ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE with BETTY RODGERS (BRAVO!)

I say author essay because that's the feature... but, how do you define someone like Betty Rodgers under a one word moniker? You don't and you can't. First and foremost, she is a  filmmaker and an extraordinary one at that. Her passion for her documentary project "Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor" is evidenced by the results her and her husband, author Ken Rodgers, have produced. The trailer alone is at once chilling, captivating, moving, and momentous. It is documentary film at its best. "Bravo!" is currently being prepped for the film festival circuit. Did I mention she's also a world class photographer? Then there's also her work producing and editing the Idaho Writers Update, which if you've been living under a rock, you might want to check out considering two of the country's up and coming writers, Alan Heathcock (VOLT) and Anthony Doerr (Memory Wall), are Boise residents. Well, as they like to say, there must be something in the water out there and I believe it's inspiration, determination, and pure talent. Betty Rodgers has obviously drunk deep and long from the those waters, for she has all three in spades. I am happy to have filmmaker, editor, writer, and photographer Betty Rodgers for this week's Author Essay Feature. 
Enjoy - J. Goertel

 BETTY RODGERS

THE POWER OF ADORATION

A parent can set the tone for how we view individuals.  Mother helped me adore my Auntie Kay by making sure I knew how she had triumphed over the life-long effects of breaking her legs as a child.  (In the early 1900s she was confined in a cast and bed for weeks.) How brave she was for serving in New Guinea as a WAC officer during WWII.  Instead of pointing out any shortcomings, Mother taught me to see the worth in this tall, intelligent, attractive brunette. This woman whose long, graceful fingers nimbly played concert-level classical piano. This woman who frequently engaged in passionate conversation about the cosmos, politics, and philosophy.

And there was my Uncle Harry, Kay’s husband.  This easy-going, handsome, fun-loving man, known as the “Long Tall Texan” although he hailed from Oklahoma, was respected and admired for his strong work ethic, common sense, humor, and cooking skills.  He too served as an officer in the Pacific during WWII.  That’s where the two met and married.  Both of them returned home, raised fine sons, and gave themselves as advocates for male and female veterans through their affiliation with the American Legion.

Mother made certain we attended every special event involving my aunt and uncle, such as Harry’s installation as the California State Commander of the American Legion, Kay’s speeches championing better conditions at veterans’ hospitals and equal rights for female veterans.  In some way, I knew they were fighting for me, too.  Yes, I admired and adored them both.

As the years went by, this background of respect and honor for veterans stayed with me.  When Auntie Kay passed away, Mother helped sort her belongings and showed me her writings about World War II.  From her book, “New Guinea, A Magic Name and A Magic Isle,” some insight into my aunt’s experience upon arrival at the American cemetery in Sapuda:

“I can’t begin to describe the emotions that filled our hearts and eyes, and overflowed onto our cheeks, as we stood there.  We thought of the heartache of the parents and wives of these boys, we thought of the tragedy of their having to die so young, and we thought of the magnificence of their courage and the firmness of their faith and belief in what they were fighting for, in what they gave their lives for; the ones they loved, the flag they loved, the God they worshipped, in two words, THEIR AMERICA!  We swore that we would never betray that faith and belief, or betray their trust in us to preserve the things they loved and died for.”

And on anticipation of returning to American soil:

“We will have…the exaltation of having done our part in winning the greatest war of all times.  However, the greatest gift that we will take back with us is the knowledge of what war is, what it can do, and an appreciation of the great faith in America that inspired the magnificent courage in our boys.  We are determined that their sacrifice will never be repeated by their sons, that what they fought for will be preserved, it will never die or fade—THEIR AMERICA.”

As we know, there have been many wars since, and my cousins did serve during the Vietnam War.  My husband, Ken, also served.  He didn’t talk about it a lot after we met, but one of his best friends told me what a hero he was because of where he served and what he lived through.  I only knew that March 30, 1968, was a day that had imprinted his life forever, but I knew none of the details. 

When we began to attend Khe Sanh Veteran reunions in recent years, I became keenly aware of the stories I heard and of what Ken had experienced, in part because of my aunt and uncle’s example.  Through them all…my aunt and uncle, my mother, my husband…I had learned to pay attention to the significance of history, service, and sacrifice.

This is what led me to a sense of urgency in recording the history of the men in Bravo Company, First Battalion, 26^th Marines...the men with whom Ken served.  As they sat around the tables and reminisced, it reinforced what I instinctively knew…that theirs was also an incredible tale of courage and sacrifice for our country, and that we couldn’t afford to let the Khe Sanh veterans’ experience fade into oblivion. We needed to preserve it for their children and grandchildren, for American history, for mankind.

And so, that seed of adoration instilled in me by my mother, along with the men like Ken and his Bravo Company brothers who lived their story and were willing to tell it, have resulted in our new documentary film, “Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor.”  After viewing the film, a common response is, “I care about these men…I love them.”  Now, after forty-four years, their story is told and their service acknowledged.  It is a testimony to the human spirit.  It is the direct result of the power of adoration.

An avid birder, Betty Rodgers is also a filmmaker and photographer living in Boise, ID, with her husband Ken. Her images are exhibited in homes, businesses, and private collections around the west. She also publishes the Idaho Writer's Update, the state's primary resource for literary information and events.  For recent news of Betty:  http://www.cowboypoetry.com/sincenews04.htm#bkr. 

To follow "Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor":  http://bravotheproject.com/

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE with DONNA HILBERT (The Green Season)

As editor at NEXTV Entertainment's literary blog, I am the fortunate recipient of wonderful essays, interviews, and features from a broad spectrum of talented writers. This week is no exception considering author and poet Donna Hilbert's essay 'Making Poetry, Compost and Soup' landed in my inbox a few days ago. I thoroughly enjoyed this literary soup for the soul and am once again pleased and humbled by the variety and quality of the submissions coming into ALL 'LIT' UP. I look forward to exploring her work, but couldn't help but be struck by this poem right off the bat from her recent collection, The Green Season. Enjoy - J. Goertel


Lesson

A portion of ashes we buried,
the portion remaining to be scattered
sits on a shelf
in my office, the container swathed
in a flannel bag, like the bag
protecting your tuxedo shoes.
How handsome you were in formal clothes!
Strangers often asked if you were someone.
Should they ask for your autograph?
The irreducible things that make up a person--
ashes, bits of tooth and bone--
transform from one noun
into another.
Before your death, Dearheart
I didn't know
that physics and grammar
are the same sad subject:
the transformation of matter,
transforming what matters.


THE GREEN SEASON by Donna Hilbert


AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE:
MAKING POETRY, COMPOST AND SOUP
by Donna Hilbert


I once lived in a house with a big backyard. I planted a garden; I kept a compost pile. I spent hours every day, digging in the dirt with the same joy I felt as a child making mud pies. I took equal pleasure in planting seeds and in pulling up spent plants to make room for the next season’s growth. It seemed that the whole world of nourishment, death and regeneration lay before me. When not digging in my garden, I sat in my office, digging through my life.

I grew tomatoes, basil, peppers, eggplant, parsley, cilantro, rosemary, sage, and lavender. I sliced, sautéed and roasted and dried—transforming my harvest into pastas, curries and soups, then returning the scraps to the compost pile, which I turned and watered every day. Amazing creatures emerged from the pile—caterpillars fat with the promise of flight, Japanese Beetles as green as emerald, the Earth Child, or potato bug, which looked to me like an extra-terrestrial’s abandoned baby.

Now, I live at the beach and have no garden of my own, but I still feel connected to the days of turning the soil when I cook, particularly when I make soup. I make soup from what I have on hand—whatever is in the refrigerator by chance, and also from what’s there by design, bought at Farmer’s Market the Sunday before with an eye to the pot of soup come Tuesday—a head of cabbage, a turnip or two. Piquant vegetables make for a tasty broth. I add fresh herbs, a bunch of basil, perhaps cilantro or Italian parsley, the juice of one lemon.

I enjoy the peeling, chopping, squeezing, and slicing. I love the comfort and security afforded by a pot of soup simmering the afternoon away on the stove’s back burner. It’s like money in the bank, back in the era when money in the bank drew interest. After a few hours, I will add the rinds from a hunk of Parmesan cheese and a few pieces of stale sourdough bread to give the soup some heft and ballast. There is a smug pleasure in not being wasteful.

Perhaps it is no accident that I routinely make soup on Tuesdays, the day of the week my evening poetry workshop meets at my house. If I make soup, I will have a simple late supper waiting on the stove to share with my beloved after my students have left for home. The more I practice the life of poetry, the more convinced I am that writing poetry is like keeping a garden, with its composting, planting, harvesting—the seasons’ continual revision of life and death.

And in the same way that I enjoy peeling carrots, chunking potatoes, quartering tomatoes, I like the feel of the poem taking shape in my hand: the weight and balance of the pen, the whiteness of the paper, the arc the line of ink makes moving words across the page. Later, once I have two-fingered the poem into the computer, I like the neat rows of typeface appearing on the screen. I love making something appear from the void, the comfort of the work in progress, the infinite satisfaction of revision.

And, as in the making of compost, the making of soup, I make the poem from what I have on hand: leftovers from childhood—fears, loves, hates, tastes, smells, injustices and moments of rapture, things imperfectly understood, nightmares and lost ambitions. To this I add what has been picked up along the way—the road kill and sea glass of life—betrayals, disappointments, joy, death, images and incidents from travel, snatches of conversation, the way a certain bird takes flight. Observations written on matchbook covers and cocktail napkins that end up keeping company with the “purse candy” at the bottom of my bag—nuggets that I will be happy to find when I need a little something to suck on.

Practicing a life in poetry is like keeping a compost pile. All the shavings and leavings of life and art go into it—the dark bruised part of one poem, the sprouting eye from another, given time enough and attention, enough turning over and over, the decomposition will bring forth the new poem, the new soup, and the pleasure of making begins again.


Donna Hilbert writes and teaches private workshops from her home in Long Beach, California. Her latest book, The Green Season, World Parade Books, a collection of poems, stories and essays, is now available in an expanded second edition. Ms. Hilbert appears in and her poetry is the text of the documentary “Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story.” Poems in Italian can be found in Bloc notes 59 and in French in La page blanche, in both cases, translated by Mariacristina Natalia Bertoli. New work is in recent or forthcoming issues of 5AM, PEARL, and Poets & Artists. She is at work on a new poetry collection, The Congress of Luminous Bodies, from Aortic Books later this year. Learn more at www.donnahilbert.com

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE with Ellen Wade Beals (Solace in So Many Words)

The Windy City continues to amaze me and make my job as editor a whole lot easier. Chicagoland authors Ben Tanzer and Patricia Ann McNair have already done ALL 'LIT' UP a turn via the Lost Weekend 6-Pack segment and the My Dinner With... segment. No wonder AWP held its convention there this year. Chi-town comes through again this week with author/editor/poet Ellen Wade Beals. Having just released my own debut poetry collection this past week, I was super psyched to get Ellen's essay and discover it was about... drum roll followed by resounding gong crash... poetry. You can call it synchronicity or you can call it kismet, but I call it insightful and spot-on writing. Enjoy ~ J. Goertel


Trained as a journalist, Ellen Wade Beals writes poetry and prose. Her work has appeared in literary magazines (such as After Hours, Falling Star, Off Channel, Eclipse, Hip Mama, Eclectic Literature and The Stony Thursday Book (Ireland), in anthologies (such as Kiss Me Goodnight and Take Two -- They're Small), and on the web (Google her).

In 1999, her short story, "Picking," was awarded Willow Springs fiction prize and she was named one of Chicago’s emerging poets by The Poetry Center. Her poem “Between the Sheets” is in the textbook Everything’s a Text (between Sherman Alexie and Billy Collins). Most recently, Ellen started Weighed Words LLC ands its first title is Solace in So Many Words, which Ellen edited, came out in May 2011.

In Service of Poetry
by Ellen Wade Beals

Regardless of whether I am a good poet, I want to be good for Poetry, and that means first recognizing that the artist is subservient to the art. I try to take this service seriously. Writing poetry and getting it published are not enough.

For one thing, I want to celebrate good poetry and share it, and that means reciting others’ work when I have the chance. At Books on Vernon in Glencoe, IL, I shared Witslawa Szymborska’s “In Praise of My Sister,” and at the Guild Complex in Chicago, I read Philip Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” and Robert Hayden’s “Those Winter Sundays.” At Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, it was Connie Voisine’s “Dangerous for Girls” and Stan Rice’s “Nearly Dissolving” that I felt compelled to read. The moment I set eyes on Stan Rice’s poem, I had the urge to recite it, and when I first came across Connie Voisine’s poem, I had to look her up and write her a fan email.

When I find something extraordinary, I feel a duty to bring attention to it, like the glorious long poem titled “The Road to Emmaus” by Spencer Reece in the October 2011 issue of Poetry magazine. I have talked it up to anyone who would listen and declared my admiration in a post on Poetry’s Facebook wall. Since composing a blog does not come easily to me, instead, I often use the space on my website to promote other writers. Some time ago, the obit for Patrick Galvin in the Poetry Ireland Newsletter led me to discover his wonderful work. So I told my web visitors about him because I think readers would really dig his New and Collected Poems.

I want to be an appreciative reader. Once, I reached out to compliment a writer on what I thought was a gutsy experimental piece in a university lit journal. My email began, “I am sure you have been hearing how great your poem was,” and she wrote back that she hadn’t heard from anyone but me. How sad to be a writer and never know whether the final step in your art has been completed. Without a reader, our writing is just words on a page.

I try to drop a positive email or note or comment to the writer. If I don’t particularly like a piece, I can still give the author props (even just an atta-boy or atta-girl) for seeing it into print. “Likes” on Facebook or Amazon pages are easy shows of support and non-committal nods to the achievement. I have made it my rule never to review something I haven’t read or to feel there is any quid pro quo at work. After all, I want to be an ambassador to literature, not a shill. My policy is that if I don’t like something, I don’t comment, but I do try to remember to say something nice when I do have a compliment. In short, I am quicker to commend and less likely to disparage.

Overly earnest though it may sound, I aspire to be generous and kind. People have been generous and kind to me, helping me out big time. A question frequently asked of me at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Annual Conference and Bookfair was: “How did you get poems by Philip Levine in Solace in So Many Words?” The answer is that I wrote him a letter. Mind you, this book was five years in the making so when I approached him, he was not yet the U. S. Poet Laureate, but he was still Philip Levine. He was as accessible as his poetry. If you read the table of contents for Solace in So Many Words, you’ll see several other well-known names, and these writers also were generous and kind. For this I am forever grateful because it meant the anthology I assembled had a chance of being a great little book.

I mention Philip Levine because I was able to meet him at the recent AWP Conference. I gushed. To shake his hand was a thrill, and he remembered me and Solace in So Many Words and our dealings, which, I will dish, included a bottle of liquor (just what type of liquor I will keep to myself). It was pretty spectacular to think the U.S. Poet Laureate and I had done business.

Speaking of the AWP Conference, I would bet that among the nine thousand or so writers in attendance, there were diverse opinions on all aspects of our art. But I am pretty certain I know the one answer almost every writer has to the question: what is your least favorite aspect of writing? I’d lay down money that almost every one would answer “self-promotion.” Yes, we all hate it.

Promotion is a necessary evil in the publishing words. Especially in today’s book biz, it is left to the writer to do it. So I want to help my fellow writers and build a community by going to their events, reading their books and getting their names out there.

To me working to promote Poetry makes perfect sense. After all, how can we expect to be supported by the arts if we are not supporters of the arts?


SOLACE IN SO MANY WORDS

“Each entry feels fresh, as it offers another angle on finding a way to remain intact through life’s complexity.” — Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul

“The diverse bedfellows who appear here prove artful words can be a balm for pain, one’s own or the wider world’s.” — Susan K. Perry, Creativity Blogger for PsychologyToday.com, author of Writing in Flow

A mixed-genre anthology of smart literary writing by 52 contributors from 15 states, Solace in So Many Words includes poetry by Philip Levine, Antler and Ellen Bass, fiction by T. C. Boyle, Joe Meno and Joan Corwin and essays by Paula W. Peterson, Patty Somlo, and Michael Constantine McConnell as well as stellar work by writers who are now less known but won’t be for long. How do you find comfort when the world around you crumbles? All the thoughtful work here relates to this timely and timeless theme. The website is: http:www.solaceinabook.com

For more information on Ellen Wade Beals and Solace in So Many Words, please feel free to visit the links below:

SOLACE IN A BOOK

SOLACE IN SO MANY WORDS (Press Release)

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE with IMOGEN ROBERTSON (Island of Bones)

British author Imogen Robertson's meteoric rise since she won the Telegraph's 'First thousand words of a novel' competition in 2007 is nothing short of astonishing. Since then she has gone on to publish three bestselling novels - Instruments of Darkness, Anatomy of Murder, and her latest, Island of Bones. As Barry Forshaw of The Independent remarks in his review,"... what makes such books as Island of Bones so unusual is their audacious mix of a cultural gloss and uncomplicated, straight-ahead storytelling. The multi-layered nuance of Peter Ackroyd and the buttonholing narrative grasp of Stephen King are stirred into the mix." I feel privileged to have Imogen for this week's Author Essay Feature. ~ J. Goertel


Imogen Robertson grew up in Darlington, studied Russian and German at Cambridge and now lives in London. She directed for film, TV and radio before becoming a full-time author. Imogen won the Telegraph’s ‘First thousand words of a novel’ competition in 2007 with the opening of Instruments of Darkness, her first novel. Her second novel featuring the detective duo of Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther, Anatomy of Murder, was published in the USA by Pamala Dorman Books in February 2012, and the third in the series Island of Bones also comes out in the states later this year.

TALKING NUMBERS: A THOUSAND WORDS
by Imogen Robertson

Any writer is a product of circumstance. Your family, your education, your relationships, your times; they all make you who you are, and therefore what you write and how you approach writing it. That said, sometimes you can look back and see a couple of key moments, key events, that turned you from a person who reads and likes the idea of writing into a working novelist. For me there were three and they involved a poem, a competition, and a group of talking numbers.

The poem first. It is The Mile High Club and was written by Neil Rollinson. He often writes graphically about sex, but he also writes tender, elegant, moving poems. When the poem was published in the Times Literary Supplement in 2001, I was blown away by it, but I lost my copy, snipped from the magazine while I was splitting up with my boyfriend, and dividing our possessions. Its loss haunted me and I began to look for it online. Using a few half-remembered lines I found Neil’s website, though not the poem, and emailed to ask if he was the author and if so where I could get the poem. He was friendly and flattered, and suggested a number of other modern poetry collections I might enjoy. (At that time Eliot was about the most modern poet I had read).

One thing lead to another. The poetry bug bit me hard and I started going to a workshop with the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden in a strip lit classroom in North London. I still go every week. You might not think that a poetry class is the best way to learn to write Historical Crime Novels, but you’d be wrong. The crucial habits of attention to detail, of criticising one’s own work constructively, making each word count that I learn there have stood me in very good stead. The poets in the group are brilliant, smart and serious about craft. I honestly don’t think I would have ever had a novel published if I hadn’t spent that half an hour on the internet ten years ago trying to track down a poem that had moved me.

Now for the talking numbers. After graduation I worked for many years for a small but perfectly TV production company called Open Mind. I started by making the tea and ended up directing for them. They say never work with children or animals, but as it was a children’s TV company, I hardly did anything else. It’s tough to write prose when you come home every evening exhausted and covered in glitter, but when I became freelance I suddenly had time on my hands, years of training in story telling and the habit of hard work so I started to write the novel that became Instruments of Darkness. I got to about thirty thousand words then discovered they just weren’t that good. I’d have to start again. I sighed, very deeply, and put them in a drawer.

Then the talking numbers arrived. Open Mind were asked to produce a series called Numberjacks and asked me to direct half of the programmes of the first series. Now the only way to get me to save money is to make sure I am too busy to spend any. Directing a bunch of TV programmes that involve computer animation mixed with real world action on a tight budget and an even tighter schedule is a really, really good way of doing that. The bank balance started to look more healthy than it had done in years.

Bring on the competition. I had been swapping chunks of prose with two friends, both journalists, and while I was preparing scripts for filming and occasionally hallucinating numbers speaking to me, one of them, Rachel, emailed us to say had we spotted the ‘First thousand words of a novel’ competition in the Daily Telegraph. She thought we should make a pact to enter it. A thousand words isn’t much, about the length of this piece, so even while wondering about how to film a naughty spoon running away with someone’s shoes, I thought I could take the time to restart Instruments and enter the competition.

Do you see how it is coming together now? I sent off my entry and went back to filming confused looking children in the park. I was just stumbling towards the end of the project when I got the news that my entry was one of the five winners. There was some dancing round the living room table that day. Our prize was lunch with the judges, and a very nice lunch it was too at La Poule au Pot in Chelsea. At one point Louise Doughty, her book on how to write a novel is fantastic by the way, said: ‘Imogen, you’ll find that when you are a published novelist…’ I don’t think I even heard the rest of the sentence. That assumption she had just made; that I could do it, that I would have a book published suddenly made the idea of writing for a living seem, well, plausible. I decided not to look for any more work in TV and just write until the money ran out. It was not a sensible decision, and I would never have dared to do it if I had anyone financially dependent on me, but I saw the chance and took it. Four months later a friend from my poetry group recommended an agent who loved the book, and just at the moment I was loosing hope of getting a deal an editor at Headline read the novel, agreed with my agent and I was offered a two-book deal. My parents cried when I told them, and my best friend took me out to drink champagne by Tower Bridge on the Thames. Every time I walk along that stretch of river now I offer up my thanks to all my friends and family of course, but particularly to a poem, a competition and a bunch of animated numbers.



Instruments of Darkness by Imogen Robertson


For more information on Imogen Robertson and her work, feel free to visit here.

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE: KENNETH RODGERS - A Hell of a Story

Ken Rodgers - poet, teacher, writer, filmmaker, and friend - dropped this week's feature essay into my email inbox over the weekend and I have had a hard time holding off posting it, trying in vain to wait for the regular Wednesday post date. But, it's just too good to wait any longer and Tuesday night seems close enough anyhow. In his essay, Ken tells just one of a multitude of stories that make up the many different facets of his life, which you can glimpse at kennethrodgers.com. For now, though, please enjoy "a hell of a story" from Ken Rodgers here at All 'LIT' UP. ~ J. Goertel


Ken Rodgers lives and writes in Boise, Idaho. His short stories and poems have appeared in a number of venues. He writes two blogs and is in the middle of creating, along with his wife, Betty, a feature length documentary film about his company of Marines at the Siege of Khe Sanh. See more about the film, Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor at www.bravotheproject.com. You can find out more about Ken at www.kennethrodgers.com.

A Hell of a Story
by Ken Rodgers

I moved from one porthole to the other checking out the rough terrain as the big chopper ferried me and a bunch of body bags from Khe Sanh to Dong Ha. The chopper crew chief barked at me again and again to sit down, but I knew what happened to men who sat down in air ships. Bullets from the ground ripped through the hulls and shattered bones, blasted livers, heart, kidneys. I hot-footed here, then there, moved again and again, my heart on overdrive.

When we finally landed at Dong Ha, I exited the rear of the helicopter and stared back at Khe Sanh. After seventy-two days under siege there, I shook my head and thought, now that's one hell of a story.

In Dong Ha, and then Phu Bai, and then Danang and on to Okinawa, that thought rode me. A hell of a story. And after landing in Tucson and being picked up by my parents and my best friend and his fiancé, I couldn't wait to start telling my tale.

We went to a Mexican food restaurant and after I ordered tacos and a beer, I began to describe the raw, red-flesh metaphors of my war. As I jabbered and jumped up and gestured with my hands, I looked at them all sitting around the table digging into their green chili enchiladas and beef and bean burritos. They wouldn't look at me, or maybe they couldn't look at me.

At the time, I thought, they don't want to hear this. I remember asking myself what I'd done wrong, what we'd done wrong in Khe Sanh. Today I know that the problem wasn't me, or the war; the problem was that they couldn't understand.

Looking at my father's balding pate and my mother's fake strawberry blond hair as mariachi music played in the background, thinking what I knew about the absolute savagery that we all...we all...are capable of, and to have them not respond settled on my shoulders like a heavy coat of chain mail Norman warriors wore a thousand years before.

They don't care, I thought.

I recall going to a party in late 1968 in San Diego with a couple of Marine buddies. The party was mostly young people not associated with the military. On the way there, one of my Jarhead pals said, "Don't talk about the war, it bums people out." But I didn't pay any attention to him and marched into the crowded, smoky place with Hendrix' rendition of "All Along the Watch Tower," and the Stones screaming "Street Fighting Man," and the cheap red wine and the wide bell-bottomed trousers of the long-haired men and women, me yanking on tie-dyed sleeves begging people to listen to me about what I saw...What I Saw. But they were more interested in sex and getting loaded and talking about stopping the war and politics and sex and getting loaded.

I started keeping my story to myself. Even among my Marine Corps comrades, I kept my memories close. Once I walked into the admin office at the Marine Barracks at 32nd Street Naval Station in San Diego and saw a man who lived in the same bunker with me for two months during the siege. He looked at me, I looked at him and said, "Hello, Horne," and he said, "Hello, Rodgers," and for the next year we never said a word to each other about our common experience. I haven't seen him since.

During one fifteen-year period in the seventies and eighties, I was repeatedly told by World War II veterans things like, "You guys couldn't fight your way out of a wet paper bag." Or, "You lost the only war we've ever lost." I knew, in my war, we hadn't lost anything but our youth and in some cases limbs and lives, but how could I tell someone that? I didn't know how. The verbal spankings from a generation of warriors that I so admired for what they had accomplished at Guadalcanal and Tarawa and Iwo burned like flashes of gunpowder.

The way a story gets recorded creates the way a story is perceived. Could I tell the story so it truthfully rendered the way I remembered it? Right then, I didn't think so, so I told myself, "Shut your trap." Yet though I made both conscious and unconscious decisions to keep the story mum, my story of my war was stuffed back in my throat like a grenade and it wanted out. It wanted to explode and blow reticence to smithereens.

In the nineties I took up creative writing. First came poetry, then I wrote a novel about my war, a novel that still sits in my desk drawer, incomplete. I composed short stories and essays, some of which were published, but none of it seemed right. The story seemed unfinished, its complexities left undiscovered.

In 2009, my wife Betty and I attended a reunion of Khe Sanh Veterans in Denver and a lot of men from Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines—my company of Marines—attended. We sat around trading war stories, many of which I had never heard; bloody sandbags and severed limbs, defying enemy fire to carry a wounded Marine to safety , pranks around the bunkers and fighting holes, dead bodies scattered in the enemy trenches.

Betty and I discussed what we were hearing. Though the stories of war are as old as humanity, every story we heard seemed unique in such a way that you could read the memories, the experiences on each man's face. It made my heart thump and my imagination dredged up scenes of red mud, and M-16 rifles, the constant incoming that drove us all facedown into our trenches for hours, for entire nights. Each rendering of experience was unique in the way each man had responded by living the years during and between the events of the siege and the telling around those tables in Denver some forty-one years later.

While I was shooting the breeze with my old comrades, Betty went to our Skipper, the man who led Bravo Company during the siege, Lieutenant Colonel Kenneth Pipes USMC Retired, and asked him if anyone had ever told the story. When he said, "No," she asked him if we could tell it, and he gave his stamp of approval.

On the way home from Denver, Betty advised me we should make a documentary film about Bravo Company. I suspect I laughed at that. A film. I barely operate a point-and-shoot camera, but yet, the notion fetched me, and we talked and planned and dreamed and started writing synopses and treatments. If we knew what we know now, we probably wouldn't have taken on this monumental task. But what we didn't know might have been the draw, too. The unknown, the adventure of new craft, new medium, a new vehicle to tell the story that I knew needed telling since that day in Dong Ha when I looked back at the Annamite Mountains in April 1968. A hell of a story.

The Marine Corps Heritage Foundation gave us a start-up grant which was basically enough money for us to, figuratively speaking, hang ourselves, but “onward” was our motto. During 2010 we travelled from Idaho to San Antonio, Texas, back to Idaho, then on to Washington, DC, back to Idaho. We traveled by car and plane. We interviewed 15 survivors of the siege. We spent three weeks in the National Archives and at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia researching, looking for old film, photos, audio recordings, all from the winter and early spring of 1968, all from Khe Sanh. We hired a local Idaho camera operator named Mark Spear and flew him to San Antonio. We filmed interviews ourselves, we hired professionals to film interviews on our road trip. As we drove from Indiana to Springfield, Illinois, Brian Crowdson agreed to work for us for a day. In Omaha, Nebraska, Jesse Hassler shot our session. Meanwhile, the guys in the film were sending photos of themselves, of the combat base; they were sending old audio tapes actually recorded during the siege in 1968.

We had a lot of fabulous volunteer help with fundraising, with promotion. Family and friends, believers in our project, believers in us, chipped in to help fund the making of the film.

A Vietnam veteran with forty years experience in film, John Nutt, contacted Betty and me and offered to edit Bravo! He took our raw material and created art out of war and mayhem. George Lucas' Skywalker Sound graciously let us mix the film at their Marin County facility. Four-time Oscar winner Mark Berger orchestrated the final sound mix.

The movie captures history, it is a study in PTSD and psychology, it is a memoir of war, it is poetic, like rhythmic verse. It speaks on multiple levels in multiple voices. It is funny, sad, loud and profound.

And here we are in film festival mode on the brink of distribution.

The story of Bravo Company, 1st Battalion, 26th Marines has now been told. The experience and the future make a heady present, as if one is leaping off of a bridge, hoping that when he hits bottom, he eases into the depths of happiness. It's a hell of a story. But there are no guarantees. So we soldier on. Or better yet, we Marine on.


The trailer for Bravo! Common Men, Uncommon Valor can be viewed here.

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE: ANNE LEIGH PARRISH - A Writer's Life

I have always felt that writing and music are and have always been kindred languages. Writing is about creating a rhythm for the reader. My favorite novels share the same shelf space with my favorite records and that's no coincidence. When I saw that Anne Leigh Parrish's essay mentioned piano playing, Chopin, and rhythm, I knew I had tapped a kindred spirit for this week's Author Essay Feature. Enjoy - J. Goertel


Anne Leigh Parrish’s story collection, All The Roads That Lead From Home, was published in September 2011 by Press 53. More of her work may be found in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Clackamas Literary Review, American Short Fiction, The Pinch, Eclectica Magazine, PANK, Bluestem, Storyglossia, Knee-Jerk, and r.kv.r.y., among other publications. To learn more, visit her website at www.anneleighparrish.com.

A Writer's Life
by Anne Leigh Parrish

It began as a love of poetry, and the beauty of language itself. As a child I was exposed to the best of the nineteenth century poets, because that was my father's field. While Wordsworth was his focus, he drew my attention to Emily Dickinson, thinking I might find her a bit more accessible. The mind is wider than the sky, she said. I agreed.

I also loved classical music. On the piano I learned to play Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin. The latter two had a particular influence on how I saw first a sentence, then a paragraph, then a sequence of scenes. There was an inherent rhythm in words, and to find it you had to write as much with your ear as with your heart.

And so my early attempts were lyrical, to be sure, but otherwise flat. In retrospect, they had an airless quality, like being in a completely closed room. Language is supposed to give us the world, not shut it out. I was doing something wrong.

I moved from language to characters. I became obsessed with the logic of psychology and motivation. People had to make sense, even when they behaved irrationally or in desperation. You had to be able to line them up and know what they were going to do next. The trouble was one of predictability. My readers often said they could see the ending a mile away. I added an element of surprise, something impossible to foresee. What I was told then was that resolutions that appear suddenly, out of the blue, are just as bad.

During the long, dark period that followed my first publication – and make no mistake, I was completely thrilled, but frustrated that success did not soon repeat itself – I tried to look on the bright side of being a writer. I compared myself to other artists. Pity the frustrated actress, I thought, who needs a stage, a director, and an audience to find her bliss. Or singers, dancers, even painters had it worse because they needed a large space in which to work. Writers need a table, a pad of paper, and a pen. My world, by comparison, seemed small and very easy to contain. I admit that this notion comforted me, as I struggled on.

Then it came, my revelation. I needed to focus not on rhythm, or psychology, or surprise endings, but on story. On what precedes and what follows the moment when the reader's understanding changes. I won't say this was easy, but it was a clear goal, and one I pushed myself relentlessly towards.

As I published and won awards, my emphasis continued to evolve. I addressed women's issues – motherhood, in particular, and also physical abuse. How do people get themselves out of bad situations, I wondered. What stories do they need to tell themselves to find freedom?

Most recently I've turned to narrative voice, bringing the inner lives of two characters into the same time and place, if only for a moment, then sending them on their separate paths once more. This requires an omniscient perspective, obviously. I don't see a lot of writers using this vantage point these days, which intrigues me. I like being able to drop down in the mind of any character. I think it makes for a richer story.

I don't know what's going to grab me and pull me to the next phase or milestone, only that I owe my readers what I always have – to lift them off from reality, and startle them into recognition.

Anne Leigh Parrish's story collection, All The Roads That Lead From Home, is available here.

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE: TAMARA LINSE - How I Got My Dream Agent

Tamara Linse lives in Wyoming, where she writes short stories and novels. To support her writing habit, she also edits, freelances, and occasionally teaches. Her new novel is about love, loss, triumph, and socks. Well, not socks exactly. Her website is www.tamaralinse.com.

How I Got My Dream Agent, Part 1

I am so honored to have the lovely Rachel Stout (http://www.dystel.com/staff-e-mail/) at Goderich Literary Management (http://www.dystel.com/) as my agent. Getting here has been a long and winding road, full of long-dark-teatime-of-the-soul moments. But if you know anything about publishing or are a writer yourself, you knew that already.

So, because it’s so long, I've broken down into two parts. In part 1, I’ll tell the story of how it happened, and in part 2 I’ll try to pinpoint the things that made a difference in my search. So, without further delay...

Once upon a time, way back in 1999, I started writing my first novel. It was the summer between graduating with my undergraduate in English and starting grad school. After timidly taking my first writer’s workshop, I had convinced myself that maybe, just maybe, I had it in me to write one.

This first novel, Earth’s Imagined Corners, is women’s fiction set in 1885 Iowa and Kansas. It’s the story of Sara, whose father tries to marry her off to his younger partner ~ a grasping and coercive man ~ only she elopes with a kind man, James, whom she just met and who, though she doesn’t know it, just got out of prison. It’s based on the lives of my great grandparents. We’ll call this Novel #1.

It took me six years, until 2005, to write this first draft. I would write furiously for two weeks, a month, and then life would get in the way or I’d come to a hard part. Then I’d put it aside. Once I had a complete draft, I got some friends to read it, and then I revised and revised until I didn’t know what else to do.

I crafted a query and started sending Novel #1 out in November of 2005. In a testament to optimism over stark reality, I sent it out to almost a 130 agents, plus about 20 small presses, with minimal response. By minimal, I mean only one request for a full and maybe a couple of requests for partials. I know now that my query letter wasn’t that good and that the first pages of the novel had red flags ~ switches in points of view, boring scenes, an unlikable character, and other things. One very kind agent in Canada requested a full and wanted to take me on, but her partners didn’t agree. She asked for an exclusive too ~ so long months of waiting. I finally gave up on this book in 2007, but you’ll be happy to know later in this narrative its gets retrieved from the bowels to which it was banished.

In the meantime, I’d moved on with writing. I’d also been writing short stories, which really really helped me with craft. Then, in August of 2005 I started a second novel, the one that got me signed with the agency. It’s called Deep Down Things. Set in present-day Loveland, Colorado, it’s about a naive young woman Maggie who falls in love with an idealistic writer named Jackdaw. She helps him write a book, and they get pregnant and then get married. However, because Jackdaw is so idealistic, he doesn’t respect her because of it. Then they have a baby boy named Jes who has spina bifida, a severe birth defect. Maggie tries to save her marriage and her baby. It was inspired by something a friend went through. Let’s call this Novel #2.

I finished the first draft in March of 2007, so a year and a half. I had a great deadline ~ I wanted to do a mentorship on it at the Tin House Writers Conference, so a lot of it was written in the early months of 2007. I don’t know how but I landed a great mentorship there with an editor at a big New York publishing house. She was so kind. I have to say, at that time, the manuscript was in sort of a mess ~ first person in four points of view and also two different time frames going concurrently ~ but she pointed out what was working on a large scale and on a small scale and what could be changed. “Do more of this ~ characters not just in the moment but also reflecting on what it means,” she said. “Even though you’re in first person, it has to be a little more toward third person. Less asides.”

I wrote and revised. I kept the four points of view but made the narrative linear. I made sure each of the characters had his or her own arc and distinct voice. Because of my initial structure, I had the beginning and the end written but not the middle. I took the book to a couple of more conferences and got more advice. I revised. I made connections with editors and agents and writers. I went to the Algonkian Writers Conference (http://algonkianconferences.com/), which is all about figuring out publishing from an agent’s and editor’s point of view and looking professional and honing your pitch. Heck, it’s about basic things, too, like making sure you know what genre you’re in and you’re sticking to those conventions. Michael, who leads that conference, gave the name of a kick-ass freelance editor who used to be an in-house editor, and she went through the novel again and gave me the full editorial treatment. I urged her not to spare my feelings ~ tell me what’s working and what’s not. She did such a great job, and I paid her a lot of money but not as much as she deserved. (Many things in this process, like conferences, cost a lot of money.) I revised and revised, including changing the title (it was called Loveland) and the ending.

In March of 2009, I started sending my query out to agents. I started with top agents and agents who represented things similar to what I write. I immediately got requests for partials and for fulls, but then they all came back with “You write really well, but fiction is a tough market right now.” I received invitations to submit my next project. I kept submitting, ten to twenty agents at a time, every month or two. I kept my ear to the ground and submitted to newly established agents and agencies. I also followed the great advice of submitting to new agents at established agencies ~ I have a subscription to Publishers Marketplace, so I scanned that every day and collected names and submitted to them.

One of those new agents was an agent at Dystel & Goderich. I submitted to the agent on January 8, 2010. She requested a full on January 14. Then, the evening of Friday, February 19, I got this fabulous long email from her. I read along and she said all these wonderful things about it and I kept reading, waiting for the “but …” The but never came. She suggested some changes and said she’d love to see it again. Over the weekend, I addressed all her changes and sent it back to her on Monday. As she reviewed it, we exchanged friendly emails about other things, at her initiation. She took another look at the manuscript and then had some other agents take a look, but then on March 25 she rejected it! I had started to become convinced that she was The One, and it was kind of heart-breaking. She was so encouraging and wonderful in her rejection email. But I understood why she had done it ~ as everyone was saying, it’s a hard market for fiction right now, especially literary fiction. I sent her an email saying that I’d much appreciated her enthusiasm and I understood. That was that ~ so I thought.

Then in late May, the agent emailed me to say that she’d come across a story of mine that was recently published and that she really liked my writing. This begins a great series of emails about what we were reading and about cowboys and the West and her being from Australia, once again at her initiation. I really enjoyed our conversations, and of course it was balm to my craven writer soul, but I didn’t really think that anything would come of it. Then, she emailed that she’d been talking to the primary agents in the agency, Jane and Miriam, and they’d read my website and liked my voice. Would I send the full again? Of course I would! Throughout this process, the agent kept me updated with small emails saying they hadn’t forgotten about me. She got back to me when she said she would.

Then, on July 15, the agent emailed me to say that nothing was definite but that they might have some very positive news for me. AACCKKK!! But, you know what, at this point, I really wasn’t believing it. I was so hoping, but I didn’t think it would happen. Then, the agent called and offered representation! I accepted of course, after emailing the other agents who had partials and fulls. I couldn’t have be more thrilled and honored to be part of Dystel & Goderich.

Do you think the story ended there? Nope. It never does. The agent was wonderful, and I went through several rounds of edits with her. Unfortunately, her father was really sick, so she quit the agent business. The agency very graciously kept me on, and I got another agent within the agency. I ended up dropping Deep Down Things (Novel #2) in favor of Earth’s Imagined Corners (Novel #1), which I totally rewrote in the first five months of 2011, keeping only the skeleton plot and tossing all the actual prose. But then, as things happen, this agent moved on to greener pastures. Once again, D&G very graciously kept me on, and now my agent is Rachel Stout. I’m so stoked because she and I have very similar taste in books, and I can’t wait to get her feedback. We chose to stay with Novel #1 instead of switching back, as I think this one is the more commercial of the two. She’ll be getting back to me with edits any day now, and soon hopefully we’ll be submitting to publishers.

And I’m sure the road doesn’t end here. I’m just thankful to be where I am, and I keep putting pen to paper. I’m looking down the road, working on an exciting new project, thankful for all my good fortune and all the great friends I’ve met along the way. Friends like James Goertel. Thanks, James!


How I Got My Dream Agent, Part 2

In Part 2, I wanted to talk about what I feel made the difference in my search for an agent. Many of these are things that people have been saying for ages, but I have also found them to be true. Please take them with a grain of salt ~ these are things that helped me. I hope these help others.

In General

Not one big thing. In my experience, it wasn’t one big thing that got me an agent but, instead, a whole bunch of small things. This means, in practical terms, that we just need to keep trying different things, keep doing research and brainstorming, keep learning, keep putting it out there, keep bouncing back. Boy, do I wish there was just one big thing!

Perseverance. The number one thing, I think, is perseverance, perseverance, perseverance. Sheer pigheadedness. I mean, we're ambitious, right? That's why we're still here. Maybe it’s just my take on the world, but a large portion of my success (in anything) has come from just being there, showing up again and again, keep putting it out there, finding new solutions or work-arounds. I mean, it took me eleven years! And, while getting an agent is a milestone, I know that it’s just another beginning.

Patience. Sort of a corollary to the last item. The publishing industry is notoriously slow. It all takes lots of time. The more ways you can find to make yourself patient, the better. It always helps me to have a number of irons in the fire. That way, when I get rejected, I have other things to look forward to. It’s all part of my Haystack Theory of Publishing(http://tamara-linse.blogspot.com/2010/03/haystack-theory-of-publishing.html). Also, if you’re sending an impatient or angry followup email, that’s not going to help your cause. I believe in following up ~ the squeaky wheel gets the grease, after all ~ but I think we should be on our best behavior when we do. To give you an idea, one of my partials was out sixteen months before I signed with the first agent, and I’d followed up three times.

Follow up on every opportunity. You know how serendipity will hand you something, and you’ll mean to follow up on it. Say your husband’s best friend is married to an agent. Or you start talking to someone in a bar who loves your book idea and says she’ll send it on if you send it to her. Follow up on it, dang it! Don’t let it pass. It never hurts to ask. Let me give you some examples. I recently read that 9 out of 10 authors fail to return their promo questionnaires ~ a huge missed opportunity. I volunteered at an archive that had a notable author in my genre who was a board member and an active researcher. I asked my lovely friends there if they would forward an email to her. I asked my workshop teacher and mentor to recommend me to her agent. I sent queries for my second book to all agents who included personal notes on their rejections to the first book, mentioning that I much appreciated their kind words. Don’t be obnoxious, but be persistent.

Jump into online media and social networking with both feet. In industry jargon, create a platform. You should create a website and/or a blog ~ NOW, don’t wait until your book is coming out ~ and be on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and other places. I’m convinced that this is one of the reasons my agency was interested in me. I showed I was capable of being a promo-sapiens. And it’s an ongoing commitment. If you create a blog, you can’t not write for weeks and then announce to the world, “Oh, look, I have another blog post up!” No. You have to blog at least every other day, five days a week. It’s a commitment. Also, keep your website current. Be a good Facebooker (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ru-freeman/facebook-etiquette-for-au_b_398318.html) ~ don’t just talk about yourself. Interact. Comment and promote others and enjoy it.

Making lots of writer and editor friends. AKA networking. But I don’t think of it in those terms. I just love being able to rub antennae with other geeks just like myself. I don’t think of others as competition. I think of them as a great big groups of fun people who I loved to connect with. But, in practical terms, this also pays off for your career.

Go to conferences. This pays off in so many ways. You improve your craft. You make friends. Your spirits go through the roof. And it gives you so many opportunities in the searching for an agent game. You can pitch agents at conferences. Even if you don’t pitch an agent, you can mention in your query letter that you saw them speak at such and such a conference but that you’re sorry you weren’t able to sign up for a pitch appointment with them. If they give a talk, you can mirror back to them what they said. I went to a conference, and the agent talking said he liked Cormac McCarthy and also was looking to take on women’s fiction. Well, I could say that my style is in the vein of Cormac McCarthy and that I write women’s fiction, as he mentioned at the X conference.

Get published in literary magazines. This sounds like an old saw, but it’s true. Not only does it get your name out there and increase your platform online, agents read them. It helped me keep my first agent interested, and I also received an invitation to submit a manuscript to a fabulous big-name agent. I was not able to follow up on this fabulous opportunity, as he requested an exclusive, but it was worth it in ego points alone. Who doesn’t want to hear that someone else liked their stuff?

Get an MFA. I don’t have an MFA, but I have friends who do. It paves the way like nothing else will, especially if you go to a big-name school. In some cases, agents come knocking at your door. I have a friend who went to a top-rated MFA program and then also attended a top conference every year. Without sending out a single query, she had her pick of four or five agents for her short story collection, and this with having only two or three stories published.

Learn about the industry. Read agent and editor blogs. Listen to agent interviews. Obsess. Do research on AgentQuery.com. Get a subscription to Publishers Lunch at least, if not Publishers Marketplace. Lay awake nights and wonder what you’re doing wrong.

Be polite. Don’t be the difficult person. Be persistent, but be pleasant.

The Manuscript

Revise, revise, revise the manuscript. It needs to be as perfect as you can possibly make it. Resist the urge to send it out immediately upon finishing the first draft. Resist mightily. Find as many ways to polish it as possible. I wrote and revised my first novel for six years. I wrote and revised my second novel for four years. For suggestions to help revising, see the following.

Read craft books. I can’t tell you the number of great things I’ve learned from craft books. Halfway through my first book, I stopped and thought, “I have no idea what I’m doing.” Then I read a gazillion craft books. I still read and reread them. It helps.

Get feedback on your writing through friends and critique groups and workshops. Prevail upon your friends. It’s nice to have your family tell you how good it is ~ we all need that ~ but it’s more effective in craft terms if the feedback is from another writer. If you have a critique group, great! Or take a novel workshop. Or take an online workshop. Or go to a conference that has a novel workshop. Get feedback on it as much as possible.

Have a professional freelance book editor give you feedback. Preferably one who has been in the industry. If you’re going to pay good money (as much as $2,500 for a good one) for a book doctor in order to get published, make sure that editor knows about publishing. If you’re just looking to get feedback on craft, that’s great. It’s fine to pay a writer who’s also an editor. But if you’re trying to work toward publication, it makes sense to get an editor who knows about publishing. I plan to use my freelance book editor for all future books (if I can and depending on my finances).

Things in your manuscript that put up a red flag for agents (http://tamara-linse.blogspot.com/2010/06/signs-of-amateur.html). Every writer goes through a natural progression of learning craft, and there are craft things that mark you as someone starting out. I think you can get away with one or two of these (calling your writing literary, one misspelling), but they add up quickly. Click on link at the beginning of this paragraph for an elaboration.

Sometimes it’s time to move on. Sometimes, you’ve learned everything you can from a book and it’s time to put it away and move on to another one. They say it usually takes two or three or more book manuscripts with multiple revisions each to get an agent. You heard me right. There came a point when it was time for me to move on from my first manuscript. Then I went back and totally reworked it.

The Query Letter

Do a whole bunch of research on writing a great query letter. It is the most exacting genre there is next to the resume. One word will make the difference between getting a request and not. There’s a lot of great blogs and resources out there. Take advantage of it. Read Miss Snark’s query letter Crap-O-Meter (http://snarkives.blogspot.com/2006/02/cover-letter-crap-o-meter-posts-links.html) ~ she commented on something like 99 query letters, talking about what was working and what wasn’t. I’d pay special attention to the ones in your genre.

Revise, revise, revise. When you’re not getting requests for partials and fulls, revise it some more. Still not? Revise some more.

Get feedback on your query, preferably from other people who’ve been trying to query or people in the industry. I went to a whole conference devoted to crafting a query, and I posted mine on an agent blog who was having a contest to give feedback on queries, where mine won a spot and received feedback. I also asked the freelance book editor who went over my manuscript to also go over the query letter.

Some basic stuff. Use her or his name. “Dear Ms. Smith:” Do not mass email to a bunch of agents. Do research on whom you’re sending to. Personalize each query. By that, I mean, read their website and any interview and somehow mention something very specific that they said. Use their wording. Think about it: You’re trying to seduce this person. You’re looking to get a partner for life, much like a marriage partner. Is quantity going to get you into someone’s heart? Nope. Quality. Personalization. Making a connection.

Check your spelling. This seems like a no-brainer, yet agents say that they get queries with lots of misspellings.

Don’t try to be cute or funny. You may feel a connection to an agent because you read their blog, but do not give in to temptation to be funny. Business formal only.

Previous connections. Mention right away if you have a referral, if you had them in workshop, if you went to a conference they spoke at, if they included nice words in their response to a previous submittable, if they are your cousin-in-law.

Follow guidelines. For each and every query, read their guidelines on their website and follow them to a tee. Also, you can get a lot of good information on AgentQuery.com.

Play by the rules. Don’t be that guy who thinks that breaking the rules will get you in. It won’t. It’ll just irritate people.

I’d recommend sending queries out in batches. Maybe ten at a time, every month or two. Aim your query high and low. New agencies and new agents at established agencies are good places to query for new writers. Subscribe to Publisher’s Marketplace and sign up for Publishers Lunch Deluxe and pay attention to the announcements for new agents.

Follow up politely. Give them the amount of time they state on their website. Or, if they don’t state it, I’d give them three months for a query, four months for a partial, and six months for a full. Repeat (politely) until you get a response. Don’t take it personally.

When is it time to give up? I don’t know. I think some people would’ve given up way before me. I queried 128 agents on my first manuscript and 62 on my second. Maybe that makes me a slow study. Like I said, pigheadedness is sometimes my greatest asset.

I hope this helps. You can do it, I know you can! And if you have questions, feel free to email me at tamara [at] tamaralinse.com.

Tamara Linse was raised on a ranch in northern Wyoming. She received a master’s in English from the University of Wyoming. Her work has been a finalist for Georgetown Review, Glimmer Train, and Arts & Letters contests, and a book of short stories was a semifinalist for the Black Lawrence Press Hudson Prize. She has been published in the South Dakota Review, Georgetown Review, Word Riot, and Talking River, among others. She lives in Wyoming, where she is an editor for a foundation and is hard at work on a novel.

ALL 'LIT' UP AUTHOR ESSAY FEATURE: MYFANWY COLLINS - Will It?

Myfanwy Collins lives on the North Shore of Massachusetts with her husband and son. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review, AGNI, Cream City Review, SmokeLong Quarterly, Quick Fiction, PANK, Caketrain, FRiGG,Potomac Review and other venues. Her novel, ECHOLOCATION, will debut in March 2012. A collection of her short fiction, I AM HOLDING YOUR HAND, is also forthcoming from PANK Little Books in August 2012. Please visit her author site for more info: http://www.myfanwycollins.com

Will It?
by Myfanwy Collins

I had spent so many years--20 or more--wondering how I would feel when I got the news that someone was going to publish my first novel that how I actually felt came as a great surprise to me when I did get the good news. On top of feeling elated, validated, grateful, and triumphant, I also felt completely and utterly terrified. Someone had finally said yes to me and my biggest fear was letting them and my long supportive friends and family down. The question turned from “Would anyone ever publish one of my novels?” to “What if everyone who reads my novel hates it and thinks I’m a deviant, horrible wretch of a talentless hack of a human being?”

I had not expected to feel this way, honestly. Not because I think I’m some superstar, but because I’ve been around the block and have been lucky enough to have work published in some wonderful publications. Frankly, I thought I had gotten over my fear of being exposed by my written word.

Sure, there is still a twinge of fear whenever something new of mine is published, particularly when it is published online as then anyone can read it. Mostly, though, I’ve been able to let that fear go. I recognize where it comes from--a fear of being judged by people who know me in my “real” life. Once I recognize it, I can squash it. I’ve even let go the stage fright which came over me and crushed me for years after I read my mother’s eulogy ten years ago. Once I recognized where the fear was coming from, I was able to let it go and once again enjoy being up in front of an audience.

But this book fear is new and unexpected and, frankly, ridiculous and frustrating. I’m beyond excited about my book and so very proud of it. There is nothing to fear. Indeed, a brilliant editor has said yes to my novel and asked to publish it. She loved reading my book. She stayed up all night reading it. She believes in it enough to put her name and her company behind it.

So why the fear?

Let’s dismantle it. Let’s pick away at it. Partly it is the worry of being judged by others; that they will feel I’ve wasted my time by writing the book or their time by them reading it. I fear that something in my book will cause someone to treat my son differently. I fear that no one will buy it or that people will buy it out of pity or that if they do buy it, no one will read it.

Worst of all, I fear that no one will care.

Ah ha. Is that it, then? What if no one cares? So what if no one cares, right? Right?

I mean, if all the years of work and the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of rejections I’ve received over the years have not broken me, a lack of caring will not break me.

Will it?