Start Here: The Great Realization & Let's Have Writing Adventures!
Choosing a new creative path and making it real.
Hi, I’m Chris! Editor in Chief of Del Sol Press, writer, poet, freelance book editor, teacher, long-time Whovian since 1981 (Doctor Who, first doctor was Peter Davison), Janeite (Jane Austen, Sense & Sensibility when I was 13), tea lover, dog freak, favorite aunt (fingers crossed) to three great kids, former arts and humanities administrator, solo traveler, believer in magic, eccentric introvert.
I’m also a recovering Writing Success Game participant and a few years ago, I realized I didn’t give a fuck about playing by the rules anymore.
(Oh, I also curse a lot. Usually in person, but we’ll see.)
The Great Realization felt like I’d fallen through a trapdoor after my life choices made up to that point, at the center of which was the belief I’d had since starting to write stories as a child: writing is everything and without it I am not real and will cease to exist. Somehow, I’d bought into succeed or die trying.
This moment coincided with quitting a job as literary arts program director for my state arts council and selling my Baltimore row house via short sale because I was $70,000 underwater ten years “after” the 2008 recession (‘cause the economy never got better for the 99%).
The job was 24/7, lots of traveling around the state and sometimes the Mid-Atlantic region and nationally. And as a state employee I couldn’t really participate in the same literary arts community I supported (ethics), so for more than a decade I focused my efforts on nurturing the creative dreams of others while mine were in a box somewhere.
I believe in nurturing others, but I absolutely needed to get back to nurturing myself as a person and a writer.
Eventually, I moved and found a new job that still feels right and is far from the arts, culture, and humanities world. I was finally free to write, publish, and teach again. To dive into the deep again.
But nothing happened. I couldn’t write. I couldn’t read. I felt—blank. What was there that hadn’t been said before? I had no idea who I was as a writer, what my voice was, or what I cared about.
I poked through the debris to see what was left outside of writing that was just—life. My life. What had I heart-and-soul participated and invested in—out of excitement, curiosity, joy?
(The word joy used to make me cringe, but now I’m starved for it. Aren’t you?)
I needed to find the path that was right for me.
The Great Realization happened the year before the pandemic hit but it really all started with a $15,000 national poetry prize I won in 1998. Then it was called the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship, one of two given each year by The Poetry Foundation) and suddenly, Big Things were expected of me. I had also finished a novel and obtained an important New York agent. I was off and running. I went to grad school and got an MA and then another grad school and got an MFA. I published poems in literary magazines.
I threw myself into All Things Writing to build my skills and my platform and that crucial network. So here’s my pedigree. See if there are any ideas for you to try here:
Literary arts program director for my state arts council—this was an incredible opportunity few people have—to help and highlight writers and literary arts organizations. I am grateful for it.
Maryland State Poet Laureate Liaison - running the jury process that made recommendations to the governor, then staffing the poet.
Director of the state Poetry Out Loud program that led four Maryland students to reach the final nine in the National Finals and two reach the top three out of 365,000-400,000 students nationwide. I built that state program to fifth highest participation in the country (17,000 students) almost from scratch and am proud of it. Millions of students memorizing and loving poetry! If that isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.
Editor in chief of a small press.
Freelance book editor (developmental)—more than 30 years later I’ve edited over 100,000 pages of manuscripts and celebrated with clients who published and won awards.
Ran writing competitions. Judged writing competitions. Spent thousands on fees to enter writing competitions.
Editor in Twitter pitch competitions. I also participated in them.
Ran a Facebook group with editors from those pitch competitions designed to help and connect with writers beyond Twitter.
Subscribed to and religiously read Publisher’s Marketplace and Poets & Writers.
Organized and ran three days of programming for a literary arts organization at the Baltimore Book Festival.
Planned and ran a writers conference with five tracks, volunteers, vendors, and authors, book signings, catering.
Presented at conferences, hosted panels, and gave readings.
Started a blog long before blogging was fashionable.
Posted every day on multiple social media platforms.
Taught in community settings: libraries, continuing education, recreation centers, arts orgs—kids age six through people in their eighties.
Taught at a high school for the arts.
Did a three-year arts residency at a community nonprofit where I started a writing program and collaborated with some of the artists—an animator, an aerialist, and a beatboxer.
Organized writing retreats and readings, including a six-hour poetry and performance marathon with 50 poets and performers, brunch, and a literary marketplace held on New Year’s Day for several years.
Created Literary Arts Week for writers and literary arts orgs in Baltimore.
Attended pitch conferences in NYC and others such as Bread Loaf (an 11-day sex-and-ego-fest that is about 8 days too long, where my workshop leader told us we were not going to discuss the purpose/meaning of anyone’s work. Just mechanics: “This poem is 39 lines. It is a sestina. It has a rhyme scheme.” FFS.)
Attended the AWP Conference (Association of Writers and Writing Programs), the annual mecca trade show for writers, where everyone makes the most noise.
About that AWP Conference. This is where the realization took root. I attended every day, start to finish, and wore myself out going to as much as possible—leaving sessions halfway through to go attend other ones; fighting for a spot in standing room only spaces where I couldn’t really see or hear; having blurs of conversations in the bar, elevator, bathroom; writing snippets of things on every available scrap of paper that I would never develop later. Pacing yourself is not an option.
I remember sitting on the floor in the hotel hallway with the roar of the conference around the corner, feeling bruised and exhausted. My brain hurt and my eyes were gritty. I was dehydrated and had a headache. I hadn’t eaten all day. I clutched another tote bag heavy with more books than I could read, with more in my car.
I felt this enormous pressure to produce something from the raw material of the conference but was overstimulated and overwhelmed from too many and too varied sources.
I was absorbing other people’s stories, goals, skills, process, ideas, which left little room for my own to breathe.
It felt like the writing equivalent of a singles bar. I received so much more from taking a writing workshop with Jane Austen’s five times great niece Rebecca Smith at the Jane Austen House Museum in Chawton, England, visiting the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam and reading her diary pages on exhibit, walking the Yorkshire moors to visit the farmhouse rumored to have inspired the Earnshaw family farm in Wuthering Heights, soaking in the warm, dusty glow of the pine walls and worn furniture of Robert Frost’s rustic cabin in Vermont.
I should probably mention here that I’m an introvert who has had to become extroverted to survive (any of my people out there?), so I have a finely-tuned antenna and know instantly what is or isn’t going to work for me.
I don’t believe in doing something because everyone else is doing it.
And through it all I wrote on weekends until I had five novels that I was proud of, each trying something new, for me, in voice, structure, and genre because I wanted to learn and challenge myself.
There were prizes, teaching opportunities, poetry publications. But something was missing and despite the AWP lightbulb, I didn’t figure it out for a long time.
I was not having fun.
I saw the writing life that had consumed me: endless rounds of conferences and competitions and coaching and writing workshops and programs and readings and pitch sessions. Everyone trying to be the loudest, the brightest, THE BEST.
Writing and its world had become another job I was supposed to sacrifice myself for and I’d offered myself willingly on the altar of Writing Success.
I was still putting too much faith in the prescribed formulas of others and judging myself as a writer and my writing through that filter.
I was still in competition with millions of other writers I didn’t know for the prize of publication, inspiring readers, book sales, and awards.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting success, but somewhere I’d lost my way, my reasons for writing, and my intimate connection to that creative spark.
Where did that leave me?
There were many bright spots in the list above. I grew and developed my skill sets, met and worked with wonderful, creative people, and had experiences that informed my own writing and teaching. These are things I share with my editing clients to help them choose their path. And I’ll be sharing those experiences here with you.
I’ve said for years to my clients, and anyone else who asks for my advice: do what’s in front of you. It’s being offered for a reason and you never know where it will take you.
What I now add to that is: do what’s in front of you that you are passionate/curious about, have time for, and will be happy to have experienced, regardless of the outcome.
It’s good to test the waters of your writing in the market by attending a conference and taking a workshop is always a great idea—never stop learning! Take advantage of a direct pathway to an agent or your favorite writer. Meet other writers like you. Participate in competitions. There’s a lot to learn through those opportunities.
But make sure you are on your path, not someone else’s. Keep checking in with yourself to make sure what you’re doing is working for you and course correct if it’s not. I’m not giving up on those things entirely, I’m changing my approach with this newsletter:
Bringing the writing life to life in a playful, three-dimensional, interactive way.
You can buy into as much or as little as you like of what I share here. I just want to make you think outside the box, and have fun, and play. Remember playing? Staying out all day in one long silly improv of world-creating and laughter with your friends?
In 1978, when I was in 7th grade, friends and I wrote Battlestar Galactica fanfiction—the original and better series (fight me) with Richard Hatch, Dirk Benedict, and Lorne Greene. Then we branched into Star Wars. We wrote twenty years before fanfiction was a thing.
We also wrote stories in which we and our friends had Indiana Jones-ish adventures in other countries or solved crimes. We wrote them in those blank, lined, fabric-covered “Anything Books” in colored markers and passed them around at lunchtime in the cafeteria where we sat at the same table every day, adding our comments and initials in the margins. Everyone had their own color (mine was either light blue or lavender). We also created teen magazines for each other and were each other’s subscribers. It was 100% true, pure creativity and joy (there’s that word again).
That’s what I want us to experience here. That kind of magic.
So, join me on writing adventures! I’ll also share writing, editing, and grants tips and my own stories and poems (including in progress or stalled), the behind-the-scenes drama of my arts residency and of working in the arts. We’ll create 3D writing projects, go on writing pilgrimages, take risks, be silly, make a mess and make mistakes (there really aren’t any).
We’re going to sneak out of the house and stay out long after dark.
Let’s leap together. The net may or may not appear, but we won’t need it where we’re going. Promise!
Getting real with your writing will open you up and make your writing come alive in amazing and unexpected ways.
We’ll get started in the next post - creating an alter ego, and it’s not what you think. Keep going!
Happy writing,
Chris