If You Don’t Know Where You’re Going, Go by a Way You Don’t Know

This is the title of the blog because I’m looking for information about this Chinese proverb (chengyu?) I heard on one of Ellen Bass’s craft talks and I’m hoping someone out there googling the same thing can help me out. Every time I google it, some dumbass Lewis Carroll piece of shit pops up and I am not talking about that one. I have been looking for this proverb for ~2 years. It has become my white whale.

Anyways, I won an award, a big award, and no one is more surprised than me. I sent poems to quite a few contests, early this year, in spite of the bad rap writing contests (often deservedly) have, because I thought sending poems to journals via open submission windows would not end well for me. I thought editors HAVE to be influenced by author bylines—they’re not machines, judging every poem by the same “objective” criteria—they have a house style! They like this kind better than that kind! They published a lot of academics in their last issue and are looking specifically for blue-collar writers, this time! They want an emerging writer for this issue but not one from Appalachia, gross! (This is all happening in my head.) So, I thought my work would have a better chance if it was judged blind.

Ergo, I spent most of my writing money entering contests. Contests that felt like the lottery (which I have never played, but have imagined playing). That had high entry fees. A really anxiety-inducing gamble, and the adrenaline was a little addictive NGL.

I’m not actually a great judge of my own work, so I had this big cauldron where I simmered the poems I thought were “good” and cast a few spells etc. with them, but the poem I entered in THIS contest, Beloit Poetry Journal’s Adrienne Rich Award, was special, and I knew it. Of course, editors reject good poems every day of their lives, it’s really a sadly crowded and competitive field out there. Nothing to be done about it, since people don’t read or buy poetry books, don’t @ me. But this poem was my only in-depth piece about postpartum depression / postpartum anxiety / postpartum suicidal ideation. It’s built on this interesting structure, of the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (a questionnaire for new mothers that’s supposed to flag them for—or clear them from—PPD proceedings.

So I submitted other poems to lower-tier mags and journals, but only sent this one to the “best” journals and contests, even after it started racking up rejections.

And now I have run out of time to blog, so I’ll cut it off here, but let me leave you with this thought: that piece your intuition is telling you is your strongest piece? It actually is. I’m not telling you to enter it in contests, unless you think it has a certain timeliness, but I am telling you to honor it. What kind of honor does it want? Does it want to be published? Does it want to be hand-printed in a free zine and passed out to people downtown? Does it want to win a big contest? Does it want to be self-published and sold on Amazon? What does it want??? It’s crying!!! Give that baby what it wants!!!!!