The how, when, where, and why of the process – (the who is my “collected” writing selves)

Early in 2021, a full year into the pandemic, I signed up to listen to Canadian writer and self-described writing “mid-wife,” Traci Skuce in a series she called “Write your First or Next Book” where she invited writers (via Zoom) to talk about the process of not only writing but also publishing one’s works.

I was intrigued by her interview with Emily Perkins, a Senior Publishing Consultant from FriesenPress, who commented on her company’s model for self-publishing, which honors the writer’s having control over the project and provides help with editing, designing, and marketing. I made an appointment to speak with her. I continued my search for how I was going to publish my collection and took another week-long seminar in February 2021, presented by two poets, about putting together a manuscript.  I remained interested in the idea of self-publishing with FriesenPress, knowing their mission is to “embrace each book as our own, creating an experience for our authors that empowers them to share their story with the world.” I would have more control over my publication date, knowing that I was a partner in the production.

Making this decision also laid out a structured timeline for me to have my manuscript ready for a publication release in Spring 2022. Yet only after I’d compiled 80 pages (of what would become a 174-page manuscript), did I feel ready to connect with FriesenPress. I would find working with a press that guided me to ask questions about a structure for my book greatly supported me in my first foray into book publication.

Then a promotional plan with the press came up in May of 2021, and I committed to finishing my manuscript with them by June 2021 and to work with both a Publishing Specialist and later a Promotion Specialist to help me.

After frequent and consistent communication with Emily, I defined my project to myself as a “bucket” list project – a gift of my writing (over five decades’ worth of poetry in many styles) to my family and friends, and to myself, so I could see the growth and continuity of my ideas and the shaping of me as a poet. April 2022 saw the published version of my poetry collection.

What was most helpful as I continued my work on the manuscript was completing a Project Questionnaire.  It asked me to “provide a brief synopsis of my manuscript and/or its main theme; professional or life experiences that led to my writing this manuscript; my goals for the book – short and long-term ones; and to define what “success in publishing” is to me.”

Looking back at my answers, I am reminded that this project was a way to produce a finished product – a book of my poetry –that would signal to those close to me and to those who don’t know me as well, what I’ve thought long and deeply about in my life, a collection that would share my thoughts, reflections, learnings, and questions with others – Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums.

My Publishing Specialist suggested, given that the collection spanned decades of my writing life from high school to college to graduate school through adult years as an educator, counselor, parent, spouse, and friend, that I separate out the poetry, which I decided to arrange chronologically, into sections of my life, titling those sections with the names of those periods – so Early Writing Years… Johns Hopkins University, The Writing Seminars…Teaching Years in my 20’s ….Parenthood, Divorce, Relationships…And, Other Writings…

I also made the decision to ascribe a date to each poem. The first one in the collection is my high school “Class Poem” printed in our yearbook and in our graduation program; others that follow include not only the date of the writing but also, places where the poetry appeared.  This way, I hoped the reader who would “stick with me” and read through the book, would begin to see, as I had and do, the continuity of themes in my writing. These originated in my adolescent questioning of the world, to my current “crone” questioning of where we’ve been and, with a sense of courage and hope, where we might be headed if we only listen to our truest selves.

At the suggestion of my editor, I added a prefatory essay, “What’s Going to Happen to My Poetry and Journals?” and an epilogue essay, “Some Final Words When Silence Gives Way to Sound.”  I reached out to a former student who had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago; she read the manuscript and I commissioned her to draw an illustration for the frontispiece – based on the themes of my poetry.  And, my husband, an avid hiker, had taken a picture that spoke to me from one of his many journeys – a tree stump with the markings leaving no doubt that the tree had a visage!  That became my cover picture.

By March 2022, my final version of the manuscript and a sample “mock-up” copy of the published edition were in my hands for a final review, and in April 2022, I held two boxes of books I’d ordered, hoping to have poetry readings and to share them with friends and family.  I now have a website (with the assistance of my publisher) at www.barbarasimmonspoetry.com, which headlines my poetry book, but gives me space to add more recent publications of mine in journals and online.  I’ve given several readings, and have, this spring, invitations to read to English classes at several local high schools as a “local poet.” I’ve read at celebrations of the arts at my church and have sent to the colleges I’ve attended for inclusion in Alumni Notes and Publications, information about my book.  And, I’ve been mindful of mentioning it on social media links. But, as I realize, the true success of my book is that it exists, has found its way into friends’ and family’s hands, and shared, as I hoped, “my soul’s appearance as a poem.”

 

Poems Excerpted from Offertories: Exclamations and Disequilibriums

 

Escape Plans

Inspired by Banksy’s latest installation art on the walls of Reading Gaol in England

 

We do it without thinking, sighting those red block letters,

                                    E X I T

reassuring our leaving places where we’ve found ourselves,

or more precisely, where we’ve found ourselves lost,

in theaters, malls, relationships,

those gathering spaces where,

not sure sometimes why we’re there,

we fold away small notes to self, including routes by which we’ll leave.

It’s been a year since we took leave

from what? Routines, connections, worn-out paths of

customary comings, anticipated goings,

a year of changing patterns, forswearing the habitual,

creating novel ways to meet, to share, to love, to spend

time trying not to think where we should have been,

envisioning new plans to leave the here and now

without abandoning ourselves. What’s left

when signs are not available? The word itself lies next to

others in the dictionary, including existential, and they

become new guides for taking leave, and flight, and hold

of who we are

as we discover what

it is to paint our own way out of boxes, out of corners,

over all walls that restrict our freedoms

finding what we’ve missed seeing.

– NewVerse News, Spring 2021

 

Take away the accoutrements, get to the essence.

 from Anna Halprin, dancer/choreographer

 

In this picture you’re barefoot on your deck,

a wooden acre wrapped around your home,

your natural dance studio, where cloud and sky and sun and blue

help bodies become dancers, where singular experiences

beyond the body find their way inside,

becoming gesture, movement, giving answers

to why we move this way, not that, into, around,

under the others on the deck, the patterns of their limbs

and feet and hands letting story enter the body, exit as dance.

 

You teach by showing that you move for love, to share

what lives inside your heart so others find what lives in theirs.

You write that when you eat a carrot

you eat the sun, that we are but the human dance

of life, recycling everything we see and touch and feel

into the you and you and you we brush past

on this deck, beyond this deck, into the trees, into

the ecstasy of branches reaching.

I watch you move

others to move themselves to be more, feel more,

uncover ways we can connect, to treat

the very ground we stand upon as holy, the feet that

touch it then and now and hence as sacred, the hands

that reach above our heads potential wings that soar,

that share, that speak the only message that will matter,

that we all have mattered here.

– NewVerse News, June 2021

 

 

A few of Judy Chicago’s favorite things  

Inspired by a photo memoir in the Wall Street Journal Magazine, 2020

 

That an airbrush is in the picture surprises me

as does the photo of Anais Nin,

the former what helped Chicago’s artistry,

the latter, a reminder women serve

as muses for each other. My eyes stop on the

poster she named “Stranded,” unable to discern

exactly what I’m seeing, but drawn to what she called

the series that it’s from, The End:

A Meditation on Death and Extinction. I am

aware the floor is set with items that she loves,

reminds me that she’d set a larger table, one

for women, where she gathered 39 to honor,

including oh so many who’d not been on

invitation lists before—women, artists,

ones deserving of a place to sit. My favorite

item, though, of hers is accidental, maybe.

Fastened to the window a wrought iron curly cue

casts shadows on the studio floor, will disappear

by sunset. All women looking at what Judy’s made

know we won’t.

– 2021

 

 

How to Make a Fortune Cookie

and maybe understand the fortune

 

It would be easy, wouldn’t it,

if all we had to do was measure out and cut

the strips for all our maybes, then write

what we predict or hope or fear will happen,

put them aside, which sometimes we can do

with thoughts pre-occupying us, then go

preheat the oven,

beat egg white, flour, sugar, salt,

add almond flavoring and oil, then stir

until the thickened batter can be spooned

upon the baking sheet. Wait fifteen minutes,

remove the baked dough circlets, place

one strip of what the future holds on each,

and fold in half.

 

Come back later, break

open one or all of these small fortune

pastries, lifting out the paper from its womb, birthing

gently what you either hope or dread will be the words

pronouncing future themes, hopes, riddles, ironies,

the stuff of fortune cookies and of life. You’ve barely tasted

what that future is, and start, in bites

to realize how you hold

what it will take to feast upon it.

– Soul-Lit, Spring 2022