Publishing Takes Forever—Part 3

Salmon of the Apocalypse

When I was in graduate school, we mailed our submissions to literary magazines by hand. We had to include a self-addressed stamped envelope inside our other envelopes. I became very good at the post-office’s weigh-it-and-mail-it-yourself station. I sent poems off to journals and then sat by the mailbox waiting for the responses to come in. I spent so much time waiting, I actually wrote a poem called “No Letters” to mark the days I got no mail. I got married my second year of grad school. (I ended up in grad school for 8 years. If you can stay in grad school forever, I recommend it). Perhaps I transferred my interest in dating to my interest in publication. If I had once been boy-crazy, I became submission-crazy. As my friend Kat Wilder wrote on a previous post “Of course, when it comes, it only works for a while. Like heroin.” You don’t have to have an addictive personality to “enjoy” the publishing world, but it helps.

The serial monogamy of my youth did not make me inured to rejection. As you will learn if you read How to Plant a Billion Trees, my relationship to men was, as they say, complicated. I carried a lot of shame from being molested, from the abortion, and from trying to act like nothing had happened (and failed). I felt rejection as shame—why did I send that out? How incredibly arrogant I was to think I’d get published. And, an overblown arrogance, the other side of shame, built for me a false armor. “They just didn’t understand me.” “They’re a stupid magazine anyway.” “They’ll rue this day in the future!” I still wrestle with the ping pong between feeling like an utter failure and deflecting overprotection. I had the same feeling about editors suggesting changes and proofreading. It led to a lot of typos. Fortunately, I’m getting better at being grateful to editors for their keen observations and corrections.

After my first 20 or so rejections, I received my first “positive” rejection from the Gettysburg Review. “We love these irreverent poems, but…..” I sent to the Gettysburg Review fifteen times after that. Still not published there. Could this be the longest thing I ever write? I could try! I could catalog each submission and rejection. I still have a drawer full. And, now I have a digital accounting of each time I launched my heart and soul into the abyss that is publishing and found the bottom—hard and flat. But let’s skip over the individual magazine rejections. And acceptances. They did come. If I look at my Submittable data, I’d say it accurately reflects my publishing success rate. About 10%. I have no idea how that comports with other writer’s experience. And, the reach of the magazines in which I’ve published varies widely. Some newbies. Some oldbies. Some little jobbers. Some a little bigger.

In 2008, both my presumptuousness and my ambition changed when I won an NEA grant. As my brain is wont to do, I assumed one win equals all wins! The New Yorker here I come. That turned out not to be quite true although 2008 was a good year. I dug in as a nonfiction writer. I published a long essay Where the Wild Things Are in Ninth Letter which had original art to accompany its big spread. That essay became the last essay in my book Quench Your Thirst with Salt which is about my dad, alcoholism, growing up as a non-Mormon in Utah. I obliquely wrote about the molestation that I talk about in A Billion Trees but not abortion. I sent Quench to big presses. I worked on another book, then called Salmon of the Apocalypse about questions I had about environmental impacts upon my body and those I would perpetrate while trying to get pregnant, giving birth prematurely, feeding and protecting my babies, trying to be a good steward of the planet and community member while also trying to juggle being a mom, a writer, a professor, and an activist. After querying about 35 agents, suffering such rejections such as “I like the idea. I just don’t like the writing,” and “There is a lot of writing about science here. You are not a science-writer,” I got my first ever for Salmon. She was a new agent, hoping, as I was, for a big break. She offered several editorial suggestions for the book. Like the whole book. One included toggling between stories of my great-grandmother, grandmother, and me. Another toggled between chapters of scarcity and abundance. Another toggled between wildlife and babies. There was a lot of toggling! Another version included my perspective from a month I spent in Italy. The agent thought it came off as a bit privileged. Indeed! The agent sent the manuscript to five places. One editor, from Milkweed, said yes, if there were more nature, he would accept it. But it didn’t. And, when I returned the manuscript later, now much more environmentally focused that editor was gone. The other four were not so nice. One said something like, “I’m sure Nicole thinks she knows what she’s doing, but I fear she may be the only one.” Admittedly, by the time I’d revised the manuscript so many times, perhaps not even I knew.

One day, I was teaching intermediate nonfiction workshop. The students sat in small groups. I visited each group, checking in on how the feedback they gave each other. In between, I did a bad thing. Bad because a) don’t look at your phone when you’re teaching and b) don’t look at your phone. I opened my gmail to find a note from my agent to say, “I’m a true admirer of your work and your mind but I suppose I’m just not feeling confident enough to dive into more drafts of these projects. And perhaps you are better served by more experimental presses and university presses, where I don’t feel I’m that able to be helpful.

And maybe another agent, coming to your work with fresh eyes will be able to have a vision for these projects and will be able to place them successfully. It’s not that I’m closing any doors here, but I think you should probably seek other representation since you need a passionate advocate, and though I remain a fan, I’m no longer sure that I have a vision for selling your books to the mainstream publishers I work with.”

Now that I look back on it, it’s not the worst thing in the world. But at the time, in front of my students, my face grew hot. My brain did one of those TV things where all it heard was buzzing and people’s faces went in and out of focus. I got it together, but my heart kept flip-flopping real real failure. Later emails reveal that she still likes my writing and if I come up with anything with more of a more organized, centralized sense of what the hell I’m talking about to let her know. I think I’ve fixed that problem by starting with titles and moving from there. Egg was centrally about eggs. It helped that I wrote (and rewrote) the proposal for that book. Proposal and grant writing focus my projects. Even if I stray when I actually write the book, the core is still there. As I tell my creative writing students, pretend that you are a stripper. The stronger the stripper pole, the core of your meaning, the further afield you can swing your body. This metaphor is indelicate but the students laugh and practice their centrifugal spins.

A week after my agent dumped me, I got a call from Zone 3 Press. I had won their Creative Nonfiction Award for Quench Your Thirst with Salt. Whatever bottom scrubbing creature I’d been earlier that day, I had turned into dancing flyer. This book had come so close to being published. My friend and I, had both received the same letter from Graywolf Press’s Nonfiction Prize, telling us that they couldn’t decide between our manuscripts, so they decided to go with a sure-fire hit, our friend Ander’s book. It was hard to be too mad. I love Ander’s writing. But it stung a bit. Graywolf is a career maker. But, in many ways, so was Zone 3. Zone 3’s prize was judged by one of my idols, Lia Purpura. She wrote the most elegant introduction. I sat on panels at AWP with her and other writers who combined memoir with science and nature. She wrote the introduction to Margot Singer and my edited collection Bending Genre. It’s called On Hybrids and it’s still one of the funniest and astute pieces of writing about the genre of creative nonfiction.

This is getting long and I have to go practice for my book launch tomorrow. I already found a typo. Trying not to deliquesce. I promise, I read the whole thing aloud 20 times. Ah well. If there wasn’t a typo, it wouldn’t be my book. Now I have the “my hat has got three corners, three corners has my hat, and if it had three corners it would not be my hat.” I can also sing this in German. Where, if I were to write it, you would also find typos.

I’ll try to write part 4 of this series this weekend! Thanks for reading this far.