US

a villanelle

by Eileen Albrizio

 

Once we were us, a family

stuffed tight inside a set of walls

Mom and Dad, four boys and me.

 

Our relatives kept company

in pictures hanging in the halls.

Once we were us, a family.

 

Many days we’d disagree

on things that led to spats and brawls.

Mom and Dad, four boys and me.

 

But always cleaned up the debris.

Patched up our wounds, survived the squalls.

Once we were us, a family.

 

One brother died, and soon we’d see

one more pass on, so fate befalls

Mom and Dad, four boys and me.

 

Another left and that was three.

Then father answered his sons’ calls.

Once we were us, a family.

Mom and Dad, four boys and me.

 

Prose and the Art of Poetry

I have been teaching creative writing for over twenty years, and I am often struck at how many of my students want to be published, but haven't written a full story, even in its initial draft. It's a common phenomenon for beginning writers. The desire to have a completed, published story usurps the desire to actually write it. It's much more fun to think about being published than it is to sit down and do the labor of writing a story. Because, jeepers, writing is hard and frankly not much fun. But why isn't it fun? Shouldn't it be fun? Yes, it should be fun, and it should also be hard, but I will get to that in a minute.

First, here is the sharp reality. If you don't write, you will never be published. It's how it works. You have to write a complete story in order for anyone to want to read it. Even if you write the first draft, it is near impossible that you will be published through the traditional means. And if you want to self-publish, well, and this may go down like too much cold ice cream, you really need to have a polished manuscript that has been written, rewritten, revised, reviewed, revised again, and professionally edited before slapping it up on Amazon. Even though you can easily self-publish without doing all that messy stuff, and even though you might get one or two people to read it, you risk getting some bad reviews and few if any future readers. People are quick to review what they don't like over what they do like.

So, you have to write your story. But how do you start when you have one or all of these mental blocks?

* I have tons of stories floating in my head. I can't seem to pick one.

* I've started writing my novel, but I spend so much time rewriting and perfecting the opening that I can't seem to move forward.

* I'm in the middle of writing four different stories at once.

* My kids/work/spouse/Mom take up too much of my time to write.

Here's the problem with every one of these obstacles. Your goal is too big too soon and takes up too much time. Writing a novel is not only a marathon run, it's a marathon that you have to run before running another marathon, and then you have to climb a mountain, and then swim across a Great Lake, and then... In short, it's a super long process and it's exhausting.

(Just like exhausted runners, writers also need a little help sometimes.)

So, here's my advice. After dinner while the kids are watching Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur on television, head off to your room, or the basement, or the front porch, or the back stoop, and open up a book of poetry and start reading. Don't have a poetry book? Don't know anything about poetry? Don't want to? Hate poetry? Really? You really hate poetry? Think about that while you are thinking of the last time you actually read a poem. Probably high school. 

It's time to change that. You've got that leftover meatloaf in the fridge that will take five minutes to reheat for dinner. A perfect night to drop by the library after work and ask the reference person for some advice on what kinds of poetry you might enjoy. Our local libraries are one of our greatest resources and grossly underused. Please, use it.

(Wethersfield Library, CT)

Some of my favorite poets are:

Billy Collins for a contemporary laugh or satirical smirk.

Mary Oliver for a contemporary reflection of nature.

Robert Frost and William Wordsworth for a classic reflection of nature.

Edgar Allan Poe for a good classic scare and some extraordinary rhyme and rhythm.

Edwin Arlington Robinson for a more terrestrial dark look into the human psyche and an awesome lesson on formal structure.

When reading their poetry, notice how they avoid abstract words and phrases and embrace concrete imagery and language. The use of metaphor and simile abound. ~~ Collins description of the neighbor's dog barking, barking, barking as if an instrument in a Beethoven orchestra. Oliver's swan as an armful of white blossoms. Frost's road bent in the undergrowth. Wordsworth as he wandered lonely as a cloud. Poe's silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain. Robinson's people on the pavement.

Most Anthologized Poems in Recent Years

I  

I would be remiss if I didn't mention my own work. If you want to read a sample of my poetry, check out The Box Under the Bed. It's one of four collections of poetry and short fiction I've published, but the only one available to sample online.

The Box Under the Bed

After reading a bunch of poetry, then pick one of those topics floating around in your head and instead of writing a novel, write a poem, using all five of your senses and those wonderful images and details that you found in those poems you read. Explore and move it around and have fun. Don't worry who will read it. Just enjoy writing it. Keep reading that wonderful poetry and keep writing your own. When you write a poem you like, share it with a friend or you dad (who may also be your friend). It will feel good and you will feel good about writing. And once you enjoy it and feel good about it, then write something longer, a short, short story for example. Nothing too complex, but use those same metaphors and images and sensory details you used in your poetry. 

And THEN, why not, go for it. Tackle that novel you've always wanted to write. Maybe take that short story and flesh it out, add a subplot, a sidekick, some back story. But don't forget that imagery and those metaphors! And I bet you'll find it fun, too! Yes, it's hard, but anything worth anything is hard. And you will discover that your writing will be more vibrant and tangible and dimensional. But maybe best of all, you will finally be able to write those two once unreachable words.

So, that's my itsy bitsy piece of advice to help you move forward with your writing. If you want to write well and enjoy the process more, dive into, or even belly flop into that great big chlorine pool of poetry. It couldn't hurt. Well, maybe a belly flop will sting a little, but it will be fun!

An Agent Agreed to Read My Entire Manuscript. Now What? 

So, an agent reached out to me and suggested I submit the query for my latest novel One Good Kick, a psychological thriller, to her. I did, and it included the first three chapters, as per her instructions. She liked it enough to want to read the whole manuscript. She told me she wouldn't be able to read it until next month, and I said that was fine. 

Fine. I said it was fine. But you know what? It was more than fine. It was wonderful. Even if she doesn't accept it (but I hope she does), she liked the initial chapters enough to want to read more and, for a writer, that brings me monumental joy. 

Now, I wait. Wait, no. Now, I write. I have started blocking out my next novel, which is super hard as I still have One Good Kick on my mind. But that's okay. Because how fortunate am I to have finished my last novel, pitched it to agents (after writing the excruciatingly impossible synopsis and query letter), received numerous rejections, and found one agent who wanted to read the whole thing.

And I am even more thankful to have found an agent for my novel previous to this latest novel. It's called The Windsome Tree. But it wasn't called that until the moments before publication. It was initially called Without Mercy. But after going through the same grueling process as I am going through with One Good Kick, that book actually made it to publication with a sparkling new title! (My third novel written. My first to make it to publication.) That agent retired, and that is why I had to start the process over again. 

 

So, here I am back at the beginning, drafting out a story that has bones, but they are all disconnected and some are only partial bones, and somehow I have to make an entire skeleton out of it. Then I have to add some meat, a heart, lungs to breath, muscles to carry it through, and, of course, flesh. Then, like Frankenstein's monster, I have to make it come alive. And after that, I need to have others help me to erase the scars, fill in the wrinkles, add new scars, create new wrinkles, run, tumble, get back up, climb mountains, and make people want to read it. And then I get the glorious task of breaking it all down into a 300-word synopsis and a one-page query.

How long will that take? Well, my first two novels took up to two years to write and never made it to the "agent wanting to read it" stage. My third novel took about four years to write, then several more years of querying, rewriting, querying some more, rewriting some more, getting rejected, getting an agent, editing and refining, and another year of pitching to editors at publishing houses.

One Good Kick took about four years to write. I came up with the premise while pitching The Windsome Tree to agents. I began drafting out the plot after I got an agent and she was pitching The Windsome Tree out to editors at publishing houses. And when The Windsome Tree was published, I put One Good Kick aside to hustle my previously published book at readings, fairs, book stores, book and author events, libraries, schools, senior centers, at the grocery store, at my family's holiday dinner tables, to my friends, colleagues, associates, strangers on the street, the waiter at our favorite Italian restaurant... Yup, that's what you have to do. 

Then COVID hit, and the events shut down, fairs canceled (even the Big E shut down), stores closed, I avoided frequent trips to the market, no longer talked to strangers, my family and friends, colleagues and associates already bought my book. (Yes, I sold it to family. Is that bad?)

(My mom and me selling our poetry books at the Big E in 2009

 and then me holding my novel The Windsome Tree, posing with Mark Twain at the 2019 Big E.)

So, it was then I picked back up One Good Kick and began writing. Really writing. I couldn't have done that if I hadn't started it while I was in the waiting room with my other novel. Three years later, it's in the hands of an agent willing to read it.

And now I have the great honor to be able to do this all over again. Ahh, the life of a writer. No, really, it's a pretty awesome life and I am grateful for it.

A Double Nonet in a Concrete Form 

Yesterday I published a post about the frustrating and agonizing waiting game when querying agents and the little respect we get as writers. At the end of the post, I shared a poem, but I fear it got overshadowed by the post itself. So, I am publishing it again. It's a double nonet in a concrete form.

A nonet starts with a nine syllable line, then each line that follows is one syllable less than the one before. So, the first line is nine syllables, the next line is eight, then seven, then six, and so on. I decided to make a double nonet, to show the irreversibility of time.  Notice, the poem reads the same way forward as it does backward. I also put it in the concrete shape of an hour glass. That means, not only does the first line have one more syllable than the second, but it has to be visually longer than the second without cheating on the spacing.

For example, the word "I" is one syllable and is spelled with one thin letter. The word "through" is also one syllable, but it's spelled with  seven mostly rounded letters, taking up much more space on the line. Therefore, I had to carefully choose my words to not only make the poem work auditorily, but also visually. And it had to be true to the theme.

Anyway, here it is. I suggest you read this forward, then in reverse from the bottom up to get the full impact of the poem. I hope you enjoy it.

TIME

 

because there’s no way to reverse time

we make mistakes and live with them

can’t slingshot back to fix things

brush the dust off and learn

then make more mistakes

and learn some more

make mistakes

and learn

live

and learn

make mistakes

and learn some more

then make more mistakes

brush the dust off and learn

can’t slingshot back to fix things

we make mistakes and live with them

because there’s no way to reverse time

Is Patience Really a Virtue? 

I sent my latest novel, One Good Kick, a psychological thriller, out to agents about a month ago. I've since received four rejections from the 16 agents I submitted to. Many of the agents said they would respond within four to twelve weeks, but won't give a personal response because they are too busy. Many other agents said they wouldn't respond at all unless interested (because they're too busy), so, if I don't hear back from them within two to six months, assume they aren't interested.

Now, I realize agents are busy. They are inundated with queries every day. But authors like me put in an inordinate amount of work into our novels, and labor tirelessly over our query letters and synopses. We are constantly told to be patient with agents, editors, and the like, because they are all so busy. But they are not patient with us, who have essentially done all the hard work. They take one look at the first sentence of a query or sample and throw it in the trash or the slush pile, then don't respond or send out an automated, generic response that doesn't help us at all.

(Yes, this is an actual rejection email I received.)

Many agents who claim to work with new authors, often won't even look at the work if there isn't some indication in their query that they have been published on some level in a mass marketing kind of way, or they have some kind of fame behind their name.

I've been to many writers' conferences in the past where agents were on a panel to talk about the process and take questions. Eager would-be authors gathered by the hordes to hear their pearls of wisdom and get answers about the overwhelming vagueness of the process. What we got was a bunch of agents telling us all the things writers do that make them look stupid and ignorant, like writing in a query about "my adorable pit bull Fluffy." Or how we disrespect them by misspelling their name or writing "To whom this may concern." They need to be noticed and addressed personally to show we care.

(Connecticut Authors and Publishers Association Conference in Hartford, CT)

The whole onus of patience and caring drops on the shoulders of the writer. But it's the writers who put in the torturous months, if not years (as is my case) of writing and rewriting, editing and rewriting. And those grueling countless moments of trudging through our insecurities, the painstaking, time-consuming research, and the never-ending work toward perfection to make the product that the agent is trying to sell.

The alternative? Self-publish. But now we are even more insecure, because we can't trust our friends and family to let us know that what we've written is actually good enough to publish. And should we publish anyway, we have to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get a good cover, edit the manuscript, and format the manuscript. Even with a professional edit, it's difficult to know if the product is good, because the editor gets paid whether the novel sells or not. An editor who works for an agent has a vested interest in the product because they don't get paid UNLESS it sells.

So, we writers who long to be published authors are screwed no matter how you twist it. And what do we do about it? We write anyway, and continue to slog through the cruel and frightening process, forcing ourselves to keep our dreams alive. The only alternative is to quit and that's not an alternative for those who truly love to write.

Right now, I'm waiting, and I'm not getting any younger because time only works one way. The longer I wait for a response from an agent, the older I get, and the older I get, the closer I get to... well, you know the rest. If only agents would be more thoughtful regarding the predicament of the writer and respond in a timely and personal fashion. I'm not asking you to take me on if you don't like the work. I'm just asking for the same respect from you that you require from me. I don't think that's a lot.

Anyway, here's a poem about time I thought you might like. It's a double nonet in the concrete form. My advice is to read it twice, once forward and again backward (from the bottom up). It's not really related to my post, except in a tangential fashion, but I feel it fits nonetheless.

Here's a little insight about the labor involved in writing a short poem like this that may help indicate the enormity of commitment it takes to write an entire novel:

A nonet starts with a nine syllable line, then each line that follows is one syllable less than the one before. So, the first line is nine syllables, the next line is eight, then seven, then six, and so on. I decided to make a double nonet, to show the irreversibility of time.  Notice, the poem reads the same way forward as it does backward. I also put it in the concrete shape of an hour glass. That means, not only does the first line have one more syllable than the second, but it has to be visually longer than the second without cheating on the spacing.

For example, the word "I" is one syllable and is spelled with one thin letter. The word "through" is also one syllable, but it's spelled with  seven mostly rounded letters, taking up much more space on the line. Therefore, I had to carefully choose my words to not only make the poem work auditorily, but also visually. And it had to be true to the theme.

Anyway, here it is. I hope you enjoy it.

TIME

 

because there’s no way to reverse time

we make mistakes and live with them

can’t slingshot back to fix things

brush the dust off and learn

then make more mistakes

and learn some more

make mistakes

and learn

live

and learn

make mistakes

and learn some more

then make more mistakes

brush the dust off and learn

can’t slingshot back to fix things

we make mistakes and live with them

because there’s no way to reverse time

(Now, read this again from the bottom up.)

Writing Your Memoir

So, I've been teaching creative writing with the Wethersfield Adult Education Department for five years now. When I first began teaching there, I focused on novel writing. I did that for two semesters in a row and found it was too big for a six or eight-week class. Novel writing should be reserved for a full college course, where students get graded and hate the class for at least half the semester. But for adults who just want to have fun, not so much.

So, I decided to teach two different, shorter classes each semester instead of one longer one: short story and poetry. That was a great choice and the students actually had fun! I knew they had fun because many kept coming back to repeat the classes, and that made me feel warm and squishy inside. But the downside was that after a while, the students wanted something different. And that's were memoir writing comes in.

Although I'd never done it before, I decided to teach a memoir writing class in addition to the short story class. I have never written a memoir, but I have read many and I followed my mom through the process of writing her father's story. Still a young teenager, I was living at home at the time and I followed my mom as she interviewed her father, taping their talks on one of those clunky cassette recorders of the 1970s.

My grandfather Armand Magnan grew up in the Hereford Mountain region of Quebec, Canada. His father was a horse trader and a bootlegger during the Prohibition, and nine-year-old Armand was charged with being his assistant. His childhood was grueling and fraught with cruelty. My mother was able to complete his story before he passed away, and I realized the importance of passing on the significant aspects of a person's life in the form of a story.

As for my memoir class, I completed the first of the three-week program last Wednesday, and tonight I head into the second. I found the experience fascinating and exciting. I read aloud the first couple of pages of two highly regarded memoirs to give the class the feel of how to start their story. The memoirs were Lost & Found by Kathryn Shultz and I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy. They both open with coping in the final days of a parent's life, and though the theme in both is similar, they are two completely different stories.

We then discussed the importance of being accurate and not making assumptions or elaborating for effect. We worked on our six-sentence memoir in which we find the heart of our story and write it down in six words. For example, mine was:

Went to prison, taught creative writing.

If I were to write a memoir, I might write about how I came to teach poetry at the York Correctional Institute, CT's maximum-security prison for women, under the direction of best-selling author Wally Lamb. 

Tonight, I am going to read from two memoirs with lighter themes to show you don't have to suffer a tragedy or overcome negative forces in order for your story to be interesting. They are The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson and Stuffed: Adventures of a Restaurant Family by Patricia Volk. The first is about growing up happy in middle America in the 1950s. The second is about Volk's 100-year family history in the food business and growing up in the middle of it in the garment district of NYC. 

Even if you don't think you would like to read memoir, I recommend these selections, as they read more like novels than nonfiction. 

I'm happy I chose this new class to teach and I'm looking forward to tonight's adventure. Thanks for stopping in, everyone, and have a great day!

I'm Back!

Hello! I know it's been a while and I'm sorry about that. I'm not sure why I stopped posting stuff, but it struck me the other day that I have this blogging site so, I should be using it! I have been writing over the last couple of years. Writing a lot, in fact. I've been writing poetry and finishing up my latest novel. The novel is titled One Good Kick, and it's a psychological thriller placed in Hartford, CT, in late 1989. This is the story of Annette Goode, a promising young editor who, after drinking too much at the office holiday party, accidentally shoots a strange man in a parking garage. Here, she makes a fateful choice and leaves the scene without reporting the incident. Despite her initial struggles with her conscience, she finds herself on a tense, winding path of deception that leads to guilt-ridden visions of the man she shot and a chilling spiral of murder and madness. This is a fast-paced, twisty thriller that is sure to satisfy! Currently, the novel is out with agents. No bites yet, but fingers crossed!

One Good Kick is actually my fourth novel written, but only my last novel The Windsome Tree made it to publication. I did work with an agent to get that published, but she since retired and other agents from her agency are either not accepting submissions or they do not work with my genre. So, I'm on the hunt for new representation. I have to say, it's hard, frustrating, and scary. But it's worth the try.

The Windsome Tree takes place in 2014 in the fictional town of Windsome, NC. It's about Mercy Amoretto, a grieving mother of four who lost her youngest child to leukemia. In an attempt to heal, she starts cleaning the house, and in the garage she finds an old rope and a tire. In a fanciful moment, she fastens them together to make a tire swing. Unbeknownst to her, the rope, the tire, and the tree in her yard share a violent history. Once the three are connected, that history is unleashed in the form of two child spirits from decades past. While on the swing, Mercy hears cryptic messages from the spirits and begins to ride the swing obsessively, believing these spirits are key to finding her dead daughter. You can find this on Amazon and B&N, but the Amazon Kindle version has the best free preview. So, check it out!

(This is the original cover from 2018. We've since created a new cover, which I love, but there is something nostalgic about this that I find haunting.)

So, that's basically what I've been up to, besides surviving the world shutting down, keeping a business open, and trying my best to keep up in the writing, publishing, and hocking my books worlds.

I am not good at being consistent with my blogging, so if you have any topics you would like me to address, please drop a note below. I teach creative writing, so I can address a diverse array of topics. I can also talk about other stuff, like cats or cooking (but not cooking cats).

Thank you, everyone. Have a wonderful day, and HAPPY SPRING!