A Writer Gets Back Into It (Maybe)

      Back in the mid to late eighties, I wrote poems. It seemed as though I was writing them constantly and I wrote about pretty well anything and everything. 
   I had entered this process in rather a roundabout way. I discovered that there was a creative writing class one night a week at the local college, Fanshawe. As a kid, I had always enjoyed and been somewhat proficient at writing but, at the end of my school career, this had gone dormant. As an adult, however, just finding out that this class existed sparked a renewed interest. So I signed up!
   Initially, I felt as though I wanted to write short stories and this did seem to be the focus of the class and what most of my classmates were there to do. Our teacher, Pam Tikalsky, made sure that we talked about and experienced other genres of writing, however, and poetry was of course one of them. I happily went along with this as poetry was also something I'd also enjoyed as a younger person.
   I then found that I was enjoying the poetry process even more than the short story writing. 
   The most appealing part of writing poems was that it was a way to take a single thought or idea and then investigate it thoroughly, right there in front of me. Having done that, I could then go on and tackle the next random thought. This became a very joyous process.
   Part of what made this an enjoyable endeavour was the constant encouragement and feedback from Pam. Along the way, she at some point suggested it might be worthwhile to start sending out poems to literary magazines, in the hope of getting published.
   I dove into this with a fair amount of zeal, making constant trips to the library downtown so that I could sit by the racks of literary mags and peruse. I ended up with lists of journals and the names of poetry editors and I began to send out batches of poems. 
   Very quickly, I began to have those same batches of poems being sent back to me, along with accompanying rejection slips. This, of course was not unexpected but at the same time was very dejecting. At one point I was very close to giving up the whole process when the miraculous occurred---an acceptance! 
   I had a poem accepted by a small quarterly magazine called Canadian Author and Bookman and I was on top of the world! This did not end the process and I continued to send out poems. Therein followed a long period of non-acceptance which was only tempered by the fact that I had already published at least a single poem.
   I saved every rejection slip and along the way I developed this weird relationship with poetry editors, most of whom were kind enough to send me back brief messages of encouragement and advice, along with their rejections. They were people I'd obviously never met but at the same time  were sharing a little bit of my journey with me. Most of them were poets themselves and, I'm sure, had been through the same process at the beginning of their careers. We poets are somewhat fragile and these other poets, knowing this, treated me with as much kindness as they possibly could muster.
   Eventually, more poems got published, in even more

A pile of stuff from the olden days...

prestigious journals and then.....I stopped! To this day, I am not even quite certain why this happened. I think my feeling at the time was that I'd run out of things to write about. It was also about this period that my creative energy turned to writing musical pieces. They're a little hard to describe but the term "movie music" occurred simultaneously to both Doralyn and myself and I'm happy enough to describe them this way but....really...this is a whole new blog post.
   About this time last year, I became aware of something called the 2 Day Poetry Contest, run by a Canadian magazine called Contemporary Verse 2. The idea was to spend two days writing a poem. The only hitch was you had to use ten extremely random words that the magazine provided! And I can't even begin to tell you how random the words were! If you want, you can read about it here.
   Well, I didn't win but the whole experience was pretty amazing and it kind of renewed the poetic fervour in me. Recently, I also became aware of the NYCMidnight Short Story Challenge. This is another contest which involves being given eight days to write a 2,500 word short story. The only hitch with this contest is that you are given a genre, a subject and a character which you must then incorporate into a short story. But that's only the first step! If your story is among the best, you go on to the next round which entails writing a 2,000 word story in three days with a fresh genre, character and subject. Then, if you get past that stage, the final stage involves a 1,500 word story which needs to be written in just twenty-four hours with, of course, a different genre, character and subject. The first story (involving a mystery, a bird watcher and a horoscope) has been sent off and results should be in sometime next week. Fingers crossed!
   

Yoda, sitting on the good stuff.

So currently the writing bug has arisen from its deep hibernation. I recently shared a poem I'd written about Doralyn and it was very well received by those who read it and suddenly I started to wonder if I should just start getting back into it a little.
   I went and dug out my pile of old manuscripts, rough copies (and rejection slips!) and sat down to re-acquaint myself with a former life. 
   Some of it was total garbage (it didn't get rejected for nothing) but some of it seemed to still stand the test of time. Whatever that is. I then began the process of separating good from bad and pulling out a handful which needed touch-ups.
   What I'm currently attempting to do is send out a complete manuscript, hopefully for publication in book form. If all else fails, maybe at least I'll get a little feedback. A quick check on the internet and pretty well the first thing I see is a well-respected publisher right here in London who just happens to accept manuscripts between now and the end of April. And, on top of everything else, he's just around the corner! So why not?!