So Long, Farewell

The time has come to Kevork the blog. And rather than leave the 3 Ps lingering with half-thoughts in cyberspace forever, we decided, before signing off, to sum up where we are three years later. Our 31 followers will be relieved to know the three of us remained friends as we travailed, and that we will continue to write and be friends as we continue to travail.

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson

Firstly, mostly, and lastly, I have a book coming out this September—My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself. I can now be found at kellykathleenferguson.com.

As for the past three years:

Moved to New Orleans. Helped start a writers’ group. Wrote a book proposal. Caught a golden coconut at Zulu. Landed an agent. Golden coconut turned bright turquoise with mold. Lost the agent. Accepted to creative writing PhD program at Ohio University. Signed with Press 53. Moved to Athens. (Not Greece. Not Georgia.) Wrote a book. Published one short story, one profile, one poem, one list and three book reviews. Survived 56 rejections (15 for one story). 2 “encouraging” rejections (same story). 4 no reply. 5 pending. Presented at two conferences. Total student loan debt running at $18,000, but no panhandling. Yet.

There’s also a few thousand hours of time elapse photography of me either staring at my laptop and/or face down crying.

And, coming full circle, I will be reading at the Montana Festival of the Book in Missoula this fall, my first trip back to Montana.

Trina Burke

I moved to Seattle. There was freelance editing and then a friend got me a job in her office at the local university (Networking: It really does work!) It was a temporary job as an administrative assistant. I almost got laid off, but a coworker left and I just happened to have the skills to move into her position on a temporary appointment. Then my appointment was almost up, but a coworker almost died from swine flu and another coworker did die of a heart attack. So I moved into another role. Then I got a permanent appointment. All in three years, all in the same department. I still freelance, but with less frequency.

On the home front: I got married. I moved three times within the same city. The people around me have been marrying, divorcing, and having babies with abandon. I've been to Europe a couple of times. I have a burgeoning pumpkin patch in my back yard. I have a back yard! I'm wickedly happy.

And then there's the writing. I've been rejected a lot, which comes as no surprise. But I've had some small triumphs, too: I won $200 in a contest, published some poems in some journals, had a chapbook accepted and published by Dancing Girl Press, wrote some reviews, attended some seminars abroad. More important than all that, I've managed to keep up a sort of writing practice. Yes, the flood of inspiration and output during the MFA years has diminished, but new work still finds its way out on the regular. I imagine it will continue to do so, regardless of whether any of it gets published.

I don't know if my experience is typical. It has been an exercise in sitting back and seeing what happens. And what I've realized is that nothing happens quickly, or dramatically. This epiphany has allowed me to conclude that there is no deadline for success. If I look back and try to think about what my goal was in getting an MFA, I don't so much find a goal as a nebulous bunch of hopes. I hoped to amass a body of work, which I did. I hoped to read a lot of poetry, which I did. I hoped to meet some awesome people, which I did in spades. I hoped to publish a book, which hasn't happened yet and might never. I think I still came out ahead, though.

It's been a kick. Thanks for reading the blog and best wishes!

Laurie E. White

Adieu! Looking back, working backwards:

[September 2011 – September 2010] I’m in Chicago working as a writer at NogginLabs, designing instructional software (read: eLearning) for Fortune 500 companies. Recently bought our first home in the Rogers Park neighborhood. Adopted a dog; he’s still our neurotic co-pilot.

[September 2010 – January 2009] Wedding (married fellow Montana MFAer Travis Fortney). The 3Ps were together again. A chapbook from From Yes Press. Before Noggin, Research Coordinator for the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. (Chemistry?!?) Four poems were picked up for the second issue of > kill author. Adopted a fat cat.

[January 2009 – May 2008] Celebrated in Grant Park on election night. Instructed at an online university; college comp. Copy edited for the Annals of Statistics. One poem in DIAGRAM. Our first Chicago apartment: the super can't distinguish our keys from the 1,000 others on his ring. Proceeds to kick in our back door with his boot, advises us to change the locks. Thisclose to taking a temp job testing Diebold voting machines for the national election in a warehouse for 12 hours/day, $8.00/hour. Drove with one cat, one fellow (see September 2010) and some of our plants straight from Montana to Chicago. Why Chicago? We picked it on a map and drove there. No place to stay. No jobs.

[May 2008] MFA.

What excellent company I’ve been able to keep at 3Ps for 3 years. Thanks for stopping by.

Montana Represents at Dancing Girl Press

The DGP 2010 lineup of chapbooks is out and the Montana kids are out in force.

Huzzah to Brandon Shimoda for "Ship-On-Land," written with Julia Cohen!

Mazel tov to Lindsay Bland, throwing down "Between the Devil and the Deep" in the Spring!

...and then, in the fall, there's "Great America" by yours truly.

2010, I love you already!

Nickalicious

This in from Nick Ekkisogloy, fellow Montana 08 MFAer:

Hey Kelly,

This is a link to an experimental thing my brother is doing in a video business class and you should click it. I hope all is well,

Nick

The link (eventually) takes you to an online literary journal Nick is starting up, Double Old Fashioned. You may read his infamous bloody kidney story. It will make you clutch your lower back.

In my old website/blog I used to post stories. This was before I realized these stories were terrible, but since then I have changed my name and gone under witness protection, so I feel pretty safe no one will be able to make the connection. Although at times I wake up a little bit sweaty.

Oh well. I don't have the psychological fortitude to self-publish fiction online. Too many scars. But to invoke fond memories of former Montana MFA program director Kate Gadbow, woman of succulent bison chili and intelligent, kind words:

Go Nick!

P is for (Re) Publication!

Three years ago I wrote a profile for mental_floss magazine, "A Walk on the Far Side: The Story of Gary Larson.” The article is posted online here. I just discovered it has been reprinted in The Pop Culture Zone: Writing Critically About Popular Culture, a college textbook. Class, please turn to pages 527-531. I am thick with pedagogy! The book even has discussion questions!

For this reprint I received the mighty check of fifty bones.

This shot was taken by fellow blogger Trina Burke in Rattlesnake Park in Missoula. I'm not sure why it posted sidewise. In case you can’t tell, I’m the Far Side Lady. You know, the one without eyes in the flowered dress. Mental_floss is the coolest mag ever because they published me in this costume as my author pic.

P is for Publication!

Email just never feels real, but now that I’ve received letterhead I’m willing to post.

My first short story has been accepted for publication: “The Law of Meat” in The Gettysburg Review.

Yay! I’m not just a bad news bear. I had moments this winter, doubting this blog. I didn’t know what to write about. I doubted anyone really wanted to view my running tally of italicized versus nonitalicized rejection slips. I decided to skip my post about The Analysis of Rejection Fonts: What Says “No” The Best. Should editors keep it classic with TNR? Or step it up with Book Antigua? Maybe sanserif is best. No nonsense. Move on. And please, don’t cry.

I hate to be a phony who just pipes in with the successes. It’s like those MFA-thread Speakeasy people who lurk all season but once they get in Iowa post all about it. Still. You can’t just keep writing about rejection because it sounds whiny and depressing. This dilemma earned us a post back when we first started this blog in Media Bistro. Some said whiny. Others said honest. The difference is hard to say.

It is a relief to know that at least sometimes, there will be good news.

To keep it real here’s the rest of my mailbag: two PhD nonacceptances (UGA and Tennessee), Michigan Quarterly Review rejection, notarized letter concerning late taxes (10 years. Whoops!) from Durham County. My car tags have expired. The New Orleans Sewage and Water Board, State Farm and the Student Assistance Foundation are all inquiring as to my health.

I’ve shoved all that mess behind the only mail that matters. So when will my milestone become available? To quote my letterhead: “Sometime in the next year.”

In the meantime here’s some pubs out now by other Montana MFAers:

http://www.pw.org/content/interview_writer_robin_romm (Lauren Hamlin '09)

http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/09_jan_feb/janfeb09.html (Pete Jones '07)

Publication!

Yay Nick!

Another member of the Montana MFA class of '08 has scored an impressive pub. This time it's Nick Ekkizogloy in the latest issue of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, No. 30.

From Stowaways:

"When we got to the river we sat down and made sounds. Francis did a siren, so I would do gunshots. If he did a seal barking, I would do a fog horn. I ate some pills and we passed the tequila. We laughed like we had just crawled out of the grave as old buddies and met by Flint River to say fuck you to death. "

Publication Strategies

A few weeks ago, as I opened another envelope addressed to myself, a dim memory rolled around in the back of skull. I remembered that I used get published regularly before my MFA. I wrote for Creative Loafing, mental_floss magazine, and quite a few zines that if we tally the numbers, have a much greater circulation than any given Suede-Elbow Jacket Review. Sure, I yearn for the word "Quarterly" in my writing CV. I have literary fiction short stories that (I hope) belong there. But in the meantime, why not write for some of the markets I used to approach?

In the interest of pimping, shameless self-promo, etc.

http://www.defenestrationmag.net/2008/10/taking-sexy-back-fashion-tips-for-crime-fighters-from-the-law-and-order-svu-team-by-kelly-ferguson/

Post MFA Pep Talks (Pump Your Fists, Say Yeah!)

When I was researching MFA programs, I admit I pooh-poohed Columbia out of hand. Word was the average grad had $60,000 in debt. I heard a few sordid workshop tales. Even the application fee was expensive. Why would anyone go there? I thought, as I practically applied to state schools that offered TAs.

I don't I regret my TA. If I had a huge student loan, I would be in a state of panic right about now. And I went to a program of which mere mention makes my heart clench in lost love. But I'm forced to admit, as I trek the murky swamps of the post-MFA, I see a goodly amount of Columbia MFA bylines. Especially in nonfiction. More than once I have read where Columbia grads (for instance Meghan Daum in one of my all time essay faves “My Misspent Youth”) debate the cost-effectiveness of the degree. Yet as my rejection-slip-covered soul devours the printed, published page I have to wonder. It can’t hurt to attend a program in a city where the vast majority of publishers, agents, and major magazines live.

It’s too bad Columbia and Montana can’t combine to form the perfect MFA mullet, business in the front – party in the back. Now that I’m facing the business end, I find myself turning to a book by a Columbia grad, Betsy Lerner, a poet MFA turned editor turned agent. I recommend her The Forest for the Trees: An Editor’s Advice to Writers for anyone in the pre-pre-writing stage, which means you aren’t actually writing, but reading books about writing.

Too busy you say? The book lists are long and the bathtub soaks too short? Okay, here’s the Sparknotes:

1) It’s tough, but hang in there.
2) Don't call the editor at home.

No, wait. I can do better:

1) Write as if your parents were already dead
2) If you are in a program or conference, use the time to learn from writers who are a notch or two above. (Of course the catch here is that you have to be willing to admit that).
3) Write with your ideal reader in mind (i.e. writing for everyone often translates into writing for no one).
4) Write the book you want to read
5) Write for your mentor or fiercest critic

The Waiting Game

I haven’t posted in a while because I haven’t had much to report and I haven’t felt passionately responsive to anything (literary, that is. I’ve been caught up in the lunacy of the upcoming election, but that is a subject that is already being done to death in the blogosphere and I doubt that I have anything substantive to add. Just more toxic vitriol that bears a striking resemblance to the toxic vitriol of other thirty-something underemployed artsy liberals).

So here’s the quick and dirty update: I’m engaged, a couple of my poems have been accepted by a couple of journals, I interviewed for a job and didn’t get it, I interviewed for another job and am waiting to hear whether I've made it to the next round of interviews, my aunt gave me a car, we signed our pug up for obedience training, I’m still freelancing and I write occasionally, mostly in response to prompts from my writing group.

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary poetry. Mostly stuff published in the past five years. To familiarize myself with what’s being published. To see how other writers sequence their books. To get an idea of whether endnotes are a good idea or whether they’re self-indulgent. To figure out if there are publishers out there that might be a particularly good fit for my manuscript. And also to enjoy myself. Because I’m not entirely self-centered and I actually do love poetry and it’s one of the few things that keeps me from ineffectually spinning my wheels about employment and politics and the economy and the environment. As a side note, I totally dug Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s In the Absent Everyday .

But really, it is all about me. And my book. I’ve revised it. I’ve sent it out to a finity of contests. I’ve considered whether sending it out to contests is a waste of time based on recent debates about the pros and cons of the contest system, I’ve researched publishers that hold no-fee open reading periods and found them few, I’ve revised again, I’ve considered formatting (2-inch margins or 3-inch margins? Alternating headers? Leader dots in the TOC or empty space?), I’ve come dangerously close to weeping for no good reason, I’ve considered changing the title of the book to Albatross so I can call it Al and it can be my bodyguard, I’ve shown it to and received feedback from many people—poets and non-poets alike. And now I am dwelling in the space of What now? What more? Mainly, it’s about the waiting. Waiting for responses, rejections. Waiting until my eyes are fresh enough to look at the manuscript again and consider further revisions. Waiting until the next thing grabs me and I can write in a different mode (a different register, a different mind) and produce contenders for the next book.

I’ve never been good at waiting. The magazines in the lobby are never interesting enough to make it feel like you’re being productive with the time. Someone has always reached the puzzles in Highlights before you and marked all over them in ink. Even though it’s ever so important that you get those teeth cleaned, it feels like there’s something else more important that you should be doing...OK, so this metaphor totally doesn’t fly. I’m not sure what gingivitis represents in the process of trying to get a book published, so I’m just going to admit defeat on this one.

So scratch that and let me begin again: I’ve never been good at waiting. But that’s what I’m doing now.

Fawlty

Yay. The first post-MFA publication! Just found out one of my poems will appear in the Sept. issue of Fawlt magazine. Theme: Perfectionism.