I didn’t go for my MFA after graduating from college almost seven years ago. A handful of my classmates went down that path with heads held high and the talent they’d developed during our times together. I didn’t follow them, not necessarily for the lack of desire but in fact for the lack of planning and the financial constraints that stood against me. In this regard, I envisioned myself as the crazy old man that left the village to be rid of society and live in solitude amongst the beautiful, beastly things in the harsh wilderness. I struck out on my own, making a home for myself in the working world and giving into my inspirations with the time I had left upon getting home before bed. I kept up on projects that I’d started in the classroom while starting ones that were fresh in my mind.
I tried my hand at submitting to magazines that I found online, thinking that my material was something that they would enjoy and potentially accept. Looking back at those experiences now, when the rejection letters started snowballing in my inbox, I know I didn’t have the maturity to handle the disappointment I felt in my heart. The auto-response to such a situation, as I’m sure any writer will say, is to pick yourself up, move onto the next submission, and hope the editor picks your work that day. This ideal would not have been so difficult to follow, were it not compounded by the struggles I was going through in my personal life. 2012 was an awful year in general; a five-year relationship came to a sorrowful end, I was jobless for a brief time, and unsure if I was moving out of the region.
But almost as if by magic, and by cliché perhaps, the following year cast out the darkness that I’d been stumbling in: it began with the meeting and courtship of the woman who would go on to be my wife. I got hired at a company that I could enjoy going to work for every day. I found and joined a writing group that specialized in poetry, which was ironic considering how little I studied it in school and that I mostly dabbled in fiction. And to culminate it all, the first poem that I submitted to this group was considered worthy enough for publication; it lives on in the 6th E-Issue of Cactus Heart Press. I felt like Steve Carrel’s version of Maxwell Smart, where he’s told he’s going to be a secret agent. He borrows the Cone of Silence to proclaim his happiness inside it, only for the device to immediately fail as he starts shouting.
Newfound inspiration and energy coursed through my being. I wrote many more pieces that were shared around in my workshop group. I fell back into a regiment of writing on a more consistent basis. I went back to reading books that I hadn’t read in years. The one thing that I take away from that period of resurgence was capturing the guidance and the critique I got from those workshop sessions; I carry a lot of my friends’ pieces as inspiration when I need it the most. It was when the rejection letters started coming up again that I grew nervous about the success that I’d celebrated. I bucked up my courage and still submitted, having a better handle of the process and my emotions this time around. I kept my work up all the same, hoping that something would stick. There were at least two magazines among the twenty-five I submitted to over the course of three years that at least acknowledged that I made it to a second round of peer review before ultimately giving me personalized rejections.
I couldn’t stand the amount of “declined” submissions in my Submittable Inbox, even though I had the ability to remove them from the page. I don’t know if I kept them as some sort of measurement of my progress or not. For the sake of brevity, I was informed by Black Fox Literary Magazine in February of this year that my self-doubt was all for not; they generously accepted two of my poems for publication, which can be found in Issue 15. The energy I’d felt before came roaring back. What made things all the better was that I could celebrate the success in person with my wife, after we’d been facilitating a long distance relationship for almost four years.
I acknowledge at the time of this post that I am still young, both in age and understanding the sense of how my writing process works. What I think is good will not necessarily make it out of an editor’s slush pile, regardless of what publication it’s sent to. I may have continued exercising my writing skills in an informal setting, but it didn’t do anything to stop me in terms of limiting my ability to be published. You have to be comfortable with your work leaving the safety of your arms and going off into the unknown, where it will find success or failure. You will find a publication where the editor looks at your piece and says, “Wow, look what I’ve got here!” It’s just a matter of sticking with it and always going about it with your best foot forward.
If I were to offer any advice at this point, or a summary of my personal experience, I would say:
- Read as much as you can as often as you can, with a pen in hand to make notes and identify points of interest or discussion (if what you are reading is yours to keep).
- Set a schedule to write and stick to it as honestly as possible; save binge watching that Netflix show or finishing that video game level for the weekend as a treat.
- Set-up or join a writing group. The feedback you’ll receive from such forums is invaluable.
- Don’t be afraid of clicking that “Submit” button; many magazines with an online venue will give you access to an archive of past issues so you can get an idea of what kind of work has been accepted in the past.
- Believe in your ability to write; developing your skill takes time, patience, and dedication. If you have an opportunity to go on to higher education after college, do what’s right for you. It’s how you forge your path after you leave the classroom that will matter in the end.
Alan Ferland graduated in 2011 with his Bachelor’s in Creative Writing and is a writer who moonlights as a Quality Assurance technician for a vitamin supplement company. He lives with his wife and cat in Keene, NH, but longs for the food, drink, and beaches of Brazil, where he has been four times in the last three years. He’s had three poems published thus far in his writing career; his first was at the Cactus Hear Press and the other two are in Black Fox Literary Magazine Issue 15.
