Leggo My Ego
what's going on in January
Happy new year, friends. I hope you were able to spend time with loved ones or beloved books, or both. I start the year with a bunch of interesting work to accomplish and a series of whimsical and intriguing ideas for creative work and publication plans.
In the first week of January, I have already had a few visual poems from the Vispo Bible accepted for publication in an online journal. I will share the link when they come out. I have worked on an eccentric poem for a call for submission, which plays with the idea of narrative. But mostly I have been working on the AngelHousePress 2023 Caring Imagination Crowd Funding Campaign with the generous small presses who have offered to donate publications, subscriptions and merchandise to help us pay our contributors to NationalPoetryMonth.ca and Experiment.O. The campaign will be launched in early February and you will be hearing from me a lot at that point.
I’ve sent out the call for submissions for NationalPoetryMonth.ca, but so far have received work from only three people. Please send us poetry and visual poetry or hybrid work and share the call with others, especially women and non-binary creators who are 2SLGBTQIA, mad, crip, D/deaf, chronically ill and BIPOC.
The Caring Imagination site is up and running. I am adding new resources to it every week or so and always on the look out for resources that help creators and cultural workers make, produce and distribute art with compassion. Please give me a shout if you have links to add.
I’ve begun working on the research for the Small Machine Talks’ first episode of the year, a conversation with Karenjit Sandhu about her amazing Poetic Fragments from the Irritating Archives (Guillemot Press, 2022). 2023 will be a year of page adjacent ish episodes. Um. I’ll come up with a better title for it…maybe.
Beast Body Epic is now entering its next stages: proofreading, final layout, printing and promotion. I intend to have the book published in the autumn to coincide with my sixtieth birthday and to launch it in November to coincide with my 13th anniversary of survival from my near-death health crisis. I’ve already had a lot of positive support regarding setting up readings, even though I am asking about a time that feels ridiculously far in the future. I appreciate all who’ve taken the time to respond and consider a reading request, and dear friends who have agreed to join me at the celebration of this book, which is so long in coming to fruition. I will keep you posted.
In December, I began a hybrid series of essays, visual poems, letters, doodles, and whatever else I can dream up. I am currently working on one of the pieces about Time. It’s a very unsystematic process. I am learning a lot, which is the primary reason to do anything, along with connection with fellow misfits and whimsy.
I realized recently or perhaps realized again, dear faulty memory, that my reasons for sharing my work have everything to do with trying to let kindred misfits know that they are not alone. This is why I made the decision to publish Beast Body Epic through AngelHousePress, and why I need to remember that when I’m trying to set up readings and promote the work.
It was difficult at first when I didn’t receive e-mail responses to my queries, but I’ve given myself a little ego shake and reminded myself that I am not trying to publish Beast Body Epic for validation or to help my publisher sell books. I can do it any way I want. There is something freeing in being able to self-publish a work. I can reimagine the whole process and take what works, leaving out what doesn’t work or what doesn’t work for me. If you had control over your own book publication and promotion, what would you do differently or the same? I’d love to know.
I thank all of you who’ve offered advice and suggested venues. What I am looking for is a cozy space, a café would be ideal. Toronto friends often tell me they’d love to see me read, so this is the opportunity I’m trying to create. I don’t need a huge space or a really popular and cool space. I don’t want an institutional space, such as a public library. I need a free or very inexpensive and accessible, centrally located space with enough room so that people don’t have to be in a crowd. By November will we still need to be concerned with Covid 19? I will take whatever precautions are necessary, including moving to Zoom if need be.
Last fall, as an experiment, I tried writing poems in response to calls for submission that I saw and it was a disaster. I wrote terrible poems, and I didn’t enjoy it. Needless to say, with one or two exceptions, they were all rejected and good thing too. Sometimes I see what others are doing, a great output of publications, books, readings at festivals, awards and I get a huge case of insecurity and jealousy, but why? That’s their route and it's a great route to take and can be very satisfying, but it isn’t mine. I’ve been doing this for over two decades now and I’ve done it my own way. I will continue to do so.
So I guess my tip for the first month of the year is to consider your motivation for why you are writing and trying to have your work published. How much does ego and validation play a role? What other reasons are there to create and share your work? If they aren’t validation and ego, perhaps if you’re having trouble placing it, you can consider self-publishing it or publishing it online on a blog or via newsletter? Who do you want to have access to your work and why?
Sending you love, hugs, joy, whimsy, solidarity in this shite storm of a millennium.
your friend,
Amanda Earl
Ottawa, January 7, 2023