I did my best not to write the past few days. Well, maybe not entirely my best, but a decent approximation. Okay, fine. I paused on the writing front for a minute or two.

Then on Saturday morning I received the kindest rejection letter EVER.

The editor told me to let him know when my poem, “To Power the Human Heart,” was published, because he knew it would find a home. He said he’d promote it on social media when it did. He said it was in his top ten for poem of the year out of over 500 entries, invited me to submit again in the future, and suggested I check out the journal’s fellowship opportunity.

Wow. That’s an amazing rejection.

(Today I received another heartfelt, personalized rejection about the same poem. Men in particular seem to be connecting to it.) 

That stoked the coals, so I sent a thank you and prepared to promptly send “Power” back out to find that home.

Only then, of course, I remembered that most places accept packets of multiple poems. So why send just one poem when you can send five? You never know what someone might connect with.

So there I was, assembling a submission, trying to match tone, theme, vibe, etc. for each journal. I remembered another poem that would go well with a particular packet. That poem probably definitely needed tweaking.

(Time to pause and say that as much as I appreciate praise, sometimes it makes me want to hide just as much as rejection. I feel all “you don’t mean that,” and yet why would someone bother to send such a beautiful email otherwise, am I right? And now I’m embarrassed to have written this, but duckies, we have to share if we are to help each other.)

And suddenly it was lunchtime. But I don’t regret my Saturday porch time at all. It’s such a great space and the view… ah. Soothing to the poem-weary eyes.

Lunch, right. I thought, Give me ten minutes and I’ll finish this submission. Cover letter. Which bio to use? (Ooh! Update the bio because I’ve got new work forthcoming!) Double-check the formatting.

(Word Raccoon whispered: Submit NOW. Then feed me lunch or I’m going to eat your poems. Then she pulled out a lip gloss labeled “poetic frenzy” and added a thick layer.)

She did not bother reminding me that I was supposed to be packing for the dunes, too.

I had a list. I’ve done this trip at least a dozen times. And yet? This time I forgot several essentials. Barely packed any snacks. But I did bring a bag full of books, a journal, pens, highlighters. You know, standard Word Raccoon fare.

WR made sure the van was loaded with Coke Zero. Could she not have added some shampoo?

Anywho, that bag of books is how I ended up arguing with poet and writing teacher Richard Hugo on the beach. The man’s been dead since 1982, but that didn’t stop me. He brought the theory (and the criticism of it). I brought the sunscreen.

Not arguing, exactly. More like creative sparring at first.

Naturally, he ended up in three of my poems I “wasn’t” going to write. One poem was me trying to process something we witnessed on the beach that I am not ready to talk about. Which tells you it wasn’t good, Nan. I grabbed a poetic maxim of Hugo’s and rode it to emotional safety.

The second Hugo poem was just my usual process: wrestling with someone else’s view on poetry until I can see what, if anything, of theirs works for me. (Does that sound like I am a poetry scrapyard ghost? Maybe so.)

I will say that a writing strength I have developed (I think) is knowing when someone’s advice is going to strengthen my writing and when it won’t. I can tell you what each of my writing mentors has contributed to my process. (Perhaps they contributed other things, but with them all, I know at least one specific thing they gave me that has made my writing better.)

Even the worst writing mentor (a professor) I had in the 1990s taught me about sentence patterns and length and how I ought to vary them. He was right. (See what I did there?)

It is currently almost two a.m., but instead of stepping in that hole in the yard again, I will tell you what other poems I “didn’t” write this weekend. 

I wrote:

• a poem about cheese being made in our town (that disturbs me, though I don’t think it should)

• one about my mother (she visited me in a dream on the beach, wearing her mint green sun hat I hadn’t thought of since childhood)

Yes, I napped on the beach almost as soon as we got there. Hubs says I said “Do not disturb” and promptly fell asleep in my chair.

  • one about my anxiety over leaving my glasses in the car (not because I needed them, but because I was suddenly convinced they’d focus sunlight just so and start a fire. Welcome to my stupid mind where anything bad, no matter how improbable, is still a possibility. Which is why it’s exhausting being me.)

  • one called Aqueduct that I’m only now second-guessing the title of (typical). The main character rides a horse for no good reason. It’s overly sentimental schlock, I fear.

    • one featuring Natasha Lyonne (embarrassed by the title, not the content—so I’ll let that one marinate until I forget to be mortified or find a better title). It’s about The Thing falling in love. Go see Fantastic Four and you’ll get it. LOL. BTW, Natasha is fabulous in everything she acts in.

    • and that difficult-to-write Hugo poem, title redacted because it’s too soon to talk about.

Meanwhile, Word Raccoon had fully staged her own side quest. She sat beside me under our cabana, halfway through a frozen chocolate-covered banana that I noticed she did not offer me a bite of, even though she knew I was awake by then. 

While I was deep in Hugo-land, she dumped the contents of her tote across her towel like a glitterbomb.

Contents of said beach bag (as of this morning):
• One Sylvia Plath coloring book (half-shaded, with commentary in the margins)
• A zine titled Poetry Snacks for Restless Geniuses (“Issue #1: What If the Poem Is the Snack?”)
• A glitter pen that doesn’t work, thank God
• Highlighters in four shades: Overwhelm, Intrigue, Oh No She Mitten’t, and Spite

We still have another day at the dunes ahead. The sun feels like it’s trying to burn my life from me. I’ve been craving this place for weeks, and now that I’m here, it’s…more intense than I expected.

It had rained, and was going to rain more, yesterday, so though we made it to the beach, breakfast in hand, we did not stay after we ate.

You will ask if we checked the weather ahead. We did, friend. But as I keep yelling this summer, the weather apps are wrong, like, all the time. Just this summer.

Then again, the whole spring/summer kinda feels like a fever dream. Some pleasant spots, to be sure. But this heat! 

It eventually led us to go see the latest Superman movie in air conditioning (the movie was sweet though not flawless, and please don’t think I’m a geeky superhero fan; I’m just easily lured by popcorn). 

Before the movie, I finished The Triggering Town and found a sentence that made me exclaim “NO SIR, I cannot let you by with this!”

It started as a niggle and grew louder: he had so many of the same faults he was warning writers against. And then came that sentence. Just… no. Absolutely not. That’s not getting a free pass. More on that in a separate post. 

And don’t worry, I will be fair. He says many things to be admired in the book, and I won’t forget those even as I discuss the thing that troubles me most. 

Like I said, I wrote a third and final poem featuring my beef with him.

I also wrote a rat king of childhood Sears poems that need untangling.

I slept between 2:30 and 6:30 a.m., which it now is. If my weather app is correct, it’s getting hot already. I had hoped to raid the shoreline for some flat rocks to write poetry on before we leave Dunesland. I even brought a Sharpie, ready to freestyle and leave words in the wild.

But the hotter it gets, the less sure I am that we won’t just pack it in and head home. Only the currently sleeping driver knows for sure.

There’s a restaurant along the way we’ve been to a couple of times. Word Raccoon is craving chicken fried steak for breakfast. If they don’t have that, I’ll eat my… well, whatever I eat, it won’t be chicken fried steak.

P.S. Reader, it was indeed too hot, so we came on home after breakfast. They didn’t have chicken fried steak; they did have country fried steak. Same difference. Word Raccoon is very content and happy to be home, even though she didn’t get to go to the beach today. She wishes it were cooler here, too.

The porch calls. She’s going to try to answer.