Non-Progress Notes
I work and work and still, there seems no place in the world for my manuscript.
posted by greg rappleye at 10:52 PM
Sunday, August 01, 2010
I work and work and still, there seems no place in the world for my manuscript.
About Me
- Name: greg rappleye
- Location: Grand Haven, Michigan, United States
I am a writer who lives and works in West Michigan. I am a graduate of Albion College, the University of Michigan Law School, and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I have published three full-length collections of poetry: Holding Down the Earth (Sky Books, 1995), A Path Between Houses (University of Wisconsin Press, 2000) which won the Brittingham Prize, and Figured Dark (University of Arkansas Press, 2007), which won the University of Arkansas Press Poetry Series. I have also published three chapbooks: Eros, Psyche and the Death of Narrative (Candle Creek Press, 2006), The Afterlight (WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2006), and The Divisible Field ( WVU-Legal Studies Forum, 2008), and have completed a fourth manuscript, Tropical Landscape with Ten Hummingbirds. I am working on a novel. My work has received a Pushcart Prize, the Mississippi Review Prize, the Paumanok Poetry Prize, the Greensboro Review Literary Award in Poetry, and the Arts & Letters Prize. I was a Bread Loaf Fellow in 2002. When not writing, I work full-time as corporation counsel for a local government and also teach part-time in the English Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
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7 Comments:
Oh, there is a place in the world. It is just so hard to find it.
I have faith.
Greg, I found your brief comment incredibly moving. My own latest manuscript, now in its fourteenth iteration, is wandering out there as well. The water is wide, as Munch shows, and the "beach" is made of boulders, and the anima (he calls her Inger) wonders when her child who set sail one day will return, having found a life of his own. I don't know anything about Munch's biography, but I imagine he had canvases like our manuscripts--and yet he kept painting, as we keep writing. Hang in there!
My thanks to both of you.
It is simply difficult to believe that one has gone on a four year adventure, alone, and no one wants to hear the story of what you did, what you found.
For what it's worth, Greg, you are not alone! I've been on one of those four-year adventures too ...
Me too, Greg. My ms. has been rejected about 15 times so far. Be of good heart. At the Wally conference last week, I was struck by Lisa Gluskin Stonestreet's story -- I believe she said her ms. was rejected 96 times. And finally hit and won a prize. Perhaps Robert can provide the details -- they're in a writing group together. Be of good heart.
15 times? I may not be up to 96 yet, but I'm at least over 50. Maybe I'm guilty of the "sending it out too soon" sin, but I figure there are worse crimes.
Please do not lament the absence of publisher validation to find the "place in the world". We, sharing these opinons here, are already in it.
The essence of art is in its expression. And only an artist can appreciate an artist's art. Once the stone is cast upon the waters we have no control of and should have no interest in how the ripples might affect the world or how others might see it. We just share it. We can enjoy the pattern of the ripples but the publications, prizes, flattery, all unnecessary validations that we hold dear, are puffery, mere affectations and personal adornments without reals substance. Indeed, they detract from that realm of art, that altered state of consciousness which we elicits and visit for a time. Keep art free from the strictures and burdens of the world. It is too much with us already. Linger in the Platonic realm and do not enslave yourself by worry over a paucity of print, competitions, pubishers desks etc. They are ony shadows in the empirical world. They are not part of the art's essence, even when they are shared. Like weak facimilies, they are flawed replicates of the original expression, what Plato called third representations.
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