THOMAS RIONS-MAEHREN

the thing about trudging

is that time trudges too

is that each step is a trudge

is that weeks trudge into months

is that the goal trudges just beyond your reach

is that suddenly you’ve been trudging for years.

My goal for this year was to run every single day. So far, I’ve run in subzero temperatures, in blizzards, in downpours, and through pollen so thick I went blind. Progress came fast at first as my speed and endurance increased back to pre-fatherhood levels, but now things have plateaued. I’m often anxious about running because I know it will hurt. I know it will be hard. And I know that I won’t see any significant progress. I still run every day.

That has been the theme to start this year. I’ve done so much and come so far, and yet not much has changed. Here I am, sitting at home, taking a mental health day from a job that I have very mixed feelings about, trying to plan for the future. Right now, I work in R&D for a Fortune 500 company with a one-year contract that’s set to expire in July. I really want to want to work there permanently. The pay would be nice. So would the benefits and the stability. The thing is… I don’t care about big businesses. I’m a chemist. I am passionate about science, not trying to impress businessmen. My goal as a scientists is to create knowledge and to make the world a better place, not to make money for a handful of millionaires. But that’s the safe choice. Should I become a substitute teacher and supplement my income by working as a translator? Should I go back to construction work? Should I go to grad school? Or should I just take the money and shut up?

As I weigh the future, all I can think about is which path will allow me to write the most. As much as it terrifies me to admit this, the ONLY thing I can see myself doing permanently and fulltime is writing. Anything else is just for survival. So then, how’s the writing thing going?

Last year, I had a lot of success with Spanish-language poetry, but I was in the middle of a cold streak with my English-language poetry. Right at the beginning of the year, though, something crazy happened. Normally, they say that getting one poem accepted for every fifteen submissions is good, and that’s how things were going for me. Then, at the start of the year, I got a string of acceptance letters. At one point, something like seven or eight responses out of twelve were good news. Some of those poems have already been published, and some will be coming out soon. Even a lot of the rejections were personalized, stating that my poem just didn’t fit with the others that they had chosen, not that there was anything wrong with my poem. It might seem like I’m just becoming a better writer except that most of these poems are old, with some being things that I had written as early as 2016. I have a few theories for this new string of successes:

1. Luck: Like I said, a lot of rejections said the issue with my poetry was the fit, not the quality. This time around, my work must have jived really well with other submissions.
2. Persistence: A big part of publishing writing is getting the right work to the right person at the right time. Many journals, by this point, have rejected me multiple times. That means that if I have one poem that they’d really love, by sending that journal my work over and over, eventually that one poem will find its way there.
3. Snowball effect: This one I’m not sure about, but it seems like since I created this website with my bibliography and links to the journals that published me, I’ve had a lot more luck finding a home for my poetry. Maybe editors are starting to see my name around. Maybe they’re seeing past the tongue-in-cheek tone I use in a lot of my work to realize that there’s a lot more under the surface and that I take writing very seriously.

Okay, so all of that is nice, but where has that gotten me? I feel like I’m at a fork in the road in a sense. Will I be someone who publishes hundreds of poems and short stories in small literary journals without writing anything that stands out, or will I start collecting more noteworthy publications and accolades on my way to becoming a fulltime writer? (It’s worth repeating that I write because I love writing, not for the money; the money would just allow me the freedom to write more). I still have my full-length collection of poetry which I am sending in to contests and publishers, without any success yet. For that, I plan on trying to get it published traditionally while I write the next collection. That should take a couple years, so if by the time the second collection is ready to go, the first collection hasn’t been published, I might just self-publish it on Amazon or something like that.

In other poetry news, my Spanish-language collection of poetry is coming along, and I should, hopefully, be hearing back from more journals on those individual poems. I’ve also become an editor at a new literary journal called Open Expression although they haven’t added me to the website yet. Their ideals seem to align with my own, so I’m aiming to help the journal grow and publish impactful poetry. There is also the hope that this will help me to immerse myself in the world of poetry and to meet other poets instead of just creating poetry from within my own opaque bubble.

The final irony of all of this is that I’ve hardly written anything noteworthy this year. All of the old stuff is getting published, but I’ve been in a slump with my new writing. I write seven days a week, but lately it’s just felt mechanical. However, I can feel some good poetry coming in the near future, almost like a tickle in my nose turning into a sneeze. I just have to wait while I continue to read, write, and live every day.

Lastly, the prose. I’m still trying to find a literary agent to represent me in order to submit my novel to one of the big publishing houses. I’ve gone through the entire list of agents and agencies twice, submitting to additional agents at the agencies that allow that sort of thing. I plan to wait until the fall to see if anybody is interested before I start submitting the novel straight to smaller publishing houses.

With all of this focus on publishing existing work, just like with my poetry, my progress on the novel that I’m writing in Spanish has suffered as well. I currently have an entire handwritten first draft. Now, I need to settle in and type it up. Getting work published is super time consuming with the cover letters and the formatting and everything else. Being caught up on that for the time being will free up a lot of time to write like mad. I think the book I’m working on has some potential, but I’ll have to see when I’m finished. I definitely learned a lot from writing and publishing the first novel.

I have plans for my next novels in both English and Spanish in the works; I hope to start those by the end of the year.

So that’s everything so far this year. I plan to write another update by the end of the summer. No matter how much I kick and scream and drag my feet, my life will be very different by then. It’s just a question of how it will look. My tummy hurts just thinking about it. The one thing I know for certain is that I’ll be out running every day.