I used to be afraid to write poetry

because it seemed like some divine task,

not to be taken lightly.

Then, I started writing every day

because the mystique had disappeared.

Now, I write every day, freely and with humor –

and encourage others to do the same –

because I know that it is a divine task,

not to be taken lightly.

An Autumnal Spring

I initially planned to write this back in July, but the truth is that despite so much happening, nothing had really changed with respect to my writing career trajectory. Now that the fall is here, it feels like so many things are coming to an end and so many things are beginning. The biggest recent change is that my wife finally (after months of tense negotiations) convinced me to buy a house with her, which was a huge risk considering my work contract for my previous job was set to expire a couple of weeks after we closed, and I still didn’t have anything lined up for afterwards. I was starting to struggle with my mental health again, to be honest, because I really didn’t want to keep working for a big, evil company, even if it was as a chemist, but I didn’t know what else to do. I missed Cuenca, and I missed being a teacher. Then, just a couple of weeks before I blew through the money that we had set aside to float us while I looked for work, I saw a posting looking for teachers at a school in my neighborhood called El Colegio, which is a dual-immersion school where nearly all of the students are either immigrants or the children of immigrants from Latin America. Apparently, the state is so desperate for teachers right now that I was able to get my license just off of my experiences in Ecuador and in Mozambique without having a degree in education. Now, I’m an English teacher, being paid to talk about poetry all day and to play basketball with my students during lunch. I couldn’t be happier!

Poetry, Poems, and Poemarios

In my previous newsletter, I said that I was off to a hot start this year with publications, especially with my poetry in English. It was my expectation that, at some point, I would it a cold streak, but that hasn’t happened. It seems like one out of every four or five responses I get is an acceptance letter, which, from my understanding, is really good! At the same time, I’m taking this as a sign that I need to swallow my pride and start sending my work into bigger journals and contests, even though that might mean way more rejections in the short term. Another thing that has been happening is that I write these new poems that are better than anything I’ve written before, so I send them into journals like The Harvard Review or American Literary Review – hyper-competitive publications – in hopes of having my first huge poetry success. But since these journals receive so many submissions, they take a long time to respond. In the meantime, I get down on myself, say that there’s no way that they’re going to accept my work, and send my poetry to smaller journals. These are still great journals with wide readerships, so when they accept those poems within a couple of days, I’m very happy. However, that means I need to withdraw them from those really famous publications. I’m going to try to be more patient with those things in the future.

Oh! And my biggest fear since I’ve started writing happened the other day! With literary journals, I’d say about half are open to anybody or any theme. Obviously, there are trends with the styles of poetry they prefer, but they encourage everybody to submit their work. Then, about twenty-five percent, more or less, are open to anybody, but they have a theme like romance, politics, horror, nature, or spirituality. The remaining publications are for certain types of poets: young poets, poets from a certain part of the country, women poets, and so on. Personally, I think this is a great way to ensure that everybody can have their voices heard and so that everybody can find poetry that expresses their unique life experiences as well. With that being said, I had a day off of work a couple of weeks ago, and I decided to use my time to send in my work to as many journals as possible as quickly as possible. A couple of days later, I received an acceptance letter from one of the journals. Awesome! I went to their website to get some additional information, and I realized that, by mistake, I had sent my work into a magazine that ONLY publishes work by LGBTQIA+ writers. I was unsure of what to do. Afterall, I was really excited about the poem they chose to publish, and it’s not like anybody is going to do a background check on me or anything. It just didn’t sit well with me, though, so I wrote an email to the editor of the publication to explain my mistake. Thankfully, they were understanding and wished me luck publishing my poem elsewhere.

In addition to the individual poems that I’ve been trying to publish, I have the same full-length collection of poetry in English that I’m still trying to find a publisher for that I mentioned last time. The new poems that I’ve been writing have a style that combines better with the more popular trends – which I really like – so those are being set aside for my next collection. If I can’t find a publisher for this first collection, though, I’ll be stuck with a conundrum. Do I leave it unpublished despite most of the poems being published in various journals? Do I just publish it on my website for free so that anybody can read it? Or do I scavenge the best of the best from that collection to the new collection so that the new collection will be finished sooner? I’m leaning towards the third option, but I’m still waiting to hear back from a few more publishers before I decide.

I’ve also finished my first ever full-length collection of poetry in Spanish, so I look forward to sending that into some publishers and contests! Hopefully, I will have good news about that soon, too.

Novels

Not much has changed with my novels, unfortunately. The novel that I’ve been working on in Spanish, the sequel to the novel that was published a couple years back, is just about done. I hoped to finish a long time ago, but life has been crazy.

I have my other novel in English which has been finished for a long time. In my previous update, I said that I had just sent it in to a bunch of literary agencies in the hopes that an agent would help me publish the novel with a big publisher. After about six months of either rejections or not hearing back, I was beginning to look for small publishers for my novel that accept work from authors who don’t have agents. Literally the day I was about to start sending my novel in, I got an email from an agent that I hadn’t heard back from previously saying that, out of multiple thousand novels they had received, they were interested in mine, but they need more time to review my work before they make their final decision. There are also a couple of other agents who said they would give me a response either way that still haven’t answered my query, so, whether this is correct or not, I’m assuming that they are also still considering my novel. Because of this tiny sliver of hope, I’ve decided to hold off for now on sending my work directly into any publishers or contests.

I also have an idea for my next novel in English, which I will start once I finish the novel in Spanish. In the past, I’ve written all of my novels by hand in notebooks before typing them. The idea was that this would make it easier, logistically and emotionally, to make major changes, but so far, that hasn’t been the case. With the novels that I write in the future, I’ll try to type the first drafts since this will literally save me a year’s worth of work each time.

Coming Out of Hibernation

I think my brain got plugged in backwards because it seems like I feel the opposite way about a long of things from the majority of people. Mondays are my favorite day of the week. I relax by running marathons. I care way more about saving time than saving money. And I hibernate in the summer while being way more active in the winter. My body absolutely cannot handle the heat. When I exercise in the humidity, it makes me feel hungover the next day, no matter how much water I drink. I need the darkness to think. I need the stillness of the frozen waterfall. I need the tiny icicles growing off of my nose hairs. I ran a marathon last Sunday; now, I have to decide if I want to take a break from running or if I want to keep training. There’s a trail running marathon in January that I’m considering trying, but at the same time, I’d like to drink an entire bottle of wine and write some goofy poetry. I should also probably be doing more around the house instead of blowing all of my energy on jogging.

Finally, the professor that I worked for at the University of Minnesota told me that this year was my last chance to apply to a graduate program for chemistry before my prospects as a candidate would drop off. I plan on applying. After ten years of being terrified of being rejected, I am applying. I even have all of my materials for the application ready to go and have spoken to the professors who will give me recommendations. I mentioned I really like my current job, so whether or not the program accepts me, I will be happy.

Despite the unseasonal heat holding on for dear life, winter will be here soon. Ending, death, metamorphosis, metempsychosis, seasonal depression, mountains of slush on the side of the road, and glimmers of hope sparkling on the unseen, smothered snowflakes at the bottom of the snowbanks. I hope there’s a freak weather pattern and that it’s the coldest winter on record. It’s the best way to be reminded of the fire within me.