As an aspiring writer in grad school, professors encouraged me, as they did with all students, to submit pieces to publications. As writers, we were taught to be comfortable with the idea of others reading our work and be familiar with the submission process. I remember one particularly ethereal-minded professor said that we should think of our poems as little fairies we send out into the universe and hope that they become what we had loved about them enough to have sent them off in the first place. Something like that; she was very mystical woo-woo.
I tried to heed this advice, and I even knew that submitting for publication was a very critical piece of the writing process, but I found the whole thing to be very daunting. Was I good enough to get published? Where would I send my poems? Magazines? Poetry compilations? Book publishers??
More importantly, though, I was worried about publication rights; I wanted to ensure that if a magazine printed one of my poems, I would not lose all ownership of it. I ultimately decided on one submission to one magazine, and I aimed high: The New Yorker. I poured through its submission guidelines to find out about publication rights and who owns the poem afterwards and whether I could still publish it elsewhere later. Because in my head, the goal was to publish a book, and I did not want a poem to be locked in a mere magazine, even one with such a dominating stature.
I obviously failed to consider the major logistical flaw in my reasoning: that I would even get published by The New Yorker, a haughty potpourri of news, commentary, politics, and creative writing. Had they printed the poem I sent (SPOILER ALERT: they didn't), I would have been in the company of Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Lucille Clifton, and an array of other poets with significant clout. Now that I think about it more, maybe this wasn't so much a logistical flaw as it was an egotistical one.
But, still, ownership of my poems was a real concern because each poem I wrote, each piece of completed writing represented a monumental accomplishment, an aligning of planets, and I never knew when or how the next one would come. I convinced myself that I had a limited supply of good ideas, and an even more limited capacity for good execution. What if my only good idea, my golden poem, was the one that could have made me millions and famous (wow, ego flaws everywhere!), but instead, I sent it for free to a magazine or minor poetry publication (as if there are any other kind in the poetry world, honestly) and then never had another one again?
Cut to present day, seven years later, where I am prepping one of my previous blog posts for submission to another blog that focuses on telling worldwide stories of the gay community. Submitting my piece affords me no rights, no royalties, nothing much, really, other than potential publication on a blog with much higher traffic than mine.
And I have no reservations about it. I came to learn of a second flaw in my old reasoning, taught to me as I have moved through this year and this blog: that I will continue to have ideas, good ones and bad, with continuing execution, also good and bad. Giving up a piece shouldn't matter when I am, hopefully, training myself to develop an endless supply of them. I should get exposure, send these little fairies out into the world, as Brenda Hillman used to say, hone my craft, experience rejection, feel the privilege of reaching an audience.
In other words, you know, be a writer.
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