Six Questions

My goodness, so much is happening right now. First I'd like to welcome Sonya Dunning to our team. We're very excited to have her as our new Nonfiction Editor. Jory Mickelson has switched his responsibilities from Nonfiction Editor to Poetry Editor, and, sadly, Mishon Wooldridge has resigned to focus on other things. So, a warm welcome to Sonya and a farewell to Mishon.

As for the Six Questions the title of this post refers to: Jim Harrington emailed me a couple of months ago now about participating in his blog. I'm happy to be a part of it. Jim contacts publishers and editors to ask them six questions, and then he posts the answers on his blog. He's gotten a lot of responses. This is great for all you overachievers (if you're reading this blog, then you probably fit this category) who want the inside scoop into what will get you published.

It's great for publishers too, because we get to be very specific about what we want to see. Hopefully it means receiving more submissions that meet our guidelines.

Today happens to be the very day that Jim posted the six questions I answered for him. Check it out here.

Since answering Jim's questions, I received an email from an artist who brought up a concern, and I'd like to address it here. Let's call this the seventh question:

I have a comment to make: Although I am technically a "youth writer", I don't appreciate the fact that writers who are younger have to be separated out in a distinct youth section. I think it's degrading to view us on a separate scale and our work should stand for itself. If it flies, it flies. If it doesn't, it doesn't.

Here's how I responded:

Thank you for voicing your concern. We are constantly trying to find ways to improve, and your thoughts are important to us.

Here's why we separate youth art from everyone else: If we believed that, generally speaking, high school students could write/create art on the same playing field as adults, we would also have to believe that college and MFA programs didn't teach anyone anything. We don't believe that. So it stands to reason that someone who has earned an MFA is going to be better at writing a great, concise story. To say that high school students can write just as well as graduate school professors is degrading to the education system as a whole and everyone involved in it.  This doesn't mean that an individual high school student can't write an outstanding piece; we just have to set up our system for everyone, not individuals.

And there's more: I like to believe that we receive submissions from high school students who haven't even shown their work to their friends and family. That they've done some writing, and they're proud of it, but they don't want to show it to anyone else until they know that it's good. Those people aren't getting advice from their peers as to how they can improve the piece for publication.  So they're at a bit of a disadvantage, because as you probably know, getting input from other artists is a great way (I'd say the best way) to improve your art. Although these kids don't have this advantage, I want to let them know that their work is good. Maybe all they need is to get something published and then they'll know that it's safe to share it with others. We can provide that anonymous feedback. But, without telling us that they're too young to have gone to college and gotten feedback from other college students and professors, we don't know why the story isn't written as well as Sherman Alexie can write. I'd say it's unfair to put that teenager's work up against Sherman Alexie without giving some sort of advantage. 

And more: We just don't get very many high school submissions right now. We're trying to get more, and one way of doing that is by publishing youth art and advertising that it is in fact youth art. Hopefully we'll get more in the future. Right now we get close to 500 submissions in five different categories. Probably ten to twenty of those are youth. What I've discovered in the three years that I've been doing this is that the more submissions we receive, the more good submissions we receive. If we were receiving 250 youth submissions and 250 submissions from everyone else, I have no doubt that we'd accept a youth piece without having to give the advantage of telling us that they're youth.

And finally: the work does still have to be good enough. We don't simply publish a youth piece just because it's written by a high schooler. This issue is testament to that. We're publishing one youth visual arts piece. The poetry and fiction wasn't up to par because it just wasn't written well enough, or it didn't fit the theme as we wanted it to, or, in the case of both of the fiction pieces I had to reject, it was too explicitly sexual. We do tailor our magazine to high school students, among other demographics, so we do have to be mindful of sexuality in stories.

I hope I've assuaged your concerns somewhat. You can see that I've put a lot of thought into this, and your concern has been one of mine as well. I still think that the benefits outweigh the cost. I hope you agree, but if you don't, I'd love to hear more about what you think.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.  All of you.  I'd also love to read your submissions.  The deadline for the Divided themed issue is only two days away!

About This Blogger

As 5x5's new nonfiction editor, I want to use this blog post as an opportunity to introduce myself and maybe say a thing or two about the kind of nonfiction I “practice,” and the kind of nonfiction (or literature in general) I admire. But first, a confession. I have never been a blogger before, nor have I ever been the editor of anything (I'm not counting editing my own writing or marking student papers). And as it turns out, I am not as technologically savvy as I'd thought I was—I've been feeling a bit like a granny off the grid (not to generalize grannys or off-the-gridders) as I test the waters of 5x5's submission manager, and email, and now this blogspot (each site, of course, requiring a different user name and password, or so it seems). I would also like to clarify that I never used to use this many parentheses, though I think that development is not too relevant here. At any rate, I am not complaining. I am, in fact, very happy to have been invited to join my fellow 5x5 editors, an opportunity that kind of just fell in my lap, and when it did, I picked it up, and I said, “Heck, yeah.” If I had been channeling my soon-to-be brother-in-law, I would have said, “I don't see why not!,” which is the philosophy by which he has recently been living. Jory, 5x5's Poetry Editor, is the one who tossed the opportunity my way. Thank you, Jory.

Onto other matters...

I'm not very good at introducing my writer/editor-self, which is to say, I am still figuring out what my practice entails, and I still find it hard to pinpoint with any exactitude the KIND of literature I like to read. But I think the two questions are related (what I write and what I read). I want to borrow some words from Barry Lopez, whose collection of essays, About This Life, I devoured over X-MAS vacation, telling my fiance (who became my fiance on Christmas Day) that I think Lopez is a kindred spirit, and why didn't I know about him until now?!? Here is what Lopez says about his own goals in the introductory pages to About This Life: “If I were asked what I want to accomplish as a writer, I would say it's to contribute to a literature of hope..I want to help create a body of stories in which men and women can discover trustworthy patterns.” What has stayed with me most about this statement is “a literature of hope.” What does Lopez mean? I used to think all nonfiction had to be really sad. I thought it was supposed to be serious and full of lament and I almost wished my life was a little more tragic so that I could increase that seriousness and lament to a higher decibel (truthfully). I am not sure where I got that idea. I do think the stories I love most (both those I love to write and those I love to read)—and by story, I am meaning essay, too, and memoir—do often stem from a place of sadness, or hopelessness, but I think they are ultimately concerned with matters of hope, with characters who persevere in the face of disasters, both large and small, characters who have courage to acknowledge the unknown, to speak up, even when it seems like there's no point. I like to write and read about survival (physical, psychological, emotional), which, in the face of a given disaster, is oftentimes impossible WITHOUT the presence of hope. I don't know if that's what Lopez means, but that is what has been on my mind as I work on a memoir concerned with concepts such as family, home, the American Dream, loss, nostalgia, foreclosure. Hope is a life-force. Hope can be redefined (and sometimes it ought to be). And none of this is to say that hope is always hopeful or the opposite of "sad." I think hope can be sad. Sometimes a little hope is the saddest thing in the world, because sometimes hope is hopeless but we are inclined to hope anyway. If asked why I write, or why I love literature (and maybe nonfiction in particular), I would say it's because within the open arms of literature I am encouraged (more so than in any other “place”) to explore who I am and how I became who I am and whether I want to keep being who I am. Particular to my writer/editor-self goals, I suppose, is the desire to offer that place to readers as it has been offered to me--to lead them through a little door they maybe didn't know was there, or that they haven't opened in a while, or ever, and take their coat, and invite them to stay awhile, out of the wind. 

In closing, I want to share with you the tips Lopez once offered a man on a plane who asked him what advice he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, an aspiring writer:

• “Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she's reading trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language.”
• “If she wishes to write, she will have to become someone...if her prose doesn't come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. Help her discover what she means.”
• “Tell [her] to...“separate herself from the familiar...when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar...[to] give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.”

Over the next couple weeks, you might consider these tips in terms of how they apply to your own writing and/or reading practices. Have you recently had to defend your choice in reading materials? Were you able to stick up for yourself in that situation? What DO you believe? What do you REALLY mean, or what is the story REALLY about (rarely is the first answer the true answer...keep digging)? Finally, when is the last time you “got out of town,” so to speak? How might you step outside yourself, or outside the familiar, and see your project with a fresh set of eyes?

A New Year for 5x5

I suppose you have been wondering where we've been.  We do too.  It is a new year and so here is to a new resolution to keep this blog up.  There are several changes going on at 5x5 and we encourage you to visit here and our website regularly to keep abreast of all that is happening.

1)  We finally attained nonprofit status!  Thanks to several generous donations, we have cleared the final hoop.

2)  We said goodbye to Mishon Wooldridge, our Poetry Editor for the past two years.  Thanks for your hard work.  You will be missed.

3)  We said hello to Sonya J. Dunning, our new Nonfiction Editor!  She is one hell of a writer and brings with her a sharp eye for good writing and a growing list of publications.

These are exciting times for us here at 5x5 and we hope that you will stick with us.

I had meant to talk about writing.  Recently, I entered a 30 Day Poetry Challenge with my friends.  Rather than make New Year's resolutions that always end somewhere in February (or earlier), I committed myself to 30 days of writing every single day.

So far, this has been a success.  I hated sitting down every day to hammer out some new material, but I suppose this is the point of writing every day--to generate new material.  Today marks the half way point and so far, I have been successful.  It is humbling to realize just how much work writing is.  I write every day no matter how I am feeling.

If I am sick, I write.
If I am really busy, I write.
If I am depressed, I write.
If I have nothing better to do, I write.
If I have a deadline for something else, I write.
If I don't want to miss the next episode of Dowton Abbey, I write before or after the show.

I have not been writing at a fixed time every day as my schedule is slightly different each day of the week depending on work, teaching, classes and events.  Sometimes I spend no more than twenty minutes writing.  Other times, I come back to the piece again and again throughout the day.

I used to think that I could only write when I was inspired or that if I wrote every day it would be crap.  The key for me during the past fifteen days is to sit down and actually do the work.  Something will get put on the page.  I have to suspend my judgement and just let myself write.

I encourage each of you readers to set your own writing challenge this year.  Thirty days seem too daunting?  How about 15 days?  How about one week, seven whole days of writing?  Set your goals and set your marks!  I hope some of you will share with us what your own writing challenge was like.

Best wishes in the New Year,
Jory M. Mickelson
Poetry Editor, 5x5