What’s your creative process like?

Fits and spurts, always. I find that I tend to have seasons where I’m doing different things: sometimes I’m mostly writing, sometimes I’m mostly revising, sometimes I’m doing neither and just trusting that the fallow time will yield fruit later. If I have the impulse to write something, though, or come across something that sparks my imagination, I try to get something down on paper right away. I’ve learned that I won’t actually remember to do it otherwise. As long as there are words on paper, I can work to refine them later—but you can’t edit what doesn’t exist!

Give us some background on the pieces you contributed to this issue.

About a year ago I started thinking and writing about the women in my family line: grandmothers, great-aunts, great-grandmothers, and even further back. I knew some of them myself; I know stories about or have photographs of others; some are not much more to me than a name on a gravestone. “Singer Slant-O-Matic 403A” is about my grandmother Jane, and I really do have her sewing machine at home. “Ohio Fields” is about my Swedish great-great-great-grandmother, Charlotta (Engborn) Ulrica, and her children who emigrated to the United States in the late 1860s. The firefly image comes from something I witnessed at a family reunion in Ohio about a decade ago: an entire field absolutely dancing with fireflies. It was magical!

What tips would you give someone taking their first steps in creative work? What did you need to hear when you were getting started?

The first time I submitted some poetry to a real literary journal, I got rejected, which left me so sad and shaken that it was a good two or three years before I got up the nerve to try again. I wish I had known what I know now: that rejection is part of the process, that it doesn’t have to hurt you, and that it’s not necessarily even a judgment on your work. It’s certainly not a judgment on your worth as a writer or as a person.

As of the moment I’m writing this, I’ve been rejected 592 times.

Sometimes a piece is rejected because it needs more work. Sometimes a piece is rejected because it’s just not a great fit for a particular journal’s ethos. Sometimes a piece is rejected because the editors received 87 top-tier poems, including yours, but only have room to publish 15. Sometimes a piece is rejected because the editor has a bugaboo about a certain word and you used it three times. Sometimes a piece is rejected because you misread the submission instructions (whoops). There are so many reasons why it can take time to place a poem, and none of them are “because you’re a garbage human being who should immediately give up writing forever.” Rejection is ok. Rejection means you’re doing the thing, you’re putting your words out there. Keep trying. Keep trying. Keep trying.

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