On the Exhumation of the Soul
A Conversation with S.T. Brant
When reading S.T. Brant’s work, you may be reminded of the Metaphysical poets, of ideas of Love, Life, the Gods, and the true meaning of the Soul. But Brant is his own kind of bard, not bound by conventional structures and tropes, and always ready to look at past and present moments with a lyrical, rhythmic, and profound voice. The result of such an approach is his debut collection, Melody in Exile (Atmosphere Press, 2022). Here, Brant’s speaker sings to the muses, deciphers the intricacies of love, attempts to forge a connection with gods old and new, and always seeks if not attain a path toward eternity, then understand how it is embodied.
Brant’s work has appeared in Honest Ulsterman, EcoTheo Review, Timber, and Rain Taxi. He works as a high school English teacher.
Hello Shane, thank you so much for your time. I was incredibly moved by Melody in Exile, from its focus on the mythic to its honesty about love and acceptance (of circumstances, people, etc.). But before we dive deeper into the poems, was there one particular poem that sparked the inspiration behind the collection? What did the writing process look like, from an emotional and craft perspective?
SB: Thanks so much for talking with me, Esteban! I’m grateful. For your time and kind words! I feel like the collection came about through brute form more than deliberation. Kind of an accident of momentum. I couldn’t seem to place any work anywhere, and that led me to a pretty spectacular despondence that halted any writing for quite a while. I decided that since I couldn’t publish poems individually, I thought they read better in their own company anyway, so I’d just try to throw a collection out there and see what happens. But the anchor for that was “Harmony”, the long poem that makes up section II. I didn’t originally see it in sequence with ‘The De-Eden’d Scenes’, but I liked the way they leafed together narratively. Most of ‘Harmony’ I wrote when I was 24, so years ago, and the idea was always that this would be its own project, a huge retelling of creation that corrects the story; but it’s been so long since I started it that the thread severed, so I didn’t see myself continuing that idea in that same vein; so I touched the poems up and wrote ‘Harmony VI’ as a last gasp to try and restart the engine, but, alas, the daemon’s gone elsewhere for me.
But the idea, the myth of it, was still so crucial to me, a religious belief, even, that I knew it needed to be longer than what it was- then I remembered these dramatic pieces that were always, to me, little explanatory notes of the larger idea, so I thought that they made a good complement to the more difficult ‘Harmony’ poems. It was a fortunate frustration that bore that because the conviction in that idea contributed to the daemonic livelihood of St. Brant, the saint called back from oblivion in the book through epigraphs, as a character, who has actually now become the catalyst for the collection I’m working on now, which I hope to be the fulfillment of the potential of ‘Harmony’ as an epic work.
I couldn’t help but be reminded of “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold when I read “The Soul,” the poem that begins the collection. I think all great poetry books both pay homage to their literary ancestors and break new ground, which Melody in Exile no doubt does. What poets have inspired you? Were there certain writers you were reading while composing this collection? And was there anything else outside of literature that influenced your process?
SB: It’s funny that you ask about influences in relation to “The Soul” because in that poem I commit one of the most obvious lifts, to my mind. I feel like I’m heavily allusive, but I generally try to bury the allusions or allude to stances or ideas more so than allude something superficial like the actual aesthetic of the reference, but in “The Soul”, I kept messing around with how to break the lines, constantly unsatisfied with its layout, until I copied how Eliot opened “The Waste Land” with those gerunds. Once I got those words lined up, the rest cascaded the way I wanted it to. So Eliot, of course, is a heavy influence. He was the first poet I loved. I feel better about my relationship with Eliot because I feel that I’ve freed myself from him a bit. I used to sound too much like him.
Some other poets that I was reading heavily (and the poems in this collection were written over years, from my 20s through the last one I wrote to be included my terza rima effort Eden Suites that I did at 30) through the years: Hart Crane (my love), Shakespeare, Dante, Yeats (the title poem “Melody in Exile” I actually think of as my “Second Coming” because that poem was echoing in my head with its images lighting the dark of my mind), Keats (my love love), Shelley, Stevens- so Modernists and Romantics. Probably pretty obvious.
There’s others, of course, but those are heavy, conscious influences, so heavy that they’re unconscious even. Even when I know they’re influence is working on me and try to swerve, it works on me, that’s why I listed them over others. I recognize the homogeneity of the list provided, which is why I’m protesting a bit too much that it’s not an exhaustive list, rather it’s a list of formative powers. Aside from them, Bloom, Harold Bloom, has been the most profound influence on me. I actually regard him as a mentor, despite never meeting him, but I credit his works as my reading wellspring: I was a malnourished literati before The Western Canon, which helped me believe that I was capable enough to read and understand Shakespeare and Dante, even if I don’t fully understand Shakespeare and Dante. So for his initial push that even if I’m a fool, it’s better to be a wise fool under Shakespeare, that my trajectory as a writer went from the unpunctuated, stream-of-conscious messes I was inflexibly doing to the, if not to everyone’s taste, undeniably better writing I’m doing now.
There are so many great things to dissect in your book! I’m still focusing on the beginning of the collection here, but I couldn’t shake the following lines of “St. Brant’s Quietism”:
I will accept what god says I must accept in the attitude
Which god accepts bad news: in whirlwinds, rains
And thunder, lightning, fire;
Death.
I began thinking about the idea of acceptance and how there might be societal standards toward reacting a certain way, or rather a “right” way. But I think you hit on something deeper here, so can you discuss more about the poem and what you have learned to accept through writing this collection? What things did you discover about yourself that weren’t as easily available to you before?
SB: I appreciate you mining this poem for that meaning, because you’ve made me sound like I’m up to more than I’ll often give myself credit for. I hadn’t read this poem for a long time, so I needed a refresher. I don’t actually reread my stuff much at all. I’ll call it done, and that’s sort of the end of it with me. I could definitely use more revision in my life. But this poem came about a bit differently than what I’ll term some of my organic things, things that come all at once, in one impassioned or rapt moment. This one came in fragments. I had a lot of sections written that were responses to a thought or a reading or something, and I was looking through these drafts to see if there was any value in the components, and when I happened upon this part I felt it connected to here and etc. I didn’t just paste them together, but I saw the themes of the pieces matched, so I worked to coherently graft them into a unity. For example, the opening stanza that takes its first line from Hart Crane, that was a riff on that poem after I reread it for the millionth time. When I reread that fragment, I realized that I left it incomplete (as I will frequently do), so then knowing that I had something there, I tried to get myself back to that space I was in when I talked about being spiritually diminished by treating any moment, whether it’s a moment when love is at is maximum or what, as though it’s a ‘trophy of the sun’, something tangible to cherish; so getting back to that, what followed is that I heard a response, so that poem became a bit of a conscience-dialogue, and that device helped me link these various themes into a singularity that I was happy with, or, in the parlance of the book: harmonize these melodies.
That’s one of the major lessons I learned about myself compiling this: that I’m able to return to poems I’ve left unfinished and complete them. For the longest time, I was afraid to go back: once the moment burned out, even if I knew the poem needed more, I didn’t feel that I was up to the task to retrieve the power to fulfill it. So it’d languish, and I’d languish, too. There’s a litany of lessons learned, so I won’t get granular with each, but rather- to simplify: the challenge of reading a batch of poems less as individual poems but seeing them in service to a larger text, a whole text, was hard to do, something that I never really considered myself particularly strong at, so it was unnatural for me to fight through that discomfort and find a suitable structure for the collection that accentuated each poem by allowing the poems to converse with each other. But that’s what makes a collection. I mean, there’s amazing poetry collections of just 100 pages of poems that don’t testify to a singular vision but are just great poem after great poem, so I’m not meaning to treat collections as monolithic enterprises: rather, I knew I wanted this collection to have a vision, so I needed a structure and I needed an arrangement. Doing this allowed me to mentally designate and accept some poems that maybe I wouldn’t have included but because they complimented another poem so well, they earned precedent over this or that poem that I maybe like better or what have you. You need minor poems.
That’s a hard truth to accept, one that’s still hard for me, because I have a tendency to want to say everything in each undertaking, but you need set pieces, sometimes, to prime your readers for what you consider to be your major works. I remember, I can’t remember the book or article at the moment, but Harold Bloom was talking about Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, I think in reference to why he preferred Cholera to it, and he mentioned that the relentlessness of Solitude’s pacing, each sentence being essential, basically, that it brought on an “aesthetic battle fatigue”. I tend toward longer poems, so when arranging the book, I had to keep asking myself if a reader would want to keep up with the tempest of text I had stacked up, not that a reader couldn’t, but you have to earn your reader’s patience and persistence, and I know I haven’t yet, because I’m no one, so if I thought a reader would consider this poem-followed by this poem-followed by this one a slough, I figured out a way to break it up. The Eden Suites leading into The Harmony & De-Eden’d section was maybe playing with fire, but because there was that section break I thought that gave the reader a sufficient breath before starting in for the heart.
I love that you mentioned these minor poems because I think they are incredibly important to a poetry collection. We often think that each poem should be life-altering (and in a way that is the hope with every poem), but when assembling a collection, you need those quiet poems that tie your themes together. And the quiet poems in your book do that and more; they almost serve as song and prayer for the longer pieces, and one that I loved was “A Prayer” and its opening lines:
Empty me unto thee, Mercy O Beginning,
Port of Terror, Port of Morning.
All my words pour on you, my heart in them,
In thoughts, nothing left in me
But me. Empty me of all extraneous, empty
Me of me, Resurrection,
Resurgence O Graft, Transplant, Flowerpot.
There is rain inside my bones,
Witness the bluing of my bones, purpling
My soul.
The poem is short, but powerful, incantatory even. Do you find yourself determining the length of the poem on the onset of its conception or the poem and its contents determining what needs to be said?
SB: It’s fitting that you mention “A Prayer” because that poem was originally published online by EcoTheo, so it’s nice that it really has made a full journey from here to a book to back here. But I am glad this poem spoke to you, because it’s a poem that’s always had staying power with me. Which isn’t usual, which is why I mention it! And that actually ties into your second question, as well. A lot of the time, one a poem is “finished” a word I’m very reticent of using when it comes to my own stuff (long, tangential story abbreviated here: a girl in high school that would always read my writing and sort of reignited writing for me when I stopped, chided me for never finishing anything I showed her- she was disappointed that everything I started, I abandoned; which, of course, testifies to Valery’s prophecy that we only ever abandon poems), but when I say something is done, then it seems to fall away from me into a sort of conscious oblivion: I remember I wrote something because I needed to, but now that that thing was expelled, I’m free, so it’s out of mind, though the freeing wound it left remains. It stained me on the way out, but I’m free of its possession. So that’s all to say that “A Prayer” is one that, after feeling it was all out, stuck around my psyche, lingering, as though it was something important. In a way, then, though it is a bridge-poem, singing in the gaps of the monuments, to me, it has an archetypal power that gets at probably some of the core of the book, which I think your wonderful and generous word ‘incantatory’ hit on, because that spell-like and mystical music is something that I aspired for in the language of the book.
Where does your second question tie into that then? When I was talking about the freeing process, or the exorcism of the poem, that’s where I think your craft question comes in. The craft component of writing is actually a terrible struggle for me because I often feel very alienated from other writers when they talk about craft or write essays or host workshops or have classes about craft and bring craft to the forefront. Just because I do think myself rather simple-minded when it comes to those discussions, almost stupid. I’m banging around on pots and pans while everyone else is playing a more sophisticated percussion. If I really search myself and admit hard truths and really expose myself here (and maybe I’m not alone in feeling this way- I’m sure I’m not, rather, because I feel alone, I know I’m not, which is also a reason why I knew if I got the chance to get a book out to the world, there’d be an audience, because I know that what matters to me must also matter to some other people, there must be people longing for the poetry that interests me because it does interest me- if you feel me: the paradoxical certainty that through solitude we can almost feel the solitude of others) but I know what I would consider weaknesses of mine in cognition and craft, so I write in compensation of that. I steer all the way into my obsessions and my “style”, if I can be so bold as to claim anything of the sort, and fight my valiant fight against the exposure of those deficits. Not to say that I’m against the challenge of engaging them, but it’s only when I’m decidedly tackling a deficiency that I’m most conscious of some of the things you mentioned, like form, for example. Otherwise, it’s just bleeding. It’s a feeling. You feel you, you open up, and you spill until it clots. That’s the poem.
The trouble is sometimes you can bleed too profusely, so then you go back and tidy up the mess. So editing, revision, those have their role for me, but generally not until I was getting things ready for the book did I really take the time to do that. Sometimes rejections from journals did lead to some worthwhile revisions, but other times I fought against that. For example, “Lone Mountain”, the concluding poem”, that was rejected well over 50 times, but I thought I got it right, so I didn’t touch it despite the resistance to it. One weakness, not to bore you too much with this, is formality. I’m remarkably informal as a writer. Rhyme and rhythm are crucial to me, but I like buried rhymes better than end, so I’ll be selective about end rhymes. For rhythm, that’s generally by feel for me, so a totally free approach, very unsystematic. Which means it lacks a model to follow or to teach. Impulse. “Admiring the Birds” is a poem that I did revise because it wasn’t working, so I turned it into blank verse. Then the “Eden Suites” were me trying my hand at terza rima. I thought it a fitting mode for a gnostic prelude into “Harmony”, and because Dante was already so prevalent an influence, I thought it fitting if I have a very explicit homage as well and took his form. Otherwise, the daemon knows (a saying I’ll borrow from Bloom- I know, I know, I’ve talked about him too much- but that book cover was my phone background for a while years ago because I adopted it as something of a mantra).
Going through a creative writing program, there were certain unwritten rules about writing students were expected to learn and follow. For example, you were never supposed to write about dreams, or write the word “soul” in a poem. Yet, some of my favorite writers do precisely what we were quietly told not to. Your poems here are incredibly confident in employing words and themes that are grand in scale and that echo the Metaphysical poets such as Blake, Marvell, and Donne. We go from contemplating the “Soul” and “Life” to wandering a landscape full of “dreams,” “darkness,” and “Death.” Have you always written about these themes? Is there a project you are working on currently that expands upon Melody in Exile?
SB: I’ve heard of rules such as that! I think not explicitly saying ‘soul’ or ‘dreams’ or whatever fall under that ‘Show, don’t tell’ umbrella, which is always something I’ve disavowed, because I think they’re the same. Telling is showing, much of the time. But that’s a different conversation, and I don’t think I’d really bring anything new into it aside from my opinion that it’s not something I put any credence in. When it comes to writing rules, I think the only hard-and-fast rule is whatever iron clad rule you have for yourself. When we start out, I think there’s always a major rule or a couple of things that we dictate to ourselves as our own creed or a rule that we live by, for whatever reason, but that private code is the only code worth following. Everything else, I see, as advice, rather than rules, and if the advice doesn’t serve you, then you move on from it. It reminds me of weightlifting, in that, before you can say that this system isn’t working for you, or that this exercise doesn’t yield any results, you have to try it out for a bit, give it some time to demonstrate a yield- then you formulate a judgment. Same with advice: mull it over, decide if it’s something you can coherently incorporate, test it, and if the work benefits, sure, adopt it; but if it weakens you, or nullifies your voice or perception or style or soul in some way, it’s not for you. But we’re all shaped by advice we’ve heard early on or at significant moments. I think sometimes it’s the words that get to us first or at the most pivotal times in our development that get precedence, whether that’s good or bad. For example, like the programs you mentioned, I remember reading a book on Bruce Springsteen, about making Born to Run, I can’t remember the book now, but in there the author mentioned that Bruce broke what many people would say is the rule to not explicitly say ‘redemption’ when you’re writing about ‘redemption’ in the song “Thunder Road”. I’ve obviously made no bones about saying soul over and over, but funnily enough, I never say redemption.
But about these themes, I think they’ve probably always been my things. Who knows why. A critic said once that no writer can select their themes or tropes, but they choose them. (It was Bloom- but I was trying to be coy and not overly cite him. Oh well.) Those realms though, the dark realm, the voids, abysses, the realm where the soul is as personable as any person we pass at the store, the realm where the angels and hell are marvelously ordinary, in that they’re taken for granted as characters to me, literal, are my realms- in that they’re the realms I don’t feel alienated from, where I’m at home. Whereas the people that are better at, we’ll say, showing the incorporeal, are probably more at home in the ‘real’ world, or the world where erotics are carnal and life is substantial, where they have friends, and where love is less Platonic than experiential. But for me, I’m uncomfortable there. I don’t have friends but the angels, whether fallen or still upright, I try to love, the best I can, but it always pulls me back into the idealistic realm and I have to continuously fight to return myself to the substantial, and life, life is as insubstantial as they come, the soul and the valley of souls and the parade of souls in that valley, they’re as carnal as the flesh is for those that love the flesh. Erotics is all heart and rhetoric for me. Reality and the life that’s called reality has left me behind long ago, so I’ve never been able to abide by thrules that we write about the physical world and its sensations in order to communicate the spiritual. For me, everything is the reverse. The literal world is the hidden one, and only by narrating that, can this world, this outward world, make any sense to me- can be in any way livable. Otherwise, life is hell.
I do feel like I have more to do with Melody. Maybe Melody will wind up the prelude to the orchestra. The concepts for the things I’m working on are a bit of a mess right now, but the foundations are in place. A poetry collection and plays. That’s the game plan. Life Between Transmigrations is the working title, but it’ll probably change, for the manuscript, and that collection will essentially be a long poem, or an epic in fragments. Maybe it’ll be a few collections depending on how it breaks. Dramatic monologues, lyrics, narrative poems, etc. The idea is there’s the narrative conscience that’s reincarnated over and over, meeting or living as various mythical, literary, or historical personages, led through each transmigration by a guide. One of the major manifestations is St. Brant (so here’s an expansion of Melody), where St. Brant serves as a rival to Paul, and they engage in battling treatises and epistles. There’s a whole Homeric plotline, a Medici cycle of monologues. We’ll see if I can get it right. The Harmony myth will aim to get worked out a bit more in there. Then there’s the play cycle. The contemporary tie-in to the poetry that starts at Nothing and goes back to Nothing. But the plays will give voice to this moment and linger there. A cycle of Vegas plays, where the central figures of the play will be references to the Transmigration oeuvre. Like I said, a mess. The bones are there, but the fossil is nowhere near constructed.
Such brilliant responses. Now, you’ve mentioned Harold Bloom as a main reading source and, I hope this isn’t farfetched in saying, as a source of inspiration. It might have been in Roberto Bolaño’s book By Night on Chile where a character says—and please forgive if I’m butchering it here—that authors have become irrelevant because it’s the literary critics that have all the ideas. Can you speak more about Bloom’s impact on your writing? We have all, I’m sure, read at least one Bloom essay, but what led you to him?
SB: Isn’t that Bolaño quote (and book) great? That feels true for me, certainly, sometimes. Novels empty me out, whereas with criticism feels like it fills me up- is a more fecundate reading, we’ll say. I’ll read novels, by and large, it seems, to take a ‘break’ from reading- in that I can read novels in a more… detached state- is maybe the right word. Not true for all novels, obviously, but more often than not, we’ll say, novels help me… recharge, or maybe we can say that novels, and sometimes poetry even, can reset the soil, fallow the mind. Then criticism or essays or some other kind of writing in that vein seeds the work. At least that’s been something of a process- but you know how these things change. What was once your process may no longer work without warning one day; and then maybe it returns after a long absence. But that’s what Bloom did for me, really. He helped me discover what sort of reading was most beneficial to my writing. Obviously all reading is- but what sort of reading was especially essential toward moving my writing forward. Kicking out your limits or your stagnation. Writing about writing. That’s the kick. Most of all, his influence, I’ll say is that he taught me a bit of fearlessness- a joy that’s fearless- or maybe not quite fearless, because I do admit that when I’m reading a truly great writing I’m excited and afraid simultaneously, but he taught me that that’s a positive reaction. Any personal reaction is a positive reaction. It’s important just to feel because you can work with that. You can interpret those feelings and from that interpretation you have a whole field that you can eventually harvest. What I mean about that fearful-fearless joy is that it really wasn’t until I read him that I felt confident enough to approach some of the writers that have been the most important in my life. Honestly, I was a late bloomer, we’ll say, in my love of literature. I didn’t read much at all until college, and it wasn’t until after college, at 22-ish that I even finished my first Shakespeare play on my own, all the way through. Can you believe that? I always dodged the readings in school. Reading Bloom, I was infected with his excitement for these writers, and finally picked them up. Shakespeare, Dante, Keats, the other Romantics. Hart Crane. Etc. But I was afraid of them before. Afraid I wasn’t smart enough. That I wouldn’t “get” everything there. Now I know that only “getting” a bit of a text is great! It means there’s more to get, but also means you got something. That ‘something’ is what matters. And I found him in a used bookstore in Utah. That was the introduction! Just browsing the shelves, saw The Western Canon, thought it sounded smarter than me, and I wanted to be smarter than I was, so I thought, ‘this works!’ and read it. Years later! That’s the punchline to all this. I bought that book when I was, I don’t know, 19? I didn’t read it for three years. Now I’m always reading as though I’m behind. What if I had these revelations three years earlier? Maybe I would’ve switched to an English major and studied literature. Instead I chose to go it alone, and now read belatedly. As though I have to catch up with where I imagine everyone else is.
You mention some writers/movements from the past who have had an influence on your work, but are there contemporary writers and/or works that provide that motivation to write?
SB: Yes, definitely! I do get a bit trapped in the past sometimes and get over-enthusiastic about traditions that I neglect the modern day, which is something I’m aiming to be more cognizant of, because there are so many contemporary writers that have helped me, that I owe extreme gratitude toward, whether it’s a bit of a persona debt of thanks or a debt accrued from my immersion in their books. Something that’s difficult with this question is to stay focused and not turn it into a list of contemporary writers I love. There’s a lot of overlap with ‘writers I love’ and those that spur me on, of course, but there’s always a bit of a crucial difference, I think, in what you want to know, so I’ll do my best to localize my answers to a manageable group! And I’ll stay positive, by which I mean, sometimes a writer motivates you because you greatly disagree with them or you see someone else’s work as an antithesis of yours, to which you feel motivated to write in response to that. That challenge is essential and an important impetus to a great many works, but that material is also more exciting when you come across it in posthumous diaries or letters, anyway.
I can’t always say what exactly is motivating to me or what it is that I feel I’ve gained from these writers that will be included here, that’s probably for others to solve, but we’ll say it’s an instinctual sense of relation.
So to start, there’s Donald Revell, who is probably my favorite, or certainly one of my favorite contemporary poets. The English Boat was the first thing I read of his, and it blew me away. Jay Wright. I can’t get enough of him. He may be the top poet around, he’s just so challenging and rewarding. Charles Wright, Louis Gluck. I’ve spent so much time with them. They’re sublime. Anne Carson. Of course. Almost goes without saying, but I will say it, to avoid the blasphemy. Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk. Enough said. A. F. Moritz. Adonis. Martha Serpas, her spiritual power is immense. Peter Cole, I read everything by him- his own poems, his translations. Li-Young Lee. He’s marvelous. I love long poems, and I think that his are always in a league of their own. Brian Teare has a very unique power that always moves me. A.E. Stallings. Her lyric voice has actually gotten me in trouble in the past, because I found that I almost over-absorbed her music and so a great number of poems of mine wound up being terrible Stallings knockoffs. She writes such unforgettable poems that she’ll do that to you! Amit Majmudar. Such a brilliant all around writer: poet, critic, novelist, translator. His essays and poems are topnotch, but his translation of the Gita, Godsong, is truly extraordinary. Rosanna Warren. She writes perfect poems. There’s not much that can be said about her except that. Eliot Weinberger. John Burnside, Sean O’Brien. Extraordinary poets. Sylvia Legris. Phoebe Gianissi. David Woo. His poetry is incredible. Divine Fire is a remarkable book.
Yikes, this list is already getting away from me. I primarily offered poets, which I feel a bit bad about because I feel like the prose stylists I adore or the powerful essayists that provoke me maybe are more influential in regard to creating poetic avenues forward for me, but the poets are who I spend the most time with, so they’re sort of at the forefront of my mind. I also tried to keep the concentration on writers who’ve I read a great deal of because if I included everyone whose single book had a tremendous impact on me I’d be rattling off names forever, and that goes for contemporary translators as well (like Jonathan Galassi, for example, whose Montale was truly God’s plenty and Geoffrey Brock for all of his Italian poetry), who are maybe as important as anybody as anyone on this list for the influences they provide me access to.
So out of fear and anxiety of not listing someone I’ll regret not listing later, I’ll say that that list is at least fractionally representative.
In interviews, we tend to focus on the analytical aspect of poems and the process behind writing a collection, but how does it feel to know you’ve written a book? What emotions have you experienced?
SB: I had to really collect myself to answer this. I’ll say more bad than good. I’ve really run the gamut, it feels like, in my reactions. I think I was happiest before the book was out, and you had expectations and all the possibilities you had in mind were still possible. Then the book is out, and the reality of the book world wakes you up, and the possibilities are defeated. The pacing of the book world will eat you up. You have all these ideas about what success means and what it looks like, and, largely, they won’t be met, because success in literary life is down the road, it’s rarely immediate. If you have a name already or are able to grace all the ‘anticipation’ lists or be on the radars of the awards before the nominations even open, well, then success may be a bit more fast paced, but that’s a smaller batch of books. Not letting the dream die is probably the big thing, for me, just because it wasn’t fulfilled on publication day. Press takes time. It takes time to read a book, and it especially takes time to read it well. We all have big book piles, readers and writers, we all shuffle what we’re reading pretty regularly, and these delays delay reactions, and as readers, great, it’s fun, it’s love, but when you’re published, and you’re dying from the anonymity, mistaking the anonymity for failure, for the death of your book on its first day, that love is death, and you feel like a failure while the splash you hoped to make quickly dissipated in, seemingly, the opening hours (especially when nearly nobody shows up for the launch you advertised everywhere you could), and find a way to tell yourself that most books are adored in the shadows, not on the twitter timelines, not in the reviews sections of the journals, not on the bookshelves of every store, but plant themselves in the hearts of this person and that person there, and they ripple outward from there, years down the line, maybe many, many years, maybe beyond your own.
It’s hard, because the negative feelings are so dominant, but how many books can you think of yourself that you love, that are your favorite books, that feel private to you completely because they aren’t bestsellers, but they’re borne from reader to reader by those readers and find a life of their own without the powerful publicity of the books that beat them immediately in all the hopeful measurements of success? Probably a lot. I can think of a lot. I guess the dream is to be among that list.
It’s a challenge to not compare your book to others though. To see all these other books being celebrated while you feel forgot. I’ve always been competitive and a tad envious, so the book world has been a cruel one for me, because when I was young and in sports, you could measure yourself fairly instantaneously and know if you were where you wanted to be: you won or you lost. The game ended, and you knew. Despite my athlete days being long gone, that desire ‘to win’ has remained, so the waiting is the hardest part for me. And I tend to feel more bad than good because I’m locked in a dooming dichotomy. If win or lose is your system of assessment in publishing, you lose, because you can’t ‘win’. You have to have personal needs that are met, and in meeting those, you succeed. Of course, winning awards sounds great! Most books don’t win awards, but how many books that don’t win awards are read years afterward and still revered? See. It’s so easy for me to fall into the trap that my book is unlovable because these dreams I had as a young, young writer are a poor way to judge myself and a terrible basis for happiness. Yet… I continue to beleaguer myself in the melancholy of life as a worm of the words.
Emotionally, then, I’ve been down, to keep it simple. Things don’t always come about how you envision them, and when that happens, and you have to live with the reality of the alternate route- sometimes the self-consciousness of that aversion haunts you: my book wasn’t published because it won an award, it wasn’t with a big press or even a big-little press, a big-indie press, but instead I took maybe a bit of an unconventional route, trying to find an inroad to a place I felt blocked from, trying to find my audience my own way, but was that way the right way? Was it, ultimately, the right decision or did I misfire? Did I publish something that I shouldn’t have and instead held my hand? I gambled. It’s probably unusual that I’m thinking of my own book as a gamble rather than already as a winning hand by virtue of its existence, but that’s where I’m at at this present moment: did the risk I took via the route I took a risk that, in the long run, pays off? Impossible to say until it can be said. If the first one helps me publish my second one, that’s how I’ll say it succeeded.