her life, and her grave in the San Fernando Valley Mission cemetary. There is not one photograph of her in the family. Maybe her story isn't as "spectacular" as my grandfather's, but I found her to be a really courageous person who became an independent woman back in the 40s and 50s. She wasn't perfect--she failed to understand how to protect my adolescent mother from my grandfather, for one thing--but she was a pretty wonderful human being. My grandfather is definitely in my book, but he's not a reverential figure--he's not a totally bad guy, just sad and totally defeated at the end. Plus, I bring out a lot of not-so-nice things about him, too--that he abandoned my grandmother in the middle of the Depression, for one thing, and that he was inappropriate in a lot of ways with my mother (she would describe these weird things as if they were normal or something--this was in an era when nobody really talked about most forms of abuse, and I believe she had no way to understand what was normal anyway).

I'm wondering at this point if I should just change half the names in my book of anyone who's living and/or has some contention about this book (one relative, from whom I've been estranged for years, has graciously let other relatives know that she will sue me when the book is published because I am not "telling the real story"). It feels these days like I have Judge Wapner looking over my shoulder as I write. Still, I'm telling my story as I remembered it. If it turns out I have to put the doily of changed names on everyone and/or market it as a novel, so be it--but those decisions are down the road.

Later today--finally, "The Hours" agency gave me back my query. It was passed, within the agency, to an agent I would not want to represent me, to be perfectly honest--I know about him and he simply represents a different category of writers than me. I don't know why they gave it to him (except that he has an Italian surname). He did write me an extremely nice personal letter about it (I think it's really good that, at this very early stage of sending to agencies, that I am getting personal letters and emails), though he passed on it. The list of agents I've drafted since sending to them seems to be a little more on the mark of who I want to represent my work. So, I will be making my multiple submissions on November 15th, which is (yes, you guessed it) the full moon. I do like my little rituals.

back from another trip

Seems I've done nothing but business travel, promoting the book via two conferences. The response to the piece I read was tremendous and gives me hope for this book. I wish I had started the process of finding an agent about a year ago--I had a lot of conflicting reports about whether a book has to be totally finished or not before one finds an agent--turns out this doesn't have to be true. Oh, well, it is what it is. I'm sending several queries out today--I've decided a multiple submisison right now is probably okay.

I was at a conference in Westwood, so decided to see my family in the San Fernando Valley. My younger sister was wonderful; she took me to the two houses I grew up in, which figure largely in the book, as well as my Aunt Anna and Uncle Mike's house, and my grandparents' graves. We got to the cemetary quite late and almost got locked in! I left feeling very happy to see family and very much on fire to finish the book. I've accepted that I am a very slow, meticulous writer; this is combined with a very busy family life, and so it makes for difficulties in sitting down and working--plus, I'm writing about one of the most painful times in my life, when my grandfather killed himself. I feel I lost my mother forever at that time, though she was still bodily present, and it takes a lot of fortitude to sit down and work on this stuff.