Publication Alert: Facebook & WGT

Dear Reader,

It's been a good week. My pseudo seasonal-depression has been aided with the long overdue presence of outdoor weather; reunions with traveling loved ones are fast approaching; three (yes three!) solid drafts of creative writing were written in the course of seven days; and publications continue to come along steadily. Fortune must be in a pleasant mood.

First exciting writing news: Antiquarian Desiderium now has an official Facebook page, making it easier for all my fellow FB users to keep track of new posts and writerly happenings. (NOTE: the Facebook icon on the sidebar is currently under construction -- my apologies if it doesn't work.) The Twitter account is still up, too, although I continue to be befuddled by its inner workings (and that 140-character limit . . . what's a verbose girl to do?). Happy social media reading!

Second exciting writing news: For those who might have missed this announcement, I received word recently that one of my poems is destined to be published in Prairie Margin's Fall 2015 issue. More details on that as it approaches!

Third exciting writing news: It is with humble gratitude and great pleasure that I announce that Antiquarian Desiderium has, yet again, been featured on Writer's Get Together, an international writer-blogger networking site. I adored working with the WGT editors back in February, due to their genuine enthusiasm and encouragement of my work, so I was thrilled to have another chance to be featured on their site. This time they were gracious enough to publish my fan-girl praises of the sage queen-poet, Mary Oliver, which originally appeared in my two-part series entitled "Little Pink Notebook." You can view it on Writers Get Together here. Thanks again, WGT!

About the work:
There is not much that I can add to what's already said in the post itself. I am continually awed by the subtle brilliance in Mary Oliver's work. I've finally started to read her poetry in addition to her non-fiction, and have found it to be just as marvelous.

As I look back on this post, however, it causes me to reflect deeply on how much that tattered pink notebook has meant to me in the past few months. Yes, I still have it -- tumbling around in my purse, a few pages bent, illegible notes scattered so far beyond its cover that it may be time to think about a new one. Although it's seen a great deal of use, I hadn't really thought about its importance in my life until very recently, during a period of personal despair. I was ashamed of myself as a writer, finding that my computer folder of Personal Writings had been mainly neglected in the past four months. I had been lazy, I told myself; I had failed the test of being a writer on my own; perhaps I had forgotten how to write at all. I was a fake, I believed.

Then one afternoon, after having jotted something in my pink notebook, I paused and started to flip back through the pages. I was always adding things, but rarely stopped to actually go back through what I'd written, thinking it was all only momentary flashes but very little of anything reusable. When I read through it, I was astonished at what I found. There were repetitions, concepts that began in January and recurred intermittently through to May. There were real poetic excerpts, phrases that word-for-word would make a solid line for a piece. There were whole poems, essays, and stories fragmented throughout, needing only to have its pieces gathered and put together in the right order (to date, I've already made four poems and one non-fiction piece from my notes since January, and have plans for more works).

I was flabbergasted. All this time, I thought I hadn't accomplished a thing in writing for four months. I thought my ideas-well had run dry, and that I had nowhere to begin. All that time, all that material was right here, in this tiny little book, which I had been meticulously filling almost daily.

Turns out, I am a writer, after all.

Grace and peace to you.

Publication Alert: Thoreau's Rooster (And Brief Update)

Dear Reader,

The last month has been one of chaos, confusion, and changes. One moment I'm flailing my way through final exams, the next I'm donning a cap and gown, walking up to a stage and shaking hands with the president of Westfield State University to receive my Bachelor of Arts in English. My undergraduate career is officially completed, and I'm left in a daze wondering how it ended so quickly. As cliched as it sounds, I mean it when I say that Westfield was my home, my life, the place where I developed confidence in my ability as a writer and human being. I am truly humbled by the loving support I received there from professors and friends, and could never repay them for such a beautiful experience if I worked my whole life for it.

Thank you so much Westfield, you wonderful, wonderful place.

My graduation cap, with a quote taken from poet Edna St. Vincent Millay

Regarding other matters of business, I just found out today that Thoreau's Rooster, a national undergraduate journal, just released their 2014 volume on their website. My short nonfiction essay "Then Autumn Came," which appeared in the print version in the fall, is featured. I'm so excited to finally be able to share it widely with friends and family. You can read it here.

About the work:
There's a special reason why I'm ecstatic to share this with essay with you: it was my first piece to be accepted for publication. Ever. I still remember the rocket that launched inside my chest when I came across that e-mail with the subject line "Congratulations!", and the string of all-caps texts that went out to my beau and family announcing the news. That rush of joy in your first acceptance is an incredible feeling; in that moment, all your previous self-doubt flies away, your love of writing swells, and that realization of "I'm a writer" pounds strongly. It's a wonderful beginning to a lifelong journey.

The subject of the piece, additionally, is one rather close to my heart. The weaving narrative form is known as the "journal" genre, in which the focus is not on a particular anecdote but on providing glimpses that make up a person's daily life. When I wrote this for my Creative Non-Fiction class, I was in a strange place. I'd recently been through a bad break-up of a 3-year relationship, and while dealing with this disorientation, I found my writing taking a turn. In previous attempts to write, I'd always struggled with the element of plot structure: how to build up to a believable but powerful climax, and how to resolve it sufficiently in a short piece; in other words, how to transform characters quickly. As I started to experiment with my writing more, however, I discovered that the appeal of a story need not be in a journey. Sometimes, simply exploring an existing circumstance, revealing what's already there, is enough. So began my greatest aim in writing: to show the value of daily life by not embellishing it, not resolving it, but only by showing it through a different lens.

Enjoy! Grace and peace to you.

There's a Purpose, Not a Destiny

Grad School, Life, and The Art of Deciding

(MFA decision included!)

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

To where it bent in the undergrowth . . .

~ Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken"

Few poems have been quoted as widely or as colloquially as Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken." For decades, it has been commonly admired as a rebellious sanction for the road "less traveled by," and is seen as a bold statement against following societal standards blindly. While the poem certainly holds a place for this optimistic view, it has always befuddled me (and several English teachers) that no one ever seems to remember anything before the final three lines. Readers are apt to quote the final stanza while ignoring Frost's prevalent tone of despair, his disappointment that he will never know what lies down that other road. (The title, after all, is not "The Road Less Taken," but "The Road Not Taken.")

Having been drowning in some major life decisions lately, I can relate strongly to Frost's agony. I was recently accepted at two graduate schools for my MFA (no fully-funded ones, sadly), and the past few weeks has consisted of many phone-calls, much hair-pulling, and much sleep deprivation as I weighed my financial and family needs carefully. In the end, I decided to attend Southern Connecticut State University's MFA program in the fall, going part-time my first year.* When I was applying for grad schools, SCSU just seemed like a safety-net option, but after speaking with past students and current professors I realized that it was a perfect fit for me right now: it seems to have that same close-knit, supportive environment that I've become so dependent upon at my undergrad school, and because it's only an hour away, the home-girl in me doesn't have to uproot her life alone. It wasn't an easy decision, though. By nature, I'm extremely risk-adverse -- which is good for keeping me out of trouble on the weekends, but it makes life decisions absolutely terrifying. No matter how much I analyze or map out each and every possibility, there's a paralyzing fear of the unknown, of the variables I can't predict or control.

Certainly, I'd say that my fear of life decisions is influenced in part by the prodigy-mania -- the cultural glorification of youth claiming that dreams must be achieved in the prime of our life, or they'll never be achieved at all. I gave up writing at 13, for almost a decade, because I foolishly thought if I didn't have my first novel written by 18 (Mary Shelley's age when she first drafted Frankenstein), I'd already failed. Yet I think there's been another, stronger factor in my fear of decisions: the vision of a single, perfect, right decision. As a Catholic, I've sometimes found that the concept of a vocation (God's personal call for your life, e.g., to the married or religious life) can invoke a sense of a destiny set in stone, some predetermined path that contains the highest achievable happiness for one's life. Of course, God doesn't expect perfection, I knew. We may stray from that path or wobble on it here and there, but if we only stay as close as possible to it, everything will fall neatly into place.

Unfortunately, from a young age I created my own obsessive, warped perception of what a vocation meant, and as a result developed a sense of guilt around the idea of not "getting it exactly right." I felt as though I'd be tampering with some perfect, divinely ordained system if I messed up along the way. As I've gotten older, I still struggle with a subconscious belief that if my life journey isn't clear-cut and well-planned, it means I haven't dedicated enough time or thought into it, or am wasting part of myself, or am letting others down.

This kind of thinking can be especially hard on writers (and artists), I think. In an ideal world, we'd write to our heart's content, publish a New York Times bestseller by age 30, have big-venue publishers begging us for a contract, and spend the rest our days churning out a couple books a year while balancing a professional career in the English field. Add an MFA degree in there and you've got what I've often thought my life "should" look like. But, for a field as competitive as ours, it's not reality. I may not publish anywhere beyond no- to low-paying magazines until I'm 60, and that may be a self-publish breakthrough at best. I may try a professional career like teaching and decide I hate it, even after working so hard for it. Life has interruptions, unexpected turns -- in short, it's goddamn messy.

I've matured a bit, thankfully, from my guilt-ridden days of vocational extremism. While I do think that God is active in our lives and has plans for us, I've realized that the idea of a concrete destiny is both absurd and harmful. I think it's easy for religious people (or even non-religious people, like Myers-Briggs fanatics or horoscope followers) to find solace in the concept of a predetermined path, to feel that the direction for our lives is not on our shoulders. I relate, but I disagree now. Though it may give us some comfort to think that it's not all "up to us," I don't believe God would give us the beautiful gift of free will and then impose such a fastidious life map on us.

We have a purpose, but not a destiny.

That may sound depressing and intimidating, but don't get me wrong: I honestly believe, with all my heart, that we each have a purpose, in the form of unique gifts that we are meant to pursue passionately and with generosity. How we pursue those gifts, however, is anyone's guess. It depends on where our interruptions and unexpected turns take us. Hell, I may figure out at age 35 that I can't stand writing and want to be a fencing champion instead (okay, bad example, but it could happen, hypothetically). It's easy to feel shame for those miscalculations, to view them as marks of failure. But those feelings all stem from the idea that success is measured by the smoothness of our journey, by its predictability, by how close we stay to one path.

Self, and Reader, I give you permission, right here and now: do not feel guilty for how messy your life looks, for how imperfect it is. You are not letting anyone down. If tangles, steps backward, and a little (little) debt is what eventually makes you realize that fencing is for you (ha), so be it.

It is this realization that gave me courage to accept enrollment at SCSU. There were so many factors to weigh, so many what-ifs, but I finally sat myself down and came to terms with the fact that mistakes won't kill me. I may love SCSU; I may not. I may want to stay; I may not be able to stay. That's the nice thing about not having a destiny: there's no reason I can't go back to that road not taken.

There will always be a million and one things you can do with your life. The only things you must do is to be good and happy.

Grace and peace to you.


*Writer's Note: Since the writing of this article, my plans at SCSU have changed; thanks to the generosity of the graduate program, I will now be attending SCSU full-time with a graduate assistantship in the Office of International Education.