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October 6, 2005

It's Out

Yesterday I met a friend for coffee at Barnes & Noble. (Yeah, I know: how terribly corporate of me. But my little home in the Rust Belt doesn't offer much else. I have tried and rejected as thoroughly inadequate the various non-corporate alternatives for book acquisition, with the exception of my university library--that rocks. And even non-corporate coffee is hard to come by. The one entry in the corporate coffee delocator for this area was provided by me, and that place is a million miles away, with mediocre mochas.)

My friend was late, so I browsed the books. On the "New Arrivals" table, I saw several copies of Best American Short Stories 2005, but couldn't find the other titles in the series. Finally I located a sales clerk. "Where's the Best American Essays?" I asked.

"What do you want?" he asked.

"The same thing as this," I said, holding up the collection of short stories, "except with essays."

He led me to a display, and there it was. I picked it up and scanned the table of contents: twenty-five essays, by the likes of Jonathan Franzen, Edward Hoagland, Oliver Sacks, David Sedaris, David Foster Wallace--and me.

That's right: me. The last essay in the collection is something I wrote about my love of textiles and some of the homemaking skills I acquired as part of the training for wife-hood all Mormon girls get in early adolescence.

It's jarring to see my name at the end of that list--not bad, definitely not bad. But though I fully intend to get used to it at some point in the next 52 weeks (just in time for the issue without my name at the end of the table of contents to appear), right now the fact that it's really cool is still competing with the fact that it's jarring and unfamiliar, much as it was to run my tongue across smooth teeth unemcumbered by metal wires one magic afternoon after three traumatic years of intense orthodontia.

It's very strange. I'm 41, I've been writing since I was 15, I've produced two books though neither is in print, but I garnered this very cool honor. Part of me hopes this is an omen of good things to come, and part of me fears this is about as good as it's going to get.

The essay was rejected by any number of prestigious journals, and printed in a small, yearly journal of women's writing called PMS, for Poem Memoir Story. I turned to the list of Notable Essays and saw that my little offering was considered superior to (among other things) something by E.L. Doctorow printed in The Kenyon Review.

Yesterday afternoon at B&N, my friend insisted on buying a copy so I could autograph it, and since we were on our way out the door, she gave it to me to take home, so I could write a note instead of just signing my name. This meant I got to peruse the book at my leisure. (I'm supposed to get a clothbound copy, but so far it hasn't shown up--I'm guessing they sent it to my agent, and perhaps she hasn't gotten around to sending it on.)

I went to campus after that and ran into Tom. "It's out," I said, and handed him the book.

"Wow," he said. "Were you surprised to see it?"

"Nah, I knew it came out today," I replied. "I've been checking the release date on Amazon every so often."

"You're the anchor," he said, looking at the table of contents. "The very last one."

"I'm the end of the alphabet," I corrected.

"Yours has the best title," he said. I admit I agree: the title is great, borrowed though it might be from a shirt Tori Amos wore on one of the four different covers of her album Strange Little Girls, which I briefly owned.

"This is huge," he said.

"I hope so," I said. "I hope it does some work for me. But I can't help imagining these reviews where someone says, ‘All the essays are really good, except for that last one, about fabric! What's up with that?'"

"That won't happen," he said. "I can tell by the first few paragraphs that it's really good." He read for a moment, then said, "Wow! You've got a semi-colon right after the close of a parentheses! That's so adventurous!"

"Yeah, my flamboyant facility with punctuation gets all the editors hot and bothered," I said. "It's what everyone likes best about my work."

The collection, I should mention, was edited by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief--that's right, someone interesting enough to be played in a movie by Meryl Streep likes my work. I am intensely flattered and gratified and thrilled that she does--there is NOTHING about that fact that sucks. But I confess I read the essay and think, "OK, I like this and I'm proud of it, but I don't even think it's the best thing I've written. So why is this getting attention when my book, which I think is great, isn't even in print?" I can only figure that either I'm a lousy judge of my own work, or angst-filled stories about religious despair just don't strike the publishing world as big-time money makers.

I wish I could say that I have other exciting publications in the pipes, but I don't. The issue of Sunstone currently at the printer's has an essay by me on "Why I Go to Sunstone" and I have a few poems forthcoming in various respectable journals. But I haven't been very good about submitting my work lately, and there's also the fact that aside from a few pieces I have purposely tried to make really short, most of my prose is long enough that it exceeds the word limit imposed by many journals. You can get an idea of that from this blog, where pieces are often so long they have to be split up into two or three posts.

I don't know. I guess I just have to write more, then put it all in envelopes and mail it to editors.

Anyway, I would ask you all to rush out and buy the anthology, but I don't get royalties, just a small honorarium, so it doesn't make any difference to me if you buy it or just read the essay in the coffee shop. (It's a mere eight pages, one of those things I tried to keep short.) But if you do read it and like it, I would be grateful for praise and congratulations--it's the most prestigious publication I've ever had.

Posted by Holly at October 6, 2005 7:51 AM

Comments

Posted by: John at October 6, 2005 2:55 PM

Posted by: SO at October 6, 2005 10:39 PM

Posted by: Jana at October 9, 2005 4:51 PM