Personal Essay

 I just submitted what they call a "personal essay" to the Sun.

Query letter: 

Dear Sun editors:

My personal essay, Bird, is a 1068-word reflection on how workplaces have changed over the years and what it’s like to be 50 and looking unsuccessfully for a job for a long time, then what it’s like to finally get hired after fearing you might never work again.

This story will appeal to readers who identify with being a part of the American work force for the past 30 years, especially people who have had a lot of jobs.

I have a bachelor’s degree in English and have published several newspaper articles for the San Diego Union-Tribune and the Bellingham Weekly and a short story in red. literary magazine.

Thank you for your consideration,

 Kelly Clark

Hemingway talks to me

Not like a voice in my head, but more like all the books of his and about him that I've read are coalescing. All the information I've been feeding my brain about writing for 50 years is shifting around and becoming something. It's exciting to watch and experience.

Hey! Look at that flower

Near the end, poet Gary Snyder says, "Art makes you see things you should have seen anyway ... You don't have to be a genius to look at a flower but somebody has to tell you, 'Hey! Look at that flower!' sometimes."

Snyder talking

Loose

I wrote a short story to submit to magazines, hoping it might lead to publishing opportunities for Desolation Ghosts, but it's going into the vault. It was sort of inspired but sort of forced (though, in my experience, all writing is forced in that you discipline yourself to put the words on the paper and make sure they're the right ones), but I'm shelving it because I didn't enjoy writing it and I didn't feel good about it during or after the process. I guess I just needed to write it for myself, and practicing is always good. I don't spend enough time in the woodshed.

Verboten?

I just wrote something I'm not sure is supposed to be written. I'm guessing tragic child deaths in first person are probably verboten. It's disturbing for sure, but I sort of feel like anything God can stand watching deserves to be written. Whether anyone can stand reading it, when I could barely stand writing it, may be another matter.

Then again, The Lovely Bones is beautiful ...

Moss.

https://mosslit.com/

Bookstore

In my fantasy world, Jeremy and I buy a building between Easton's Books and Steve the old hippie (who knew Di Prima and Burroughs) in Mount Vernon, WA, where we live upstairs with our beagles (and cats) and run Books Off Jameson downstairs, possibly augmented by a small coffeeshop or automat-drink-serviced reading area. Jeremy putters around the bookstore during the day, while I walk a few blocks to my new, exciting job (which I actually have) helping advocate for the voiceless invisibles, then come home at lunch to eat with my man and walk the dogs along the river revetment and downtown. My best friend, Rob, who works for a cool bookstore in San Diego moves up with his husband, who, like my husband, has a career in computers, and manages the bookstore. He knows everything about book retail. More importantly, we get to workshop our writing together, like we did in the old days; we get to talk about, breathe and live books. 

And maybe we publish our own books and the work of our friends, like the amazing poems of my other best friend, Sarah, that are sitting like Emily Dickinson's in drawers and journals and computers, unread, when they are truly, unbiasedly some of the most breathtaking poems I've ever read. I've never read one and not gotten the chills, and I am cold-hearted when it comes to feelings. They would probably make normal people wail.

And this is how it was done by the Beats and City Lights and the Lost Generation and Shakespeare and Company. Granted, someone had to get credibility the old fashioned way first, through legit or semi-legit publishing and hype ... and sometimes through dubious magazines and infamy. Kerouac initially carried the Beats via Sterling Lord, Hemingway had Charles Scribner, and Fitzgerald had Maxwell Perkins. It's hard to imagine the three of them sitting at their desks writing pitches and mailing off pages, but I guess they must have. 

I know agents and publishers are as important as writers. They are. An unpublished book is just scribbles on a page going nowhere. And I know I'm not Kerouac, Hemingway, or Fitzgerald, but I can still sniff along their trails, following the best I can, just in case I've put some words together in the right order to capture some ideas or emotions or information that other humans might identify with and need to hear.

Publishing Perspective

The thing I have to remind myself of is that Desolation Ghosts was given to me as a gift. If it's supposed to have a life in the world, all I have to do is take some basic actions to make it available. I don't have to run around in a chaotic world (publishing via agent) that clutters up my head and feels yucky. Self-publishing, at this time, doesn't feel right. Paying someone else to "self-publish" it is definitely off the table. Trying too hard to get an agent is out, but I can use QueryTracker to occasionally look for possible matches and send out some queries, even if it feels like it's not enough or like it's a waste of time. And I could research some magazines and write some short stories and send them off. That feels pretty clean, but only if I don't force the work. I'm interested to see if the wind of inspiration might return for some short stories or if it was a one-time deal. It is also possible DG just needed to be written - to exorcise ghosts, to validate a friend, to keep me sane during Covid - not actually published. And I need to remember that, too.

Scavengers

Back in the eighties, my best friend from high school got sucked into Faces International, where she paid a significant amount of money for the chance to be discovered as a model. Someone I know now has fallen for a similar scheme to get her book published and has set up a Go Fund Me to do it. The hype I see around getting an agent - seminars, conventions, books and trainings about how to write books and queries, books and trainings about how to get published - it all feels pretty close to that lower level of production/scamming. But my husband reminds me that no matter how good (or bad) what you have to offer is, it still has to get noticed by the right person to get born and introduced to the world. It's all pretty overwhelming and foreign.

Wit

While reading all of Fitzgerald's novels in the past two weeks, I noticed how much he talks about epigrams. I wonder how he would feel in today's social media environment, where the quip is king. Pretty comfortable, I'd guess, but I don't think Hemingway would like it. Was cleverness always so important in publishing?

Pitching is not my strength, but I can write a little, just like I'm not good at job interviews, but I'm a good worker. At least I don't have to perform what I write, because I'd be even worse at that than pitching it. I'm excited to see Henry Rollins perform May 17th at the Neptune for the first time in years. What a talent to be able to tell stories audibly like that. What a mind.

Excerpt 5 - Rattlesnake Wrangling

Machris remembers her first interaction with a visitor struggling with mental health issues. Her duty station the first time she came to NOCA was in the remote town of Stehekin, on the east side of the park, accessible only by foot, ferry, or float plane, where the climate transforms from rainforest to a drier, less dense, Colorado-like environment with pine trees and fat rattlesnakes.

An interpretive ranger at the Golden West Visitor Center had called to report yet another rattlesnake sunning itself not far off the deck of the lodge. Protecting visitors by wrangling rattlesnakes was not what Machris had signed up for, but she left her quarters and jogged down to the Hilton, which was what everyone called the seasonal rangers’ and transient fire technicians’ housing units, to pound on Dirk Talbot’s door. She needed the other ranger for back-up in case the snake evaded her. She was really very afraid of them, but she would never let it show.

At the lodge, Talbot grabbed the garbage can and Machris took the rake. Still unable to believe she was doing it, Machris maneuvered the rake a little below the snake’s head, using the tines to scoop him up as he snapped at the handle, then quickly flipped the rake twice in two directions so the snake’s body briefly wrapped over the rake in two places before she shook him off into the upright garbage can and Talbot slammed the lid shut. 

“There has got to be a better way to do this!” she said for about the sixth time that summer, shivering in disgust. Worst dance ever.

Talbot laughed, like he always did, and good-naturedly grabbed both handles of the garbage can to carry it up the hill to their snake-release spot away from the lodge and the ferry landing and the rest of “town.”

As the snake streaked indignantly under a log, Machris yelped when she backed into a blonde girl, about 16-years-old but younger-looking because of her spaced-out expression. The girl shrieked in return, and muttered indecipherably but vehemently. Machris could make out a few words like “devil,” “sin” and “blood,” but the girl didn’t seem to see her. 

Talbot mouthed “cuckoo” behind the girl. Machris gestured for him to stop and spoke gently to the girl, “Hello. Hello? Can you hear me?”

The girl looked up toward the sky, seeming to see something, then swiveled her head as if watching the thing float, but there was nothing there.

Talbot flicked his fingers above the girl’s shoulder, casting shadows onto her chest, and she turned fast, but he’d withdrawn his hand quickly, and she searched again for something that wasn’t there.

Machris glared and shook her head at him, glancing around to see if there was anyone nearby who might be with the girl, but there wasn’t.

“What’s your name?” She asked.

The girl’s head suddenly whipped toward her, and she directed a burning stare into Machris’s eyes, chanting in a low voice that increased in volume and intensity, “Do you dare speak to me? Do you dare? Do you dare? DO YOU DARE, HERETIC?”

Machris shivered, and Talbot covered his mouth, obviously trying not to laugh. Then Machris made a mistake, one she never repeated.

“Hey, let’s, um, let’s go find your parents,” she said carefully, reaching out a hand to guide the girl toward the lodge. When her fingers touched the girl’s arm, the girl released a piercing, inhuman howl and started seizing. 

“Run get the paramedic!” Machris ordered Talbot. He took off, and Machris searched around for something to put in the girl’s mouth to keep her from biting her tongue off. 

She found a small stick but was as afraid of the girl’s mouth as she was of the rattler’s.

A firefighter appeared within moments, followed by Talbot and a scared man and woman, who had been looking for the girl when they heard Talbot’s calls for help.

Whatever that was, psychosis or something more sinister, Machris had not run across anything like it since, but she’d learned to approach situations where people may not be in their best states of mind with respect and caution.

Short Stories

Now that I've pulled my posts about writing DG from Facebook onto this blog where they can all be in one place, I can continue talking about the selling process, which is a lot stranger to me than the writing or revision processes were. Revisions, of course, continue, but I think I'm done with the major ones.

I've sent 31 query letters, each one adapted a little as I learn more about how to get an agent. It's kind of gross because you have to take something that feels real and true and original, package it into something artificial and gimmicky, and try to fit it into a bunch of categories that suck the freshness right out of it. 

The whole thing feels kind of backwards to me, trying to find someone who is looking for exactly what you have to sell and hoping they'll take a tiny peek at it to see if it fits their interests. I do get that they need to be excited about it in order to sell it, but I feel like the way the product and pusher connect is askew. My husband says it's just like finding an agent to sell your house, but it's not. You don't research all the real estate agents to figure out who's looking for two-stories or only wants to sell houses with Jacuzzis, etc. 

I'll keep researching and querying agents, but I've been thinking about the back door, which was suggested by a lovely couple who let me describe them and their work in the book with their real names. They suggested pitching parts of the book - which does have a number of adventure stories that can be read independently from the novel - to magazines, where maybe someone would see my short story and want to read a whole book.

I like the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Sun. I decided to research what kind of fiction they publish. I started with this short story The Missing Limousine by Sanjena Sathian, and it was so good, I was completely demoralized and embarrassed at my effrontery in thinking of myself as a writer.

However, there are different kinds of writing, and I do think my book has value and might be publishable. Six people have read the whole thing and are very supportive, but they're family and the most loyal of friends, some people have read parts and claim to love what they read, but there were bunches of other people who were excited to read it and asked for access to the whole thing. Then, after sharing it, I never heard a peep from them, which, you know, isn't good. So I'm aware it may not be grabbing the majority of people who have a look. On the other hand, everyone has their own tastes, and you can't please everyone. It's just impossible to know if you have something really good or if you've written a lemon and are too close to see it. So you go on faith and instinct and hope you're not deluded.

I did use some fancy writer tricks in the book, like symbolism and repetition and foreshadowing and all that fun stuff, but it's mostly simple, straightforward writing, so maybe the literary magazines won't be the right fit for the small adventure stories inside Desolation Ghosts.

Which means I have a pile of short story collections to study, more magazine short stories to consume, and possibly more writing to pursue if I want to try publishing DG via getting noticed in a magazine. I liked writing short stories in the past, but it's been a long time and I've only written one I'm actually proud of. Maybe I'll try again.

How and why Desolation Ghosts was born

In the winter of 2020-2021, a man with mental illness left a suicide note in his car and disappeared into the woods in the Pacific Northwest. He was known to be paranoid, probably dangerous, and carrying a gun, which affected how his search was handled. Should it have changed how emergency services responded or should he have gotten the same resources as someone not in the throes of a mental health crisis would have?

In February and March, 2021, a book on the subject - Desolation Ghosts - exploded out of me, based on my experiences working as a dispatcher at North Cascades National Park. The majority of the book turned out to be a love letter about the park itself, as well as fictionalized word photos of people, events, animals, and places I experienced there. 

Outdoors + Social Justice

 In case anyone else tries to sell a book, here's somewhere agents post specifically and concisely what they're looking for.

https://mswishlist.com/

My book boils down to: Outdoors + Social Justice, which is a hard, specialized combo, but I think it's original, not just the same old story dressed up in different clothes.

Old Hippie

Yesterday was great because it was a 2-dog day (not counting my own) and I met an old friend of Diane di Prima and Brion Gysin, who introduced him to William Burroughs in the 60s. He also helped paint the Merry Prankster's bus. Now he is retired and selling books in Mount Vernon.

Today is already a 2-dog day since I met two corgis running in the street in front of SWHS. I was on my way to work, so a teacher who stopped to help catch them took over getting them home. I have a few techniques for catching loose, stranger dogs (while keeping them safe and out of the street), but she taught me a new one. She just told the dog to sit. I've had luck getting them to take me to their homes by telling them in a certain tone of voice that it's time to go home, but I will definitely add "sit" to my toolbox for when I need to catch them for some reason.