A fellow writer/mom just made a Facebook post that got me thinking about my state as a writing mama. The Facebook post talked about completing and submitting a draft of her dissertation, and it also talked about the job applications she is sending out and the two (two!) novels she has completed and begun submitting, too.

She is the mother of a toddler, a one-year-old. Where does she find the time????

Another writer friend of mine is also putting me to writing mama shame. Jayme Russell’s son, Dylan, is, I think, eleven. He was eight when I first met him, and he was so tiny and adorable and sweet and fun (he’s still most of those things, except that he’s not really so tiny anymore). In spite of having her hands full as the mother of a spirited school-aged boy, Jayme still found the time to earn her MA in poetry and is now working toward her MFA at the University of Notre Dame. Jayme has published nonfiction and poetry alike, and recently she made a vow to write a poem a day for the entire month of October (you can read about her progress in her blog).

She’s writing every. Single. Day. AND earning her MFA. AND being a mom.

Meanwhile, my relationship with writing has been very on-again/off-again since Amie was born, since I found out I was pregnant, even. It’s hard for me to find, not the time, maybe, but the energy to sit down and write when I spend most of my day chasing Amalie around, trying to prevent her from sticking everything she ever finds in her mouth and choking on it, and stressing out about whether I’m stimulating her mind enough and whether she’s hitting her developmental milestones on time. By the time I get Amie down for a nap or to bed at night, I don’t even feel like reading, let alone writing. To be fair to me, during a good deal of her sleeping time I grade papers or plan lessons, but I do have some genuinely free time . . . and I spend it watching Mad Men or playing Super Mario Land 3D.

I honestly think if I hadn’t already published a book before I had Amie, I would probably just give up on the whole idea of being a writer. I’m in my thirties, I would probably tell myself. I have a kid. It’s time to grow up and stop dreaming about something that’s never going to happen. But I did publish a book before I had a baby, and that, combined with whatever small success I’ve had so far, is enough to make me feel not like a would-be writer, but a writer, unqualified. It gives me the confidence to believe I should be doing this, should keep at it, that I am not wasting time dreaming the impossible.

So rather than looking at my writer/mama friends and telling myself, “I guess I’m just not a real writer, like they are. If I was, I would have found a way to be as productive as them,” I look at those ladies and feel inspired. I say, “So it is possible to juggle motherhood and the writing life. So I can do this.” And then, I do.

First of all, some news: my book is now available in Kindle format! I couldn’t be more thrilled that the publisher decided to make it available for Kindle. If nothing else, it allows people who might be somewhat interested in reading the book the chance to read a sample before purchasing it. Plus, the Kindle price is much lower. Readers who might be hesitant about spending $17.95 on a book by an unknown author might be much more willing to take the gamble for $9.99.

Now on to what I want to talk about this week. It’s almost time for summer break here—summer break, for me, means one week between the end of spring quarter and the beginning of summer quarter, during which time I have to prepare the Blackboard course for my summer class—and I’ve been excitedly planning my summer writing projects. I haven’t been able to get anywhere near as much writing done as I would have liked for the past year, but the older Amalie gets, the easier it is to get things done around her. On top of that, I’m only teaching one class over the summer, and it’s a creative writing class. I expect to have plenty of time in which to write, and that’s exactly what I plan to do.

Here are my goals for this summer:

1.      I’m going to complete the first draft of a middle grade children’s novel, of which I currently have about half written. This, I decided, is the main writing project I want to be focusing on right now. I talked a few weeks ago about how leapfrogging from project to project was preventing me from really getting anything done, and how I needed to pick one project to just finish, for cripe’s sake. Well this is the project I’ve settled on.

2.      Once I’ve finished the first draft of that novel, which will probably take me no more than a month, I want to write a first draft of the much shorter children’s book I’m collaborating on with my mom. My mom is a scratchboard artist, and she’s creating the illustrations for a children’s story that I’m going to write. We agreed on this a couple of years ago—but I’ve been slacking in my duties. She’s already completed several scratchboard paintings for the book. I’m going to use the paintings she’s already created as inspiration to write the story. We don’t know if we’ll be able to find a publisher for the book once it’s finished, but it’s an incredibly fun project and worth spending time on, nonetheless. Plus, I sort of think we might be able to do a show in a gallery even if it doesn’t end up getting published, or we can create copies of the book ourselves and sell them as art-chapbooks (I learned how to make those in a workshop while I was getting my MFA).

3.      In addition to those two main projects, I want to work on some stories. I have, at present, five stories I’m sending around. I have three more stories in draft form that I’d like to revise and start sending out, and three more half-written drafts of stories that I feel really excited about and would like to finish. I won’t set a concrete goal in terms of stories, but I will say that by the end of the summer I’d like to have a few more stories in circulation, and ideally, I’d like to have complete drafts of the three half-written stories I believe are so promising.

In the house across the street from mine lives a small family—a mother, a father, and maybe two or three kids. They have a swingset in their yard, and now that the weather is warm and beautiful, you often see one or two girls swinging away. It reminds me of how much I loved to swing when I was a kid—well, I still love swinging, to be honest. When I was little, I’d spend hours, HOURS, on the swingset in our backyard. I used to bring my little portable CD player out with me and listen to music and swing until either A) a bee would come by and scare me back inside, or B) my mom would call me in for dinner.

Now, I am thirty-one years old. My hair is turning white, one long, wispy strand at a time. I am a mother, a wife, a college instructor. Strange though it seems, I am a grown-up. I’m not sure when that happened, but somewhere along the line, when I was looking the other way, I guess, I passed through childhood, through young adulthood, and ended up here.

As you may have noticed from last week’s post, I’ve been feeling a bit depressed lately about my prospects as a writer/college instructor. These things didn’t bother me that much before I had a baby, but now, at times, I’m completely consumed by my desire to publish more, land a decent job, and generally find a bit of stability for myself and my family. I feel frustrated that my daughter won’t get to grow up with a nice backyard and a swingset, like I did. I feel frustrated that every summer, we don’t even make enough money to cover our basic living expenses (true story: the summer I signed my book contract, we DESPERATELY needed the money I got for my advance. I honestly don’t know what we would have done if that bit of luck hadn’t happened at just the right time. We would have emptied out our savings account well before the end of the summer).

I think to some extent, having published my first book a little over a year ago adds to these feelings. When I first found out I was getting the book published, I thought it was going to create a sort of domino effect for my career. I imagined I could use the fact that I was getting one book published as leverage to get an agent and publish another. Then, with two published books and an agent, I would go out and land myself a full time job, which would afford me a stable enough income that I could write more and more books without the distraction of worrying about money all the time or having to work during the summer.

Of course, that isn’t what happened. It’s hard to say whether having a book published already made any difference when I was querying agents last time around. It may have—at least one agent told me my credentials were “impressive”—but I probably got about the same average of manuscript requests as I did when I was querying agents without a published book under my belt, and,  just like before, all of those still ended in eventual rejection.

And the more time that passes since my book’s publication date, the more I think prospective agents, editors, and employers alike are going to ask, “Alright, but what have you done lately?” I have this overwhelming fear that if I don’t publish another book in the next couple of years, having published a book won’t really matter at all anymore—in terms of being a stepping stone for my career, anyway. If you don’t keep steadily climbing higher on the ladder, the rungs get too slippery and you fall clear off.

But who knows? Maybe I’ll be able to pull myself back onto the ladder. I haven’t fallen off yet, I don’t think. Right now, I’m just sort of dangling, looking down and up and back down again, trying to find some way to regain my purchase. I’ve been writing again, and that’s a good first step. I’ve started submitting again, too: ten submissions a month, just like I used to do. I’m very, very seriously considering applying for PhD programs, and I’m even thinking about trying to get a seat in a graduate level workshop at Ohio University (since Damien’s an employee, I can take classes for half-tuition). Whatever happens, I’m going to try not to let these feelings of failure get the better of me. There is still hope, isn’t there? There is always still hope.

J. T.Dutton is the author of the novels Freaked and Stranded, both published through HarperTeen. I met Dutton a few years ago when she came as a visiting writer to my MFA alma-mater, the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Dutton’s books are quirky and funny and daring—I highly recommend them. I was excited to get a chance to pick her brain about the process of publishing them through such a major publishing house.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and revising your first book, Freaked? You began working on it as an MFA student, right?

Yes, I submitted Freaked to my MFA workshop as a short story, then expanded it to a novella, then expanded it again to a draft of a novel for my thesis project. After I left Alaska, I dropped it into a drawer. Certain scenes continued to grow and become more mentally realized in my imagination and when I had time, I worked on them. Five years later, I finally stuffed the whole project into an envelope.

For those of us who have an unpublished novel languishing on our hard drives, landing an agent seems like the impossible dream sometimes. How did you hook up with your agent? How long did it take you to sign with your agent after you had begun shopping the book around?

I sent simultaneous blind queries to agents in A Writer’s Guide. (I did not think of Freaked as a Young Adult novel so I chose agents based on their interest in literary fiction.) Jodie Rhodes was maybe number 32 on the list. She asked to see the full manuscript, signed me a few days later, and sold the book in a matter of hours. I was still getting rejections from other agents even as news of the sale was going public in Publishers Weekly.

The seesaw effect of loving my manuscript one day and hating it the next is what kept me from submitting it sooner. Fear of rejection is what often stops me from taking important leaps of faith.

I’ve read that most agents don’t find many clients through the slush pile, preferring instead to meet clients through referrals. Do you have any advice for writers trying to brave the query letter process? What do you think makes a query letter stand out?

I was invited to teach at the Midwest Writers Workshop last summer alongside four agents who presented a panel on the best methods for pitching work. At the end of the conference, all of the agents had requested several full manuscripts and one stated that she’d had some of the best face to face meetings with authors ever. I walked away impressed by how much a one-on-one meeting with an agent can made a difference for aspiring writers. The road to publication requires a lot of collaboration between agent and writer, editor and writer, agent and editor and it makes sense that agents want a sense of who somebody is before they consider signing them.

The typical agent receives nearly 200 blind manuscript queries a week. In lieu of a face to face meeting, a blind query should probably deliver as much of the writer’s personality as possible. Some agents want writers who are market sensitive, others prefer an author who tells a good joke, others are more brass tacks and down to business. Finding the “one” should probably take a while in order for the match to be a success, and query letters should probably not be formula-written, but instead, come from some deep individual and original place.

I have yet to meet Jodie Rhodes face to face though we have exchanged hundreds of e-mails. She recently published a memoir entitled Confessions which describes why she has dedicated herself to the promotion of new authors. If every agent had a manual, figuring out a “personality match” would be a lot easier. Certainly “getting to know” Jodie has deepened my respect for her as a human being and for the work she does.

Tell us about the process of signing the contract with HarperTeen. They loved Freaked so much, they signed you to a two-book deal, right? How much freedom did you have on your second book, Stranded?

Publishers of YA novels frequently sign new authors for more than one book because the bigger contract allows them to plan releases so that the momentum and marketing of the first sells the second. It’s a good deal for writers because having an advance provides a little financial security while they are working. Having the second contract looming over me though managed to stress me out astronomically. I couldn’t dawdle or wait to feel inspired to write. I also had to show my editor a lot of garbage that I hadn’t yet recognized was garbage. I worried every day that she was going to boot me to the curb. I definitely felt like I was “faking it” a good percentage of the time.

Despite time constraints, I received quite a bit of creative freedom to take my second book in the directions I wanted. One of the things I like best about Freaked and Stranded now that they are out in the world is that they don’t fit into a clear YA mold and that they truly represent my take on the genre.

How hands-on has your agent been with your books? And your editor(s)?

I think we put equal parts love into each project.  Author love is different than agent and editor love. I did the writing, Jodie did the selling, and my editor did a truckload of patient reading and recommending.  One of the things I have learned since being published is writing professionally is very collaborative—a lot of thought goes into the finished product. 

Now that both books are out, what’s the next step? Will you continue publishing through HarperTeen?

I have no new projects with HarperTeen in the works though I would lay down my life to publish another book with them. I learned a mountain of useful information under my editor’s tutelage. I can’t even begin to express how much I grew as a writer. Whether my next book will be something she wants is really more her decision than mine. I get the sense that she would potentially read anything new I finished, but her business is an art too and she has to make very judicious decisions about what is the best use of her time.

What’s your relationship with your agent like now that you’ve published both books in your two-book deal? What role does your agent play as you take the next steps in your career?

I keep Jodie apprised of my projects and I get the sense she hopes to see work from me soon. Hopefully, I will oblige. I am in “creative mode” at the moment, where really it’s a time just to shut the door and write.

What are you working on now? Is a third book already in the works?

I have written two half-novels and a quarter of a third since I finished Stranded which have potential but not the full-on magic that I think is going to make them interesting to a perspective publisher yet. I’m not about to give up on them, though. If I’ve learned anything these last few years, it’s that big ideas pull together in mysterious ways. I just have to keep the words flowing, sit down every day and work, and more than likely, something interesting will come from it.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the poetry collection Rag & Bone, which was awarded the Elixir Press Antivenom Prize. Her poetry, which is raw and real and exceptionally well crafted, has appeared in numerous literary journals. She teaches full-time now at Central Missouri University and is the Poetry Editor for Pleiades, but when I met Nuernberger, she was finishing up her PhD in Poetry at Ohio University, where she worked as the Assistant Editor of New Ohio Review and, later, the Editor of Quarter After Eight. In spite of her busy schedule as a professor, editor, and mother of an adorable one-and-a-half year old, Nuernberger found the time to answer some questions about her experience winning a book publication contest.

Can you tell us a little bit about the process of writing and revising Rag & Bone? You hold an MFA and a PhD, right? Were any of the poems in this book included in your thesis or dissertation?

I never had the idea that I was writing a book – that task is so monumental I don’t think I could have written a line if that had been the goal. Instead I spent years writing poems, occasionally pausing to spread all of the ones I liked out on the floor and see if they could be grouped in an elegant and meaningful way. Then I’d submit the result to publishers and go back to writing new poems. I repeated this process every six months or so, taking out weaker poems and putting in newer, better ones. I can remember at least six different titles and arrangements, but there were probably more. There are a few poems from the time when I was working on my MFA that made it into Rag & Bone, and many more from my PhD time.

How did you know when the manuscript was ready to begin sending out?

I definitely began sending out the manuscript before it was ready. But I’m not sure how to avoid that. If I found myself thinking older work was as good as it possibly could be, that would be a sign I’d stopped growing as a writer. Alternatively, if I never had those moments of confidence that I had just written something really great, I’d have to give up writing altogether. This is why I love and am grateful for editors – without them I’d be alone in my attic accepting and rejecting myself willy nilly.

How much research was involved in selecting which contests to enter with this book? There are so many poetry manuscript contests out there—how did you learn about the Antivenom Prize?

I used The Writer’s Chronicle and Poets and Writers to keep track of the upcoming contests. If there were presses I wasn’t already familiar with, I’d check out their catalogue to see if they published the kind of books I want to read.  

What made you decide to enter the Antivenom contest in particular? How did you know your book would be a good fit for Elixir Press?

Elixir seemed like a good fit, because many of the poets they published share my interests in quirky history, scientific factoids, and mythic memory.

Can you talk a little about the editorial process for your book? How closely did your editor work with you once the book had been selected as the winner?

Dana Curtis was a very patient and helpful editor. I’d just finished one of those big overhauls of the manuscript about a month before I found out I’d won the prize, so I sent her a manuscript that had a completely different title, a different ordering of poems, and in some cases, some pretty dramatic revisions of the poems themselves. She shared the revisions with Jane Satterfield, who judged the contest, and they accepted these changes. She also had the manuscript carefully copy edited, which was a great help, since there are a million ways to bungle a comma. And she worked with a designer who did four versions of the cover that I was invited to choose from. I’ve heard horror stories about presses that claim artistic control of the manuscript once it’s been accepted for publication, but I was always included in the decision-making process and my requests were always respected… all the way down to my preference for a serif-font.

What has the press done to get the book in the hands of readers? What have you done personally to market the book?

The press sent out many review copies of the book and also has submitted it to some prizes. I’ve scheduled readings in any city where I can find a couch to crash on.

I’ve long been interested in the difference between an MFA and a PhD—both are considered terminal degrees, though more and more programs these days are looking to hire people with PhD’s. As someone who has been through both types of programs, what do you see as the major differences? Would you encourage writers to get one degree over the other?

I thought of getting an MFA as the secular equivalent to spending two years in a monastery or asherim. I was checking out of the work force for a time to focus my attention on poetry because I thought I would be a happier and more fulfilled person at the end of that process. In the back of my mind there was also the thought that I might be able to work in academia someday, which can be a really supportive environment for writers.  

Because those two MFA years were the first time I had devoted myself so completely to the study and practice of writing, the learning curve was shockingly steep. I did not experience that same degree of explosive growth during the time I worked on my PhD. Instead, the four years I spent in a PhD program were a time of steady growth and more methodical revision. It was also a great time to work with accomplished writers and study alongside talented young writers. One great benefit of getting a PhD for me was that I was sheltered during that period from the financial insecurities of the job market – I didn’t have to worry about whether I would be able to find work as an adjunct from one semester to the next, nor did I have to return to my old job as a high school teacher, which can be very time-consuming and emotionally-draining.  

I would advise creative writers to choose programs that emphasize craft over literary theory -- but that balance varies from program to program and the MA/MFA/PhD distinctions aren’t necessarily the key factor. I would also advise writers to pursue these degrees because they find pleasure in the educational process itself. If the MFA or PhD is only a means to a tenure-track end, the risk of squandering 6-7 years of your life in pursuit of uninsured, low-wage adjunct work is very high.

I know you teach full-time now at the University of Central Missouri, where you also work as the Poetry Editor of Pleiades. Do you still find the time to write? What are you working on now?

Because I’m a mom to a young child, I find that this new job actually allows me more time to write. Greater financial security = more child care. I like to joke that I work 9-5 at the poetry factory. I write from 9-11 every morning, then spend the rest of the day on my teaching and editing responsibilities. For me that steady rhythm is good for the creative process. I just finished up a new manuscript earlier this week. It’s a series of poems based on fragments of an Old Kingdom Egyptian cosmology. But if my experience with my first book was any indicator, I’ll be rewriting the whole thing again in six months.

Kelly Kathleen Ferguson is one of the most accomplished early-career writers I know. Her memoir, My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, was published by Press 53 last fall. Her work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Gettysburg Review and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. Kelly, who’s been extremely busy lately doing interviews and readings to promote My Life as Laura, agreed to answer a few questions for us about the process of publishing her book through a small press. For more details, I recommend you read My Life as Laura—she talks about some of her experiences trying to publish the book at the end.

You talk about it a little bit in your book, but could you describe the process of getting this book published. You were originally being represented by an agent, right?

I was! I had what most writers would call a dream agent, who represented exactly my kind of book (narrative nonfiction), who worked for one of the most established agencies in New York. MFA dream come true!

Then a friend of mine told me about an author who had just signed a book deal with a major NYC publisher about a humorous, narrative nonfiction travelogue where the author planned to retrace the pioneer journey of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

That, by the way, was my book idea.

I tortured myself for a week about whether to tell the agent or not. Part of me wondered how she hadn’t heard about the deal, since my agent was supposed to be the one in the know—not me. In the end I decided to email, which was as much fun as telling your fiancé you had herpes this entire time the night before the wedding. I spent all night tossing and turning and sweating until the phone rang at 9 a.m.

New York city area code.

Her first words were, “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

What made you decide to go with a small press rather than seeking representation from another agent?

At the time I believed the agent, that after the NYC publisher had signed Wendy McClure (the “other” author), that no other major publisher would touch my book, because they couldn’t compete with the publicity budget. Probably she was right.

How did you decide which presses to submit to? Did you send out to several, or did you only submit to Press 53? What about Press 53 appealed to you for this project?

I submitted to presses I had heard of: Algonquin, Greywolf, Milkweed, and Press 53.  I owned a book from each of these presses, so I knew they looked professional and represented writers I admire.

I had a personal connection with Kevin Morgan Watson of Press 53, in that he was from North Carolina where I lived for twenty years and he was a friend of a friend of mine. I had first heard of him a few years back when I was first starting to write and I was pleased to see he had been so successful.

What was the editorial process like for this book? Did you work closely with an editor to revise the manuscript?

I’d had many chapters workshopped over the years. I’m grateful for all the advice—from content suggestions to line edits.  One advantage of being in a PhD program, or rather mine in particular, is that I had my adviser Dinty W. Moore read my rough draft. He gave me great big picture feedback. I cut the introduction in half and trimmed 100 pages from the book.

My press editor was Robin Muira. She also worked with me closely, helping me fix the ending, working with copy edits, sharpening language choices, etc. She’s an experienced editor who knew how to shape my book into a professional manuscript.

Most of the bottom line choices, though, were my own. That’s the benefit and the nerve-wracking aspect of working with a small press. I was allowed final say on pretty much all decisions, large and small. But I spent hours, weeks and months pouring over sentences, making sure the book was the best it could be.

One of the main reasons (aside from having an in with the major New York publishers) authors talk about the value of having an agent is to have a professional negotiate a fair contract. This was definitely something that made me nervous when I signed my book contract—I didn’t know what was standard, so I didn’t know whether certain things were just part of the game. Did you feel like you could have used help when it came time to decipher and sign your book contract?

My contract was easy to understand, so not really. I suppose I decided that someone in the small press business probably isn’t in the money racket. I do think a NYC contract would have scared me. Kevin and I from the beginning had what would be called in the Old South “a gentlemen’s agreement” (although technically this would be a gentlemen/lady agreement). I hadn’t even finished the book when he promised to publish it based on a few chapters and an outline. But we hadn’t signed anything.

How is the book being promoted? Has the press been able to market the book at all? What steps have you taken to promote the book?

To avoid repeating myself, I will refer to two blog posts I’ve written on how to be your own book publicist. One I wrote a month after publication and another a bit later. 

I returned recently from a little Alabama tour, which reinforces my advice to use your personal contacts. I have family in Tuscaloosa and friends in Mobile (the Mobile friends build on a Montana MFA friend). The tour confirmed for me that it’s best to read in libraries or small colleges or whatever nice venue you can find. The bookstore has been a pretty big bust for me as a small press author. I had one bookstore employee shut the door in my face. You’d have thought I was hawking copies of The Watchtower. I’ll be honest. I cried.

At most, bookstores agree to carry a few copies. At my last library reading I had a woman come up and want a signed copy for each of her grandchildren—seven!  And with the bookstore cut out of the picture, I made more money. (Press 53 will sell me books at cost). That extra money, combined with places to stay with family and friends, helped me actually clear a little  money on the tour. Crazytalk! I’d still love to work with bookstores, but that hasn’t been the way so far.

For the next book, do you think you’ll go directly to a small press, or will you probably try to sign with an agent?

It will depend on the book I write and what sort of audience I seek. If I write a mainstream book, I would still try for the agent and sign with a big press. I want the publicity budget and the connections. I want distribution to Barnes & Noble, the chance to get on National Public Radio, the opportunity to be reviewed in major newspapers, nominated for major book awards, etc.  That being said, I’ve had a positive experience working with a small press, and it’s great to see small presses doing so well. Small presses are receiving more and more attention and winning more awards.  The difference between "small" and "large" presses shortens every year. So, let's see what I write next and what's happening then.

What are you working on now? I know you write fiction as well. Will your next book project be another memoir, or do you think you’ll go a different route?

So far I’ve been working on a book about Jack, as in Jack Squat and Jack Daniels. Finishing the book and promoting the book has drained me. But on my trip to Alabama I began feeling that spark again, writing notes and taking pictures. I might feel another travelogue/memoir coming on. That’s kind of a bummer because I was looking forward to writing fiction again. Perhaps a Young Adult mystery. We’ll see.

Ken Brosky is the author of the books The King of Blades, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachman (and other stories), and, most recently, Desolation: Stories, and his work has appeared in multiple literary journals of note. You can get the Kindle version of Michele Bachman on Amazon for 99 cents for the next two weeks, so head on over. I first learned about Brosky and his work through his blog, in which he details the process of self-publishing and promoting his Michele Bachman short story collection. Brosky agreed to let me interview him via email to learn more about his experience as a self-published author.

      The stories in your book have been published separately in literary journals, and “I Can’t Just Turn It Off” was a finalist in a Glimmer Train Contest. I have no doubt that you could have published the collection through a small press. What led you to the decision to self-publish?

I just didn’t want to go through the long, long wait for this project. First, you gotta find an agent. Then, you gotta find the publisher. Please wait 6-8 months before sending the manuscript out to another agent/publisher. Then once you find someone, you wait another year or two for it to come out. I just don’t have that kind of time! It’s bad enough the dog needs to go out twice a day … on top of that I’m sending out so many new short stories to magazines that I’m getting like, a rejection a day.

There was another more serious reason, too: I really, really wanted to publish a Kindle version for an affordable price. I think $2.99 is a good price for 100-or-so pages of short stories, no? I’m not a big fan of buying a 150-page short story collection in hardcover for $20. That’s just too much. It’s not a good business model, and I have no idea why New York publishers are so obsessed with keeping this going in an age where the newest generation of readers are used to getting everything—music, magazine articles, news—for free. And where is the cost coming from? Paper and whatever the heck hard covers are made out of.

So I put this out on my own, with the help of a lot of great people. And I think I’d like to keep it going. I think Brew City Press could help a couple published authors a year and we’d do the exact same thing: put together a collection of published stories or poems. We’d format for the Kindle, design a cover, set up the account, and then let the writer have it. Writing all this down, it sounds expensive. This would definitely be a vanity project.

      Several things about the book strike me as very innovative, the introductory notes about each story and the intermissions, for example. I can’t imagine coming across these elements in a short story collection published by a small press. Do you feel self-publishing gave you more freedom than you would have had if you had published through a small press?

Oh sure. You get to do whatever you want with your book. Neil Gaiman did a little set of introductory notes for one of his short story collections, so I guess there’s some history for it. I really liked it, though. I enjoyed hearing him talk about the stories and give a little behind-the-scenes for each one.

It’s not for everyone, though. Some people don’t like it, and they can skip it. That’s OK. But I’ve always enjoyed getting inside a writer’s head and hearing the story behind the story.  

      Have you come across any drawbacks of self-publishing?

      Well, for starters you’re not taken too seriously. That’s not surprising, though, given how much complete crap ends up being self-published. That isn’t to say it’s all crap, but there’s plenty of it. So I’m trying to earn some respect here. It’s a slow process. I still can’t convince my hometown newspaper—The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel—to review my book. It’s “tainted” because it’s self-published. But all the stories were previously published, I argue. Sometimes that works. I contacted Madison’s Cap Times on a whim and they were amazing to me. Interview and everything. Great write-up. A lot of fun. Really supportive of the local arts. When I realized the article was in the printed paper, too, I went to the local supermarket and grabbed like, 20 copies or something. I got a few strange looks from shoppers.

Reviews help, for sure.

      Of course, you need to find reviewers. No publicist here. So I’ve been going out and slogging through dozens and dozens of book blogs and Web sites with some success and some failure and then I blog about it for fun. The big reviewers are so inundated that they almost never take review copies anymore unless they come from the publisher. The Book Slut definitely won’t. I more or less begged without success.

The trick is to find reviewers who might actually like to read your kind of book. My book is a collection of short stories. A web site that reviews only Half-Naked-Scottish-Vampire-Man-Beast books probably isn’t a good fit. There’s a lot of those types of books, by the way. If you’re going to search for book reviewers, expect to end up on lots of sites featuring book covers with half-naked men. Depending on your sexual preference, I suppose this could be an enjoyable process.

      Then of course there are the web sites who charge a small fee for a review. It’s a business and sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad. Kirkus will review self-published books, but for a hefty price. Some other smaller review sites will do it for a much more affordable price, like the Self-Publishing Review.

      What really gets tricky are the sites that are clearly taking advantage of writers. Outskirts Press is a great example. For just $299 (holy crap!) they’ll submit your book to 10 reviewers. Wow! That’s an amazing deal, Outskirts Press! Thank you so much!

      Guess what? I contacted those very same reviewers and sent each one of them a copy of my book. It took two hours. The cost: $20 for printing and shipping.

      So it’s been a lot of work. I’d be lying if I said maintaining the blog and checking the book sales hasn’t been fun, though. I’m learning a lot and I hope others can learn from my mistakes, too.

      After my book was accepted for publication through a small press, I spent the next several months revising according to feedback from the press’s fiction editor. What was the process of preparing your book for publication like? How did you make up for not being able to work with an editor?

      I never would have done this if I hadn’t already received feedback. Since 10 of the 11 short stories are previously published, they were already looked at by editors. Feedback was accepted and implemented.

      Still, it needed a good look-through. So I gave a few copies away to former classmates in my MFA program to see what they could spot. They found a few things, mostly grammar and the such. It passed muster, though.

      But this is one of the downsides of self-publishing. Worst of all, a lot of writers don’t bother getting editing help or, worse, they find an editor and pay way, way too much. I run an editing business on the side and I’m amazed by the number of writers who come to me after having spent 2 or 3 thousand dollars(!) for editing help, only to be greatly disappointed by the service. They’re disappointed enough that they want to spend more money getting more editorial help.

Getting free editing help is one of the cool things about finding an actual publisher. Man, to have an editor who actually likes your work enough to stick with you? That’s the dream right there.

I wouldn’t know. The first book I sold was dropped before it was published by Harbor House Books, so clearly that publisher didn’t believe in me. I don’t even think I had an assigned editor. My blog rants against the Bush administration probably didn’t endear me to the good ol’ boys running the press, though. I remember their editor-in-chief once wrote a book about slaves fighting for the South during the Civil War. That’s how ridiculous he was. That should have been a red flag.

Live and learn, I guess … oh look: they’re out of business. Well, maybe there’s some justice in this world after all.

      You initially put the book out as an e-book, which sells on Amazon for only $2.99. A month later, you put the book out in hard copy form. Was your plan always to make the book available in both formats? How have the sales of the e-book compared to the hard copy?

      I only added a print version because my friend and classmate, Chris Smith, designed such an amazing cover for it. Like, seriously, it’s beautiful. It looks better than most of the stuff you see at Barnes and Noble. The moment I saw it, I said (to the dog, ironically) “This needs to be in a book store.” The dog looked at me curiously, but I think she understood too.

So now the book is in stores. It’s available in two bookstores in Madison and one bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. And I’m happy to ship a few copies anywhere else, too. I’ll try and get it in a couple more stores. I might try and leave one in a Barnes and Noble and then try and buy it and then go: “Oh, it doesn’t scan? That’s weird. This guy’s getting pretty popular.” It might make for a good blog entry.

      Sure, the price is a little higher. But, again, that’s just the cost of printing.

      These days, publishers rarely spend very much money marketing their books, so from a marketing perspective, self-publishing isn’t much different from publishing with a press. What have you done to get the word out about your book? Have there been specific things that have worked especially well?

      Besides reviews? I’m up for anything. The blog has gotten pretty popular, which is cool. Maybe I could sell copies of the book at Madison’s farmer’s market. We have a pretty unpopular governor so maybe I could stop by the protests and sell some copies. Cold selling would take a lot of guts. I could barely work up the courage to walk into the local bookstore and ask them to sell my book.

      There are a couple little sites that let you post a blurb. It’s a neat idea that lets interested readers get a feel for the story. Other than that, you just gotta be creative. I’ve found what works best is desperation and a little self-flagellation. Brainstorm an idea, then procrastinate until you’re in a cold sweat. Then stand in front of the mirror and berate yourself until you finally put on your coat, go out and give it a shot.

      There’s always standing on a corner asking people to buy your book.

      I had one other idea that I might try: what if I just sat in a Barnes and Noble all day and tried to sell 50 books? It sounds doable, especially if I brought some kind of snack to lure people in. If it’s a failure, it’ll make for a great blog entry.

      Then again, you could always do nothing. I put my fantasy novel, The King of Blades, on Kindle, too. That was the novel that was going to be published by Harbor House before they changed their minds after two years of foot-dragging. That freaking book is outselling the short story collection by a mile. What the heck? I mean, I like the book and all, but it’s still a little depressing. I’m really, really working my butt off promoting this short story collection. I have an intense desire to see its Amazon ranking climb a bit.

      In the second intermission to the book, you list ten things you learned while writing the book. I couldn’t help but relate to number five: “Nobody wants to publish my atheism-tinged novel.” If I were to make a list of ten things I learned while writing the stories in my book, I would say the same exact thing. Any plans for the atheism-tinged novel? Are you shopping it around? Do you think you might self-publish it?

      I would kill to publish that book. It’s funny. It’s smart. It’s got the most colorful characters I’ve ever come up with. In the first ten pages, an English professor shouts at students legally crossing the street and I can’t stop laughing every time I read it. I’ve sent it out from time to time, but no dice. Isn’t there some kind of anti-press out there? Like, who’s publishing the antithesis of Eat, Pray Love? My whole book is about evolution and the fact that Creationism is idiotic. It’s gold, subjectively speaking. It could be complete crap too, I suppose.

      You get to a point, sometimes, where you just want the story out there, and I think that’s when self-publishing is at its best. Especially if you have a network of writer-friends who can help you with the process. I have another book written that I worked on for my MFA degree. It’s called The Occupation of Emerald City and it’s about three people living in a city that’s being occupied by a foreign country. The entire book is based on research of occupations, especially Iraq. It’s two years old now but I still think it’s pretty special. Couldn’t find a publisher for it, though, so now it just sits on my computer. Every month, I go back to it and I read through part of it and the temptation to just put it out there is just getting stronger and stronger. 

       What are you working on now? Is the next book in the works yet?

I’m writing the second draft of a book that I think is probably one of the best things I’ve written yet. I’m using first-person narration, just the natural voice that I’ve been so successful with in my published short stories. I’ve never tried that in novel form before, and I have no idea why. I’ve always written in third-person even though that’s not my strong suit. It’s like I had a choice between chocolate cake and carrots, and for some reason I kept picking the carrots.

The story’s about a psychologist treating schizophrenics and it’s based on true events. I actually met someone involved in the original project at a local Starbucks and I would pick his brain every time I bumped into him. Lots of research. Lots of good things happening there. Big Pharma’s not gonna like it, so I suspect they’ll probably kill me soon.

Sometimes, a story really sucks. I’ll go back to it after I’ve finished it and I’ll delude myself into thinking it’s OK so I’ll keep working on it and then I’ll send it out and get a bunch of rejections. Then I’ll look at it again, and I’ll fight the urge to vomit on my keyboard. “What are you thinking?” I’ll ask myself. “Seriously? A story about pirates who find unusual gems filled with the souls of other pirates? That doesn’t make a lick of sense!” Delete.

Sometimes, a story just tingles. I had that with “I Can’t Just Turn It Off,” which is in the book. That story … I sent out the first draft to Glimmer Train and it won a Finalist award. Everything came out almost perfect. Except the ending. The ending needed work. I was lucky enough to find an editor, Richard Peabody, who believed in the story and let me re-submit it three times before it was finally accepted. That’s unprecedented in the world of literary journals. It’s the coolest experience I’ve had so far with a publisher.

So yeah, what I’m trying to say is … this new book? This new book has a tingle.

I’ve been busy, busy, busy this week trying to catch up on grading in preparation for AWP, at which, by the way, I’ll be doing an off-site reading (Friday, March 2^nd at 6:00 PM at The Hideout in Chicago) and will probably be doing a book signing at the book fair (date and time TBA). Maybe I’ll see you there?

Anyway, I’ve just got a quick post, then, this week, to drum up some anticipation (I hope) for the interview series I’ll be posting on my blog during the entire month of March. I’ve learned a lot about the publication game through these interviews, which detail four very different writers’ very different experiences publishing their books.

The schedule for this interview series is as follows:

Sunday, March 4^th: Ken Brosky, a self-published author who has implemented some interesting and successful strategies to market his short story collection, The Unauthorized Biography of Michele Bachmann (and other stories).

Sunday, March 11^th: Kelly Kathleen Ferguson, whose memoir, My Life as Laura: How I Searched for Laura Ingalls Wilder and Found Myself, was published through a small press (Press 53) and has been selling phenomenally well in the few months since it’s been out.

Sunday, March 18^th: Kathryn Nuernberger, author of the award winning poetry collection Rag & Bone, which was published through Elixir Press after winning the press’s Antivenom prize.

Sunday, March 25^th: J. T. Dutton, who published her two novels, Freaked and Stranded, through HarperTeen. Dutton, needless to say, secured an agent prior to signing contracts with such a major publishing house.

I hope you’ll check these interviews out, and please, if you know any fellow writers who might be interested, point them in my blog’s direction during the month of March.

A few weeks ago I posted about how I’ve been struggling trying to catch my stride as a writer for the past several months. I received some excellent advice in the comments, which not only made me feel better (thank you! I really needed that!)  but also gave me some thoughts on what I might do to try to keep writing, even if I don’t feel, for whatever reason, that I can produce anything publishable right now.

So since then, I’ve been writing letters to my unborn daughter. It’s amazing how quickly this project opened me up and pulled me out of my slump. Since I started these letters two weeks ago, I’ve written 34 pages and still have plenty more to say. To give myself more practice writing a book length work (and so that it will be engaging enough that my daughter will actually want to read it!), I’m writing it in the style of an epistolary memoir and plan to revise it extensively after I finish a full draft. My goal is to have a complete draft done by the time my daughter is born in September.

This project has made me feel like a writer again, brimming with words I just have to get onto the page. I’ve once again recaptured that fantastic feeling of having my head half in a writing project throughout the day. Even when I’m not writing—I’ll be washing the dishes or doing laundry or lathering my hair in the shower—and some idea will come to me that I simply have to include: I should tell her about the time . . . I should talk to her about . . . I should share with her my experiences with . . .

I think part of the reason I’m so excited about this project is because it feels important. Anything else that I’ve tried to work on lately has raised the question, “What’s the point?” Because publishing a book was so anticlimactic. Because the novel I poured five years of my life into still languishes, unpublished, in a file on my computer. Because even the things I’ve published, hardly anyone will ever read. Because, now that I’m pregnant, I realize there are other things in life that are way more important than my career as a writer.

But this project feels, to me, like it matters. Once I started working on it, I was overcome with the feeling that my daughter has a right to know these things, that she needs to know these things. I want her to know me not just as her mom but as a human being, and I want her to know that she is not alone, that if she inherits my depression, my social anxiety, if she struggles with her feelings about religion, if she finds herself wondering why she doesn’t seem to belong anywhere, I want her to know that I understand, that I’ve been through it too, that I will do my best to help her along the way.

And so this project feels more important and meaningful to me than anything I ever wrote with the end goal of publication. And because this isn’t something I’m writing to publish, it’s very low stakes, which is probably another reason why it so easily opened that blocked writing passage in my mind. Maybe part of it, too, is that I’m doing something completely different from any type of writing I’ve ever seriously done—outside of a few assignments I’ve been given over the years, I’ve never attempted to write creative nonfiction—and perhaps just switching gears so completely knocked something loose in my mind. Whatever the reason, I’m writing again without having to force it, and it feels good. It feels damn good.

Here’s something I find really interesting: in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers, there’s an extensive article/interview on book contests. Included in the article are some pie charts representing some overall statistics on the winners of last year’s book contests (there were 129 total, or at least, those are the ones P & W announced in their Grants and Awards pages over the course of the year).

The statistics were fascinating for a number of reasons (I was not at all surprised but interested to find out that roughly 77% of the book length contests out there are for poetry books), but the most interesting of the pie charts, for me, was the one that showed that 111 of the 129 winners hold an MFA, MA, or PhD. Only 18 of the winners (roughly 14%) did not hold a graduate degree (presumably—at least for the majority of the 111—we’re talking about a graduate degree in creative writing. At least, that's an assumption I'm starting from, and I think it's very likely. I’m guessing a small number of the winners probably hold a degree in some other field, but I’m betting—and who knows, I could be wrong—that most of them studied creative writing. At any rate, there's no way to know for sure, so let's allow ourselves to speculate a bit here).

As someone who has always been (perhaps overly) fascinated by the difference between formally studying creative writing in a graduate program and practicing writing other ways, of course I found this news extremely thought-provoking. Is this definitive proof at last that writers who earn a graduate level education in creative writing are better than those who don’t? Well, not so fast. I can think of a couple of possibilities that might explain this statistic another way.

For one thing, I can’t help but wonder if writers who go through formal, graduate level creative writing programs are simply more aware of the variety of small presses and book contests out there. I think a lot of would-be writers who haven’t had any formal training just don’t know about certain paths that are available to them. In a graduate level program, you become very aware of these sorts of things—often your own instructors are past recipients of some of these awards.

Another possibility is that the sort of writer who studies in a graduate level program tends to be more the sort of writer whose work is very well suited for small presses. Now that sounds like a very sharp distinction, and certainly there are people who fall on one end or the other of the line. There are MFA students who mostly write science fiction/fantasy. There are non-MFA students who mostly write highly literary short fiction, and there are, of course, faculty members in graduate level programs who have agents and publish with major presses.

I am not suggesting that people who go to grad school don’t or can’t publish with major presses, but we all know that the major presses are primarily interested in the bottom line ($$$) and are far, far, far less willing to publish work that is of high literary merit but has little chance of selling many copies than small presses are. Publishing with a major press has a lot to do with who you know and luck. Publishing with a small press has a lot more to do with how good of a writer you are. So all I’m saying here is that in general, in general (I repeat it to hopefully avoid any misreading of what I’m trying to say here), graduate level creative writing programs accept and train literary writers, and small presses (and, thus, book contests, most of which are run by small presses) are seeking work from the very same type of writer.

Of course, there is always also the possibility that the statistic is a result of a number of factors, and included in those factors might well be that there are possibly more good writers who have studied creative writing in advanced programs than those who haven’t. This would certainly not mean that any writer who hasn’t earned a graduate level degree in creative writing is crap—14% of the winners had no graduate level education, after all. But maybe it’s true that of the writers out there who have really gotten good at writing, who have learned the value of revision and have found their own unique voices, maybe there are more who got there through the aid of a graduate level education than any other way.

I think the statistic probably results from a heavy mix of all these factors and more, but either way, it’s worth thinking about. The statistic is simply too striking not to raise some questions.

Lately I’ve been struggling with how much time I think a writer should spend actually writing and how much time I think it’s okay—necessary, even—to spend on other, writing related endeavors (like reading). Part of the reason I’ve been having such a hard time pinning down how I feel about the issue is because basically for the past year (almost), I’ve been having a very on-again/off-again relationship with my own writing. I’ve had a very eventful year; between the book and the baby news, I’ve been quite busy and distracted, and I’ve had a lot of trouble getting into any sort of comfortable writing groove.

I’ve read that what I’ve been experiencing is not uncommon: you get word of your first book deal (or sometimes, you finish—really finish—a large project), and you find you have no choice but to take a break; for whatever reason, your mind simply will not let you embark on another project without a breather. That all seems fine, except for the fact that I got word that my first book was going to be published almost a year ago. Even if you consider that most of last summer I was revising and editing the manuscript, it’s still been a good nine months since I’ve had all that behind me, and nine months seems like an awfully long break, to me.

Maybe, then, it’s the baby, more than the book, that’s been keeping my mind so occupied. Thinking about and planning for my new baby has certainly taken up a lot of my time, but let’s be honest, I have a lot of time right now. I’m only teaching one class. I could spend hours a day thinking about the little being growing inside of me and still find an hour or two in which to write.

No. The truth is, all excuses aside, I just haven’t been as interested in writing this past year. Something strange clicked over in me when I signed that book contract, and I know part of it is the disappointment of realizing how little a book deal really matters, and part of it is disillusionment at the anti-climax of publishing a book, but there’s something more, too, and I can’t quite put my finger on it.

Part of it, I think, is that I just haven’t had as much to say. I’ve been, if you want to know the truth, much more interested in reading these past few months. I’ve always been a reader, certainly, but for the past few months I feel like I’d rather read than do just about anything, but I can never quite decide if it’s okay for me to indulge. Obviously, writers need to read, but they should also write. Lately, I’m always very quick to pick up a book, less so to turn on my computer and put words to paper myself. The result is that when I’m reading, I feel guilty about it—I should be writing.

So I’m torn, you see, because I don’t know where the balance lies. I think reading is essential to writing, and part of me thinks, maybe it’s not so bad if, for a few months, I just really want to read. But then part of me thinks that’s just self-justification. Yes, reading is important, but it’s not like I was ever at risk for not reading enough. The risk is not writing enough. The risk is not producing.

But I don’t really know what the right answer is. Should I be putting more pressure on myself right now, or less? Should I accept that I need a break—though it scares me, though I’m terrified I’ve lost my abilities and may never get them back—or should I be forcing myself to rebuild my momentum? I don’t know. I just really don’t know.

Damien and I watched a documentary about Raymond Carver the other day. The documentary itself wasn’t very good, but Raymond Carver said something that’s been slowly building to a boil in my mind ever since. I don’t have the exact quote (we already returned the DVD to the library), but it was something along the lines of how every story he ever wrote was, while he was working on it, his favorite story. The excitement of watching the story become truly good was, I couldn’t help but assume, what helped Carver develop that famed revision ethic that, in my opinion, all would-be writers should (but don’t always) emulate.

It’s finally hit me, just now, what it was about that quote that seemed so significant to me. It’s the fact that I once felt that way, too. Once. But I haven’t felt that way in a while, not since I got the phone call telling me my first book was about to be published.

Even though I have been writing lately, which sometimes feels like an accomplishment in and of itself considering how distracted I’ve been with my thoughts of the little girl who is growing and growing inside me right now, I haven’t really been producing anything particularly worthwhile. Writing and producing something worthwhile, of course, are not always the same thing. While I can say I’ve definitely spent some time in front of the computer for the past year, I don’t really have much to show for that time, just a bunch of hollow drafts and half-assed revisions. Nothing feels like it’s coming together the way it should, and I don’t, really, feel all that excited about any of my current projects.

Nothing that I’m writing now feels important. On top of that, I feel discouraged by the fact that very few people will likely ever read the book I’ve already published. I realize that’s not supposed to be the point, that we should write for ourselves, but it is a difficult realization, when you discover that this thing you’ve been dreaming about for so long—publishing a book!—is so anticlimactic, is of so little consequence in the end.

It’s strange, but actually winning a fiction prize and publishing my first book has made me ever more cynical about my career as a writer. About writing in general, as a serious endeavor. It’s different when you dabble in writing for fun, but when you reach a point where you’re really invested in it, where your writing is one of the most important things in your life, it can be a hard reality check when you publish a book. Once that short-lived excitement about having “made it” passes, you realize that readers don’t know who you are, that most of them will never even hear about your book, and of the ones who do, few will buy it, and even fewer will actually read it. The thrill of the accomplishment wears off fast, and what you’re left with is the realization that you’ve been so very naïve all these years, when you told yourself that publishing a book actually mattered.

And so, I guess, what it comes down to is that I’m having trouble rekindling that flame that was sort of snuffed out by the harsh reality of actually publishing a book. Where once I felt so excited about each new project, now I find myself wondering, sure, but what’s the point? Who cares about this stupid story? Even if I publish it, who cares? The excitement that Raymond Carver spoke of has left me, and I’m not sure whether it will ever come back.

But I did speak last time of how this shift in perspective is a strange sort of relief. It’s depressing sometimes—I feel it as an acute loss—but at the same time, it’s kind of liberating, too. It used to feel essential that I wrote and wrote a lot, that I produced and published, that I pushed myself to be the writer I wanted to believe I was. Suddenly, now, those things don’t seem to matter. So what if I don’t write today? So what if this story ends up going nowhere and I give up on it? It doesn’t matter in any real sort of way.

The things that really matter, I see now, are my baby, my marriage, my ability to extend, in whatever way I can, the few moments of true happiness that ever come my way. Sometimes writing brings me that kind of happiness, but thinking about my baby delights me in a way that no story and no publication ever has. There’s something reassuring about that. It’s reassuring to be reminded that writing isn’t all there is, that whether I publish something or not doesn’t really matter, that there is more to life than ambition and drive. That sometimes, just sitting back and living is enough.

In a recent Salon.com article, Laura Miller discusses the increasing importance of self-promotion for writers. Miller compares the current state of the literary world to times gone by, when authors like J.D. Salinger and Harper Lee (just to name a few of Miller’s examples) were able to have their writerly cake and eat it too, being both reclusive and successful at once. In the contemporary literary market, Miller points out, “someone like [Harper] Lee might as well not bother; however good her book is, it won't find an audience unless she's willing and able to make hawking it at least a part-time job.”

This is so true. So depressing and yet so true. As someone who has recently published my own first book, I have to admit that I’m a bit discouraged by how much of a published writer’s job is just getting out there and trying to sell his or her book. I have to admit that, while I’m still excited about having a book published, I’ve also found the entire experience anti-climactic in that writing the book, it seems, was just one small step in the being a published writer process. Now that the book is out there, I have to become a salesman, which is something I’m not particularly good at, nor is it something that I really want to do. I hate selling. I’m like Lloyd Dobler (from Say Anything) in that way: “I don’t want to buy anything, sell anything, or process anything as a career.”  

But unfortunately, it turns out that a good deal of a writer’s job is spent in PR and sales. I’m introverted and socially awkward—that’s why I got to be so good at writing to begin with. Instead of spending time outside, interacting with other kids my age, I stayed inside and wrote. At the time, of course, I wasn’t thinking about one day trying to publish the things I wrote, but if I had been, it surely wouldn’t have occurred to me that if I did publish them, I would have to then get out there and try to make those other kids, who I was afraid of to begin with and didn’t know how to talk to, like me enough to want to buy my book.

And what I find the most discouraging is not even that I have to get out there and push my wares, but the fact that even if I do, my book is still unlikely to reach a very wide audience. I can set up readings and book signings galore, but I’ll be lucky if very many people show up, never having heard of me, and even luckier if I actually sell more than a copy or two per event. It feels, sometimes, fairly futile. And all of the time and energy I put into those events take away, as Miller says, from the time I could spend writing.

So yes, I think the true state of the publishing world is a bit depressing. It’s depressing for the writers who will never reach much of an audience because they don’t know how to sell themselves, and it’s depressing for readers, who end up only hearing about a small fraction of the great stuff out there, and who, even then, are most likely to only hear about the writers who A) Spend more time marketing themselves than writing, and as a result are not great writers, or B) Have been deemed marketable enough by the gods that be at a major publishing house that the publisher is willing to spend time and money on promoting their book(s). While certainly the latter group includes some good writers, both groups, I’m afraid, include a lot of hacks and otherwise lousy writers. In other words, I don’t think it actually is that far-fetched to suggest that most of the really good writers aren’t even on the radars of most readers.

This all sounds like a rant, perhaps, or at least a whole lot of complaining. I don’t mean to complain. I’m a cynic, certainly, but I don’t see myself as a pessimist. I guess to some extent I think it’s interesting, as both a reader and writer, to be aware of how these things really work. I don’t know that there’s a solution to the problem. I suppose as readers, we have to be diligent about seeking out new work, and as writers, we have to be willing to put the time and effort in to selling a book or two here, a book or two there. But even then, there’s going to be a whole lot of great writers that I’ll never hear of as a reader, and there’s going to be a whole lot of potential readers that I’ll never reach as a writer. And I suppose that’s just the way it goes.

The issue of the difference between an MFA and a PhD with a creative dissertation is once again at the front of my mind. Many of my husband Damien’s fellow MA students at Ohio University have decided to go on to PhD programs after they graduate, while Damien has decided to go the MFA route. Having watched me earn my MFA and get a book published shortly thereafter, yet still be in a position where I haven’t found a full time job, Damien finds himself, I think, worrying about the value of the degree once he earns it. Is he making the right choice? Should he, instead, have applied to PhD programs like so many of his colleagues decided to do?

I’ve been looking around at various blogs and articles where people tackle this issue, and I’ve also, in my own quest to find the answer when I was trying to decide whether I should try to earn a PhD, compared degree requirements for specific programs, but a concrete answer to the question sill eludes me. One thing I have noticed for certain is that people who seem really adamant about one side of the issue or the other appear (to me) to be suffering from cognitive dissonance, where they are trying to justify whichever choice they themselves have made.

People who have gone the PhD route, for example, often swear that hiring committees prefer PhD candidates over MFA’s, yet if you look at job postings, hardly any creative writing positions seem to distinguish at all between MFA’s and PhD’s. People who have gone the MFA route, on the other hand, often suggest that MFA’s are more valuable because they are more prestigious (especially if you go to a highly ranked school) and the degree focuses more on writing than on literature, but I’m not sure I buy that, either.

Indeed, both PhD proponents and MFA proponents alike agree that the difference between the two degrees is that a PhD offers you a more scholarly, literature focused education, whereas an MFA is really just about writing. Having earned an MFA myself, I have to say I think this distinction is inaccurate. In my MFA program, we had to take several literature courses, and we had to take a comprehensive exam, as well. In fact, the requirements to earn my MFA degree were pretty much the same as the requirements to earn a PhD at many schools: you take some creative writing courses, tons of lit courses, and a comprehensive exam, and at the end of it you have to have completed a book length work that your committee deems of publishable quality.

There are only three real differences between my MFA and many PhD programs that I can see: most PhD programs require that you write some sort of scholarly supplement to your creative dissertation, most PhD programs require that you are fluent in at least one foreign language, and most PhD programs give you an extra year or two to write your book (while MFA programs require you to do all the coursework, take the exam, and write a full book at the same time, usually in a period of three years). Those differences seem pretty slight to me, and it doesn’t really seem like one degree has much intrinsic value over the other—the question, though, of whether one looks better on your CV than the other doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the two degrees’ intrinsic value, though, so perhaps that’s all beside the point.

However, I think most hiring committees know that there isn’t really much difference between the two degrees, although I’m sure it’s true that some places lean more towards one or the other. In fact, I know that some MFA programs are most interested in having MFA’s teach for them because they don’t want to call their own degree into question. I imagine the same might be true for PhD hiring committees. And some places might figure it just looks better in general to have a doctorate over a master’s degree. Even so, when you look at job postings, creative writing faculty positions—whether for the graduate or undergraduate level—tend to make no clear distinction between the two degrees. What they seem most interested in is years of teaching experience and publication credits. Many of them require that you have at least one book published, whether you have an MFA or a PhD, and many of them are looking for people with a lot of experience teaching college English.

And it’s the experience issue, actually, that I think is causing the confusion over which degree hiring committees are generally looking for. If you compare two job candidates, both who just graduated from their respective programs, there will be a distinct difference in amount of experience between the MFA, who was probably only in school for three years, and the PhD, who probably went through a master’s program for a couple of years first, then spent four or five years in his or her PhD program. That means that if you’re just comparing fresh graduates, the PhD will have six or seven years teaching experience, while the MFA will only have three. That probably is something that will make the committees pay extra attention to the PhD.

However, this is kind of an unfair comparison. The person who earned his or her MFA can just as easily teach adjunct for those extra three or four years to build those teaching credentials, and will probably, at that point, be just as hirable as the new PhD graduate. Time-wise, there was actually no difference; both candidates took six or seven years to build up their CV’s. Financially, one or the other may have been living more comfortably during that extra three or four years, depending on how many classes the post-MFA adjunct was able to land per semester, and depending on what kind of stipend the PhD student earned. Either way, the two options are pretty comparable, if you ask me.

So then the most important factor in who is going to get hired seems to be publication credits, and for that, it really doesn’t matter whether you have an MFA or a PhD. All that matters is that your writing is good, you’re doing a lot of it, and you’re persevering and sending a lot of stuff out there. There are all kinds of other variables, too, which can make or break your chances at getting a job, none of which have anything to do with which degree you earned.

So it seems to me that it just doesn’t matter. Go to the program that seems to suit you the best. Go to the place where the faculty consists of writers you admire, or the place that offers you the best funding, or the place that seems to have the course offering that best matches your interests, or the place where you’ll be able to work for a good literary journal.

Whether you earn an MFA or a PhD, landing a tenure-track job is going to be very difficult. It’s competitive out there, and it seems that what matters more than anything is that you get a lot of teaching experience under your belt and that you publish. A lot. Preferably in big name venues and preferably at least one full book. I would worry way more about those things than which degree to earn. As long as you have a terminal degree, you’ve got the base credentials. Think about it, the degree itself is just one tiny part of your CV, and every single applicant will have one or the other of the two degrees. It’s the rest of your CV, really, that will allow you to set yourself apart from the other applicants.