The Only Way to Talk About the Universal is Through Many Particulars: on Making Manuscripts

There is a little cloud of insects above my house’s roof—right this second—and the evening light is hitting their wings, lighting them up. They are all movement and change, yet continually. Individuals, yet a collective. Their lives are short—they will die before I have finished writing this piece.

I mention the insects because, although they are incidental to my place in time—this backyard hammock at 6:30 on a slow, North Carolina evening—they belong to it. They change me, my space in time, my description. Animals and the living world, when they break through our self absorption, are the visitations of a writer’s world—the sometimes small, fragile and not so frightening angels. Writers are some distant version of Mary, with her book, interrupted in the Renaissance paintings for the sake of news. (Louise Erdrich, in her novel FUTURE HOME OF THE LIVING GOD, writes how Renaissance theologians understood Mary to be impregnated through the organ of her ear—but writers have every organ and sense open to received experience).

If I chose, I could write the insect cloud into a poem (instead of this blog post, or in addition to). The poem could resonate with me and my thoughts on some level, and I could slip it into my current manuscript…and another ripple would go through the poems collected there, and the poem might (or might not) stay. To quote Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower: "All that you touch. You Change. All that you Change Changes you."

The insects still flutter frantically above my roof, though the light has lowered through the height of the Loblolly pines, and their wings are a more muted movement now. They are as good a metaphor for your poetry manuscript as any, and better than most. They are animal change, as your manuscript is.

I want to say something about doubling, twinning, and budding now--another reproductive mode of nature.

My first real book submission took place about ten years after my flurry of trying to submit my MFA thesis (which was NOT a fit book for publishing, but the efforts of someone learning a great deal and trying to absorb it all). By "real" I mean one I felt confident in--there had been another shortly before, a full-length collection centered on motherhood, called What My Mother Fed Me; it was an early version of not one but two of my manuscripts.

What follows here is ONE version of how the organic planting of a manuscript happens: I had visited Ft. Fisher on the North Carolina coast with friends, and began to write (more) civil war poems, inspired by the artillery mounds and the live oaks, the waters where a woman Confederate spy was drowned, her skirts laden with British sovereigns. By the time I noticed the civil war poems creeping into my manuscript, which was now called LARKS, I realized they might make a good chapbook. My friend, the poet Jess Stark, urged me to separate my single manuscript into two half-finished manuscripts, and continue to work on them both (I don't remember when this happened, but it was hugely helpful advice!). So on a quiet anniversary week at the Outerbanks with my partner, I wrote more poems, pulled them together, formatted their TOC, and submitted them to Bull City Press. When I did this, I subtracted them from my full-length manuscript, and planned on having a discreet/separate chapbook. After several months of intense nail-biting anxiety (at once point I had a tarot reading done for my book--it was promising, and told me to wait), the book was accepted, and when later (the next year? maybe?) the BCP editor heard I had a chapbook coming out with Ethel Zine, they cannily asked if I wanted to expand What Pecan Light the chapbook into a full-length. And of course I did!

So much work happened then. Over the next nine months, I pulled poems that did not seem up to the task of the book. I wrote into the holes and the gaps. I thought about the themes, images, language. I wrote the notes. I ordered and reordered to the point where I felt estranged from the order (don’t do this!). There are so many factors and persons at play in making a book--don't be surprised when you meet some jolts along the way, but do advocate for yourself and trust your gut when it comes to decisions about your book. Late in the editing process, I received a not-at-all-praising blurb from someone I trusted that sent me reeling. I sat in the bath thinking about the blurb until the water went cold. These things happen. A better thing that happened: I had a sensitivity read that helped the manuscript grow from its white perspective to something a little larger, more critical, more sensitive to language of harm. I had months of silence (this is something I'm really sensitive to, as an editor, and we will try our DARNDEST to be in excellent communication with our River River Books authors) and then a flurry of edits from my editor. The book emerged, and was published in 2021, three years after I'd submitted it in summer 2018.

This process is different for everyone. It is an emotional-critical one. The light changes constantly. Sit with it. Sit with your poems. Be open to the many many changes and versions as you write towards self-articulation, self-annunciation. Reach out to others to read your manuscript, because this self-work is best done with others.

And always hold what is particular about your work—its sense of place, its use of language—in highest regard, and save it from revision.

And do read Jorie Graham's "Some Notes on Silence," (excerpt here) which is never far from my mind when working on a manuscript.