Question mark

A poem from my chapbook

I always wanted to be an author, from the time I was a young girl. I went to grad school and got my MFA in creative writing. I wrote both poetry and fiction, but I dreamed of having that first novel published to wide acclaim. Terry Gross would interview me on Fresh Air.

I wrote two novels, one that I killed by rewriting it again and again, and a second that eventually attracted the interest of an agent. That novel did come close to selling, but eventually my agent stopped shopping it around, and when I sent her a new novel, which wasn’t at all ready for the world, she didn’t like it.

I was devastated. Being an author was what I wanted most in my life. It was too important. Being a successful writer meant my life had value; when the book was rejected I felt like a failure, a fraud. I quit writing fiction then and put those novels away in a cabinet. I kept writing poetry though, and I had a poetry group, and that group kept me writing.

My dreams about writing, while they never went away, became more right sized. I’ve worked in and around publishing since the mid-1990s—I’ve been a freelancer for almost twenty years. I love being an editor. I have a rich life and a poetry community. I’ve had a lot of poems published. Yet I still wanted a book.

Then, in June 2022, Unsolicited Press accepted my full-length poetry manuscript; however, my first published book turned out to be this little chapbook of punctuation poems from Bottlecap Press.

On January 25, I posted a short note that I had just received my first royalty check for my chapbook Punctuated and in a few short days, 672 people have liked that note. I don’t know if that means it’s gone viral, but I do think it says a lot about you, the people who are on Substack, and how kind and generous you are. This is truly a community, and I am so grateful to be a part of it. Thank you!

And I want to welcome all my new subscribers and followers! To celebrate my first royalty check for my first book I want to share a poem from Punctuated. Each poem in the book explores “the function of the particular mark of punctuation and its metaphorical and visual representation out in the world.”

You can purchase Punctuated directly from Bottlecap at https://bottlecap.press/products/punctuated. It’s a fun little book.