THE WAY UP AND DOWN
Previously published in The Small Press Review
Despite guest editorials to the contrary in these pages, no one should question the difficulty of publication as the writer s life is not for the faint of heart and there is nothing new in the hurdles posed. If you think otherwise, review John Matthews Taliesin: The Last Celtic Shaman, and his description of Irish bardic schools where students toiled for half a lifetime. This was not book learning but the commission of work to memory. By the 12th year, a student knew 350 tales, and one scholar has estimated that if a student learned ten lines of poetry a day (with two months off a year), then after 20 years he would be the master of 60,000 lines, twice the length of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
In these schools, learning was somewhat monkish. A small low hut in a solitary place with apartments and separate beds, no noise, very little light, and long tedious days, during which the teacher spoke a unit of verse, after which the students repeated it until they got it right word for word, pronunciation, and intonation after which the teacher explained the grammatical structure, its meaning, the truths it was intended to convey.
They shut
their doors and windows for a day s time, and lie on their backs with a stone
upon their belly, and plaids about their heads, and their eyes being covered
they pump their brains for rhetorical encomium or panegyric; and indeed they
furnish such a style from this dark cell as is understood by very few . . .
Today s MFA programs seem a reduced form of this penance, although they may also be at least as likely to result in a mind crammed full of something other than imagination. While the brightest innovations often come from youth, the true penance in American letters may be the tradition that a writer does not mature until at least the age of 40 (which now often may be 50 or 60), after sufficient and full experiences in life allow it.
As for complaints about unappreciated work, you simply don t get ahead by having a thin skin but must have one thick as a rhinoceros. At a screenwriting conference I once heard that the best writers usually fail due to lack of mental tenacity; those who succeed are not the best or the brightest or the most creative but the most determined.
If editors ignore you, don t respond, or don t return your material, it s hardly worse than the writers from whom we request blurbs who rarely respond either, or the reviewers for magazines and newspapers who won t review anything self-published, rarely review small press paperbacks, and select only a small number of the hardbacks submitted by the big publishers. There s just a limited amount of time for editors, successful writers, and reviewers to wade through (much less skim) everything submitted to them. I view it as akin to an applicant for a job where I work. The person seeking a position has about 30 seconds (maybe less) to catch my attention with a cover letter and resume. If it s not what I m looking for, if it doesn t immediately catch my interest, if it doesn t stand out from the rest in some way, then sorry but no dice. I do find time, however brief, to review the information and send a response. Wouldn t it be polite if everyone did? But fact of life many don t. Nor does everyone return phone calls.
As for our own
conduct when we find ourselves in the position of having to respond to
inquiries (if we re lucky enough), remember what they say in
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