Blinded by the light...

Yesterday I got word that a story of mine is now up on The Sun's website. The address is http://www.thesunmagazine.org/archives/1933 should you care to have a peek. Just checking out the magazine will be worth your while. It's a really good publication: one of those rare ones like the New Yorker, where readers feel they've discovered a personal friend. There's something raw about it, which fits in nicely with my own sensibilities.

Anyhow, as I wrote a friend who'd sent a congratulatory email, This is the story that ate my lunch. After I published this story, I couldn't get arrested, and that was eleven years ago. I could blame various others, but that would be dumb, not to say deluded. I suspect that all barriers, as usual, are within my own punkin head. The story, How To Find Him had a lot of success, which I didn't fully understand at the time. My husband, who reread it yesterday, and who touched me mightily with his reaction, said, "It's a perfect portrait of the time then...It should be required reading for all nineteen year old girls." And that is the usual reaction I've gotten, one that's nice because it's an unintended bonus.

The story was written in one bout of about six hours. It came about because I wanted to experiment with narration done in the second-person singular, which sounds like a bloodless reason for writing anything. Still, I was excited by the idea and by another developing notion as I wrote: using a broad expanse of time within a short story, something Alice Monroe does so effortlessly. Both these mechanisms fall into the New Toy school of creativity I learned as a painter. That is, sometimes when you're jammed up, just getting some new brushes can unclog whatever is roiling around inside.

After it came out, whatever I sent in to whomever was roundly rejected. Pawing through a pile of my orphaned manuscripts, I realized How To Find Him had taken up residence in my head as some kind of yardstick. If this was as good as HTFH, they would have accepted it, I'd think, or This is better than HTFH and these dolts can't see it. Success like this had happened to me a few times before, and always stalled me out. A painting I did a few years after grad school got a lot of attention and became one of those fateful markers-in-the-brain, as did a sonnet cycle that turned into a limited edition book, and sent me sailing off into public readings.

At my ripe age, I think I've realized that success isn't always good. It took me quite a while to get over myself, to understand that my tiny triumph was good, but not all that good in the cosmic scheme of things.

Anyway, it's not something that should concern an artist. Going into the next thing, while trusting that sometimes you'll speak to people and other times you won't, is the business of a writer. We're not critics, after all. That's a job we aren't good at; it leads to paralysis by analysis, and causes us to go dormant, stung into inaction by our own poisons.

But go ahead, read the story. You're in luck: it can't clobber you like it clobbered me.