All You Have to Do Is Get into The New York Times (Part 2)

Years ago, when I was in Earth Fare shopping, my husband and I met someone with whom he had grown up. We got to talking and discovered we were each writing memoirs. The difference? She had a publisher. And a contract. And a deadline. I was still, at that time, just writing my memoir hoping someone, someday, would want it. Which I admitted to her (all the while wishing I could say to her: “You have a publisher? Oh, me too, me too.”)

As the story goes, she said to me, “All you have to do is get published in The New York Times.” Which is what she had done. As if that were the easiest thing in the world. On her first try, she had gotten a piece into The NYT Modern Love column and boom bim bam, she had a publisher for a memoir she had not even written.

Needless to say, I tried to get into Modern Love a time or two or three billion, and I was unsuccessful. That was years ago. Eventually I finished my memoir (The Going and Goodbye) and got a publisher; I finished a short story collection (A Small Thing to Want) and got a publisher; and I finished a poetry collection (Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning) and got a publisher.

And somewhere along the way, I stopped trying to get into Modern Love or The New York Times.

Until a few weeks ago.

That’s when I attended a virtual literary festival and heard the editor of The NYT Tiny Love Stories speak—about what she looked for, what she didn’t like, what she wanted out of a submission. Each story is a maximum of 100 words—thus why it is called tiny (not because it’s made of stories about pitiful love—like what you feel for the person you care for just enough to meet for a drink but only if your favorite Netflix series doesn’t have a new episode out).

I thought, well, why not try to write a Tiny Love Story? Sure, it would be like throwing a paper airplane into a gusty wind, but I could at least have fun folding the airplane and sending it off, right? I’m a writer. I have thrown a zillion paper airplanes into the gusty winds of the publication world. (I have submitted to The New Yorker more than a handful of times—that should tell you how unafraid I am of gusty winds and how I have thick goggles to protect me when the airplane zips back all pointylike and darts right into the center of my face).

So I sat down, and I took a 300-word poem about Barney, our Jack Russell Terrier whom I had adored, and I chiseled it (not the dog) down to 100 words of prose. 

Let me tell you, it wasn’t easy and it took quite a bit of time. I had to figure out what was most important (everything!) and how to pluck out the best parts of a sentence. I had to leave behind things I loved. But it was fun. So I folded my little airplane Tiny Love Story and sent it off to The NYT. I expected nothing. Well, that’s not true: I hoped to at least hear back a “We got your submission” and then later a “Thank you but…” (that’s how rejections always start out), but I realized big publications often don’t have time to send out those kinds of correspondence. 

And then I did what any writer does who’s been around the block a few times: I started on the next one. Not because I am a masochist (although you could argue that all writers…) but because it was fun.

And then something really strange happened. You know how you hear about these stories of someone out in the middle of a desert, all alone, and suddenly spotting a UFO? Well, the editor emailed me back (she is not the UFO in this story), asked some follow-up questions, and then a few days later, accepted my piece. The acceptance is the UFO because IT’S FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES. 

Of course I immediately thought back to that time in Earth Fare and that person who told me that all I had to do was get published in The New York Times.

Last week, I finally did. 

You can read my Tiny Love Story here.

Photo by Harry Shelton from Unsplash.com.

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Upcoming Seminars

Make Your Titles Do More of the Heavy Lifting
May 26, 2021, 6:30-8 p.m. EST
Titles should serve your poetry (and prose) rather than simply helping to navigate the contents page. Using poetry titles as examples so we can cover more ground during this short seminar, together we'll look at titles that work hard and offer zing and pizzazz so that your own titles will entice readers and better serve your writing. (What is covered in this seminar applies to flash fiction and flash nonfiction titles, too.) This program is part of Press 53’s High Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction. Cost: $30. Register here.

The Art of Memoir & Personal Essay: A Generative Writing Workshop
June 9-July 7, 2021 (Wednesdays), 2:30-5 p.m. (EST)
Join me in this five-week, online (Zoom) workshop during which you will generate new writing, read writing that inspires, and learn some tools and techniques on the craft of personal essay/memoir writing. There are no critiques in this workshop. The goal is for you to leave with first drafts and a writer’s toolbox ready to help you finish and write the rest of your own life stories. Space is limited. Learn more here. Cost: $349. Register here.

Fast Love

We were young when we met. We loved to dance. I’d go as far as to say that dancing was a key to our falling in love. Without it, would we have? Later, we would not dance as much, and then eventually we did not dance at all. For a long time after our split, it was really hard for me to remember the good times we had, those happy, early moments when love felt easy and smooth.

I wrote this poem as a way of looking at that story in my life, but from the perspective of going backwards chronologically. I start with a very early moment and then immediately go to the end of everything, and then to just before the end, and then a little before that, and before that, all the way back to the beginning again, like a trail of crumbs that shows you how you got from here to there. Recently, in my memoir/personal essay workshop, I asked my students to write a similar type piece: to take an important moment and then go backwards in time to another moment prior to that, and before that, but in essay form, not in poem form. Sometimes seeing your own story from this perspective helps you see it differently than you had before.

Here’s my story, in poem form:

This poem is from my debut poetry collection, Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning, winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. If you’d like to purchase the book, you can buy it directly from my publisher, Mercer University Press (use the discount code “Facebook” or “MUPNEWS” at checkout for 20% off, plus free shipping if you choose media mail). You can also get a copy from all the major retailers. This poem is copyrighted and may not be reproduced without written permission of the author (me).

Remember not all poems have to be true. Most of the details are in this one, but I have tweaked some. The essence of it is definitely true. Apologies to my ex (sorry! sorry!) for having to appear in my work now and again. Oopsy.

You can listen to Robert McCready reciting the poem on his Evening Magic YouTube Channel here.

This concludes my National Poetry Month celebration for 2021. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did, and thanks for going along this ride with me. For my longtime subscribers, an especially big thank you for letting me indulge in poetry every April.

During the month of April, which is National Poetry Month, I have been sharing poems I love from contemporary writers. I hope I piqued your interest in poetry, if it needed to be piqued, and to show you that a really great poem can be accessible to all. If you missed the other poems, you can find them here and here and here and here and here. Thank you to the wonderful poets who allowed me to share their work.

Photo credit (of two people): Casey Horner

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Upcoming Workshops

Sometimes a Friend Can Save Your Life

Years ago when I was single and in my twenties and living in Oxford, Ohio, I would drive down US 27 and meet my friend Jen on the west side of Cincinnati. She lived on the east side and this was a halfway point for us if we wanted to see each other on a weekday evening. Bob Evans was our place—an easy spot right off the road. We would slide into a booth and order and then talk until we had run out of time or light or both.

Jen and I met our first day of college, and then what cemented our friendship was we had an 8 a.m. chemistry class together that first term, and goodness knows we needed each other in order to make the trudge across campus on those cold mornings to go sit in a lecture hall and hear about elements and who-knows-what-else for an hour. We were bonded after that.

But by our mid-twenties, as we navigated careers and relationships and breakups, we needed each other more. Particularly I was dealing with a demanding job and a boyfriend who seemed to both love and loathe me—Jen and I spent countless hours on that topic (too many, I can see looking back, but I was young and didn’t know all the signs that spelled goodbye).

Which brings me to Jenny Molberg’s poem, “Different Kinds of Sadness,” a poem I have read again and again. (Note: Jenny Molberg is not the same person as Jen, my college friend.) In the author note below the poem, Molberg says that the poem “is a love letter to a friend. I found myself, in the wake of divorce and a subsequent abusive relationship, relying heavily upon my support system of female friends, and I’m interested in challenging the traditional canon of heterosexual love poems by focusing on the often unshakeable and quantifiably more stable relationship that can occur between two women.”

I had that with Jen. I still have that with Jen. We talk nearly every day, and she still gets to/has to hear the ups and down and sideways of my life. Because of Molberg’s poem, I wrote a poem about Jen and our friendship. It’s called “Halfway” and will be published by The Pinch this fall.

Here is Jenny Molberg’s deeply moving poem that inspired me:

This poem was first published in Missouri Review and then later in Molberg’s collection Refusal (LSU Press, 2020). (A note to my author newsletter subscribers: I featured this collection in my June 2020 author newsletter). You can learn more about the poet here.

Thank you, Jenny Molberg, for allowing me to share your beautiful poem here.

You can listen to Robert McCready reciting the poem on his Evening Magic YouTube Channel here.

During the month of April, which is National Poetry Month, I am sharing poems I love from contemporary writers. I hope to pique your interest in poetry, if it needs to be piqued, and to show you that a really great poem can be accessible to all. If you missed the other poems, you can find them here and here and here and here.

Photo credit: Michael Petrila from Unsplash.

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MY NEXT WORKSHOP:

In this online workshop, we’ll talk about what flash nonfiction is, how it works, and why it works. Together we’ll mine some powerful flash pieces for effective techniques you can use in your own writing. This program is part of Press 53’s High Road Festival of Poetry and Short Fiction. Cost: $30. Register here.

Find all my events and workshops here.