Honing In, back from Iota Conference of Short Prose

 

Nina and two contributors to “Dumped” – Penny Guisinger and Judith Podell, on the porch of Prince Cottage, Campobello Island, IOTA Conference

 

The nine-hour drive back from the Iota Conference of Short Prose last night became more wearisome with each mile. Metaphors abounded – a mile is like a sentence, each small town a paragraph, each visual transition a small piece of prose. With each random thought becoming a brilliant brief essay in its own right. You probably know what I mean, trips home from excitement – the hospital after having a baby, driving home after a good job interview, dinner with friends, a gallery excursion, a hike, a shopping expedition – your brain fills with ideas and plans for the next big (or little) thing.

And then you are back, and slowly you fill with things of daily life, not so exciting. The things you forgot. The things you left undone. I always leave half my stuff in the car, looking like laziness on the surface, but actually another metaphor.

My manuscript for Dumped: Women Unfriending Women was left untouched and behind schedule. The days were filled with foggy views of the ubiquitous Atlantic Ocean, driving between New Brunswick’s Island of Campobello where the conference was being held, to Lubec, Maine, through the customs each time. Lubec, a movie set whose pastel and dilapidated buildings became paragraphs in themselves. And the conference where two of my anthology contributors – Penny Guisinger, organizer of the conference, and Judith Podell, became actual three-dimensional entities. Not just paper and screen anymore but flesh and voice.

Our faculty: Charles Coe whose poems about forgiving his parents escorted me back to childhood, Suzanne Strempek Shea whose tender enthusiasm made that child fantasize crawling into the backseat of her car and falling asleep, and then there was my faculty, Barbara Hurd, on whose mind I developed an unapologetic crush and threatened to make a photo of her into my screensaver. Like a stalker who wants to keep her with him always. It was funny in the moment. Now I wonder if I should delete that. Even the very private and elegant Hurd found it humorous after the first moment of terror…. but that’s what happens at these conferences. We are distilled into small working pods for that magical iota of time, wondering how we will go back home and write alone.

The days were filled with reading and workshopping our small pieces – after all, that is what “iota” means: a very small amount, bit, speck, mite, scrap, shred, ounce, scintilla, atom, jot, grain, whit, trace. It all became much bigger than that.

We wrote about the larger world in miniature, shifting the lens within a small frame from the personal and tiny meaning to the universal. Within the next breath. Paring word count. Stripping away excess. Might I be allowed to be corny and say that we lifted the fog on our words? Yes, it is my blog and I am still ever so slightly within the experience, and possibly well over word count.

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Going Hybrid

I have decided to publish “Dumped: Women Unfriending Women” with SHE WRITES PRESS. SHE WRITES was co-founded by Brooke Warner, for whom I have a tremendous amount of respect. Brooke was the Acquisitions Editor for Seal Press (the first hot shot non-fiction folks who published my early essays) and she is also a bad girl (gave people wine from under her display table at the AWP conference last March even though the security guards told her to stop.) (She reminded me of me as a teenager.) (Only smarter. Taller.) More importantly, being a “bad girl” means that she was willing to leave behind the norms to create, with co-founder Kami Wycoff, a hybrid publishing model. “Hybrid” falls between the “still not ready for prime time” concept of self publishing and the traditional route which has begun to erode in our digitized and transitioning literary culture. Gutsy, professional and transparent, SHE WRITES may just be leading the way for a whole new deal in publishing.

Did I (do I) dream of the traditional route? Getting on the train to Manhattan to lunch with my agent and strike a big advance with a major publishing house? That image also has me in white gloves, nylons, and a tight waisted suit, much like the one my mother would have worn when she accompanied my father to do just that when I was a little girl. And if I focus on that, I might just end up too old to even get on the train without serious help. My initial forays into that world were pleasant enough, some generous assistance finding an interested agent, but for the Catch-22, the details of which I have already bemoaned adequately.

Brooke consulted on my non-fiction book proposal- a traditional thirty seven page “learning experience” which was likely more time consuming than the final product will be, and we suddenly asked ourselves why I didn’t publish with SHE WRITES? The vetting process a success, SHE WRITES has now accepted it for Fall 2014 publication.

Dumped will be a collection of essays written primarily by women about that awful moment when you are erased from a friendship more meaningful than even the basic romantic relationship. You expect romantic relationships to break up, the entertainment industry and a good part of literature revolves around that loss. You feel as though there should be an Adele song for you, but there isn’t.

My “pitch” goes like this:

“The essays in Dumped aren’t stories of friendship dying a mutually agreed upon death, like when you fall out of touch and a decade later find each other and you haven’t missed a beat. These are the stories about suddenly finding yourself erased, without context, possibly without worth, undefined. The stories that stay with you, maybe for a lifetime. I want textured, layered, messy, funny- with anger, sexual confusion, redemption, hopelessness and social context. What did it really mean to be deleted, discarded, deserted?” By the ones you most trusted?

I  have a number of essays I am reviewing from women all over the country, I have some works in progress by some outstanding writers- Jessica Handler, Alexis Paige, Judith Podell. A reprint promised by the well known Ann Hood. In conversation with a fabulous publicist I met at a conference this spring. A number of other writers who’ve made initial commitments.

But seriously? All I can envision is the not yet existing  “EVENT” button on my website, fast forward to the readings and signings and NPR interviews. And what I will be wearing and if I can lose 40 pounds. In the meantime I will update on the process of “going hybrid.”