THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE HUCKLEBERRY

The rewritten "All About Jane" has already been rejected by a magazine called Chestnut Review which collected a fat $5 fee for considering it. They took all of 5 days to consider it. Fair to say I get rejected a lot. Most writers do unless they have huge name recognition, but 5 days and $5? Makes me think it could be a scam. Easy... form a magazine, put it into Poets & Writers Magazine and charge a $5 reading fee. Publish the magazine online for very low cost and make at least pocket money rather than lose money as I did publishing George & Mertie's Place. Most magazines these days use Submittable to handle mss and Submittable gets $3 to handle a ms. Fair enough, but $5? I'm tearing up my file card for that market. Too suspicious. 

by rob mulally @unsplash

Good news on the other hand. One of my poems has been accepted by current Washington State Poet Laureate Claudia Castro Luna. It appears on the map. You will find the poem by clicking on the red button about 2/3 of the way on Interstate 90 from Spokane to Seattle. A very handy blip on I-90 occurs just below the red dot. The dot represents Huckleberry Mountain in the North Cascades whose name is in the title of my poem "Group Encounter at Huckleberry Mountain".

BEATNIK MEMOIR ON A ROLL

Eighty-two people looked in on The Silent Boomer today. Thank you. All my jabber in recent entries about my psychology and the memoir I'm working on and a current rereading of Steinbeck's East Of Eden has created the following Facebook discussion with myself and friends. The picture above is a cartoon I created for my microzine, George and Mertie's Place, long ago and far away.

BOOMER BEATNIK LOSES ANOTHER FRIEND AND WRITER: PHYLLIS JANOWITZ

"Friends and colleagues of Phyllis Janowitz plan to remember her life with a gathering Friday, April 17 at 11:30 a.m. in the English Department Lounge. Janowitz, poet and professor emerita, died Aug. 17, 2015 at Seneca View Skilled Nursing Facility in Montour Falls, New York. She was 84. Janowitz taught creative writing and poetry at Cornell for nearly 30 years and served as director of the Creative Writing Program in the Department of English twice, from 1980-83 and 1986-91. She retired as a full professor in 2009."

Currently, as I've mentioned before, I'm putting together a list of writers Mertie and I published in our tiny microzine, George & Mertie's Place, from 1995 thru 2000. I look some of them up to see how they're doing. Recently, you'll recall, I was surprised to see that Madeline DeFrees died in November of this year. Tonight, I came across the obituary of Phyllis Janowitz. In 1975, she was a visiting poet at the first two week poetry workshop I ever attended a few weeks after I arrived in Cheney, Washington to commence graduate work in Creative Writing. Smart, clever and eccentric, I loved her poetry. She was a joy. We danced one night at a local tavern, a country western bar. Those days I dressed in steel toed boots, Levis and dungaree shirts. She told me, laughing, that I was the first man who ever sang in her ear while she danced with him. I told her she was the first dancing partner into whose ear I ever sang as we danced. We talked of meeting someday in Biloxi, Miss and writing together down there. I was in love with her the whole two weeks, then she returned to NYC and my fickle heart went elsewhere. Very saddened to read of her death. The poem of hers we published follows:

Losing
   1
Little
but it has a
sharp tongue which wounds. Even
so, anything it cuts ends up
lighter. 
   2
In the
error of an
asphyxiation, she
sees a bit late that air's weight may be
required.
   3
Wanting
and waxing are
two exercises she
is good at. And right now waning's
waxing.
   4
He tells 
her she's obese.
She says all she needs to
lose is whatever she most needs
to love. 

SILENT BOOMER AS EDITOR, PUBLISHER AND HUMORIST

From 1995 through 2000, wife Mertie and I published, and I edited George & Mertie's Place, a monthly microzine that appeared February through December. Lately, I've been putting together a list of those poets and writers who appeared in our microzine. In doing so, I've come across cartoons that "Art Clip" and I put together in arrangements that tickled my fancy. The two items on the left are samples of my work in that vein.

The list of men and women we published during those years is quite interesting. At the time we published them, I never paid much attention to who they were or their reputations. I was interested only in what they wrote. As I've  compiled the list, I've Googled a few names and am very pleased to discover more about them. I had no idea of the extent of the work they've done and still do. I've sent off some emails to a few, merely to touch base and see what they're doing now. Quite exciting. Sadly, one of those we published was Madeline DeFrees whose name I did know of at the time. I discovered that she died on November 11, 2015...8 days ago.

SILENT & WIFE RECOGNIZED FOR ZINE AND DIDN'T KNOW IT

Had a pleasant surprise last night. To further our aim of getting someone other than myself to publish the best selling novel, Manning, I'm currently writing, I decided to get myself on the "Directory of Poets" listed by the prestigious Poets & Writers Magazine. To qualify for the list, a poet (or writer) must have earned twelve points. Poets earn 1 point for every recognized anthology or journal their work has appeared in.

The key word is "recognized". I have enough publications (caution—still in process), but the application took hours of entering data and scanning the table of contents of publications not on the web when my work went in. In the process, I had to go to Poets & Writers list of authorized publications each time, and there was our pleasant surprise. Out of curiosity, I looked up the monthly microzine that Mertie and I published and I edited for 6 years from 1995 thru 2000. George & Mertie's Place: rooms with a view was on their list of authorized publications. 

"Of course it is," I happily told myself. It was a fine production with little resources. I created funny cartoons and wrote a comedic "Horroscope" [sic] for it, and we laid out the microzine carefully. Eventually, we were getting work from new, now established, writers and established names too. At first, we paid our writers a pittance. The checks we wrote were little more than symbolic gestures. Eventually we offered a $50 prize (instead of little sums to each) which we named the "Diver Award" (after F. Scott's Dick Diver in Tender Is The Night). 

Finding our microzine on Poets & Writers Magazine was a happy moment. Being pleased as punch, as the archaic saying goes, we want to thank those among you who submitted the microzine to the list and to Poets & Writers for recognizing our work in the list.

THE BEATEST SILENT BOOMER GETS LOST IN HIS REFLECTIONS

klipschutz

The personality trait about myself hardest to accept is that I'm a writer. Came through to me two days ago when a publisher I queried asked to look at Angie's Choice and also asked for "intended audience, marketing ideas for your work". These days the writer not only writes but he must market his work. Panic! I never took a course in marketing, have no talent for selling myself or the book I've written. The thought of selling myself terrifies me. 

my hidden nature

I don't know marketing from grocery shopping or networking from fishnet hosiery. I've been writing about my life and the reality it exists in since high school with absolutely no financial success or major critical acclaim. If I'm not writing a poem or short story, I've been at work on a novel, most of those unfinished. Those times when I'm not working on creative stuff, I'm pounding away at internet debates with strangers, letters to the editor, emails to friends and family, and essays or journaling, now blogging or Facebooking—thousands and thousands of pieces of my reality all over the place—plus those scholarly term papers when I was in school. Several decades ago I got tired of carrying them around and found a home for them in a dirty green dumpster. Could it be, I ask myself, that I'm trying to disprove the idea that if a writer sticks with it, he'll make it. "Make it" itself is loaded with ambivalence and ambiguity. 

Here's the problem in a nutshell: What is it about a human nature that it must have someone other than itself approve of what it's doing before the value of the doing becomes evident to him or her? At the top, I've included a photo of klipschutz, a poet/songwriter who understands the art of presenting the self. His work is pretty damn good also. Take a look at it. We published him long ago in a microzine wife and I published and edited: George & Mertie's Place.

SILENT BACKSTORY FOR THE NEW SILENT BOOMER'S NOVEL

I've been weeks working up what's become a 5 page back-story for the new novel. A complex history has developed that I find quite intriguing. Looking through photos on the web as stand-in inspirations for my main characters, I've found a lover for my detective and a face for his robotic partner. Faces for the Huynhymns might be harder to find, but I think I've got the Neanderthals covered pretty well. The ghouls I'll leave to your imagination.
If you think you're hearing things, well...?

More good news:  a recent effort at humor was accepted in an online issue of 50plusnorthwest.com.  

Last Saturday, was privileged to be offered (by Chris Luna) the opportunity to read a poem at the Peace and Justice Fair at Esther Short Park in downtown Vancouver. Received an unexpected honorarium of 25 dollars. Add that to the 22 dollars I earned in 1978 from the publication of two of my poems in the Anglo-Welsh Review, and I'm fat as far a being a poet on the outskirts of the known world of poetics is concerned. Of course, I've not put a value on all the copies I've received of the magazines I've appeared in. The 6 years Mertie and I published the microzine, George and Mertie's Place, we did have subscribers, but we never broke even. Didn't plan on profits in the first place. 

SILENT BOOMER TAKES A LEFT UPPERCUT TO CHIN!

Thank you so much for your interest in Talcott Notch. While your project has much merit, I'm afraid I don't feel strongly enough to take it on in this tough marketplace. I wish you the best in placing it elsewhere.
Best, 
Paula Munier  Talcott Notch Literary Agency
 

Got photo at:

I always pay attention to a very interesting word in Paula's rejection letter. She writes, "I don't feel strongly enough...." From my own editing experience (and my reading in neuroscience), I assure myself that "feeling" is the only important element in every literary judgment. 

A guy like me (or a gal like Paula) reads something and likes it or not... period! Once the electrochemical computing system that runs the human body and is the human being has made that important feelingization (sic), it can generate an impressive set of  rationalizations for why I felt as it did or it felt as I did.

Of course, my feelings about each piece of writing I looked at when I edited Willow Springs, George & Mertie's Place or Heliotrope were informed by decades of reading the very best and the very worst of literature, and Paula's are based on, she hopes, what might be popular, and, later, the books that last will be the combined feelings of agents, publishers, scholars and readers...Dickens, James Joyce or Tolkien.

That's the situation as I feel it. Feelings are what motivates an agent and an editor, and the feelings of readers make a book a best seller. Feelings made a very poorly written book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin" a powerful tool in the anti-slavery movement that led to the American Civil War. Feelings!

It's the same old story,

A fight for love and glory,

A case of do or die,

The world will always welcome lovers
As time goes by.

TAX TIME FOR THE SILENT ONE AND HIS "WRITING BUSINESS"

Yesterday I did our taxes. I had to claim I had a business last year because I bought some of my own poetry books to give away and, thus, I made 15 dollars and paid 4 dollars in taxes. Authorhouse (my self-publishing outfit till now) reported my earnings, as they should. I charged my business cards to this new Business of Writing, and some paper products, and so I lost 33 dollars last year in my business as writer.

The six years I edited and published George & Mertie's Place, I had a business license and did keep track of business expenses, and I had to hire a taxman to do my taxes because there was also depreciation on a computer and some software I bought to format the microzine. We never broke even selling good literature. I'm not going to go into all that business stuff this time (unless I write a best seller) although I could say that my laptop is used exclusively for my writing and claim its purchase as a business expense.

I'll tell you one thing that I did learn those years I published George and Mertie's Place. Businesses everywhere can sure write off a lot of stuff, and they get many state tax breaks, yet we hear some business people who are always complaining their states aren't business friendly. That's about all I'll say because this is not a political blog.

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE, OLD DOG

I've had 11 years of editing and/or publishing literary magazines and microzines. I've had the yeah or nay over the works of some very fine writers in my time, yet I've s

Our microzine. This issue on orange paper.

till managed to learn a thing or two from my recent attendance at two writer groups. As you know, I recently translated a novel from mss to editable files. My goal, of course, is to entirely rewrite the novel, Delinquent Lives, and put it on Amazon as an ebook...if I don't land an agent.

When the Coffee House Writers Group [chwg] looked at the novel, several readers were bothered by a lack of clarity in the way I switched between the points of view of two characters which, actually, continues throughout the entire work. At first, I was too enamored at the clever way I was integrating the personalities of the two characters whose points of view dominate the novel, but I took my reader's advisement under consideration, and this morning I rewrote several sections to clarify the characters in relation to one another, and I'm damned happy with the result.

In the other group, SW WA/OR Write To Publish, they live by a silly rule about using the word "it". Can cost a man a quarter if he uses "it". I always think of bringing the opening of The Sound and The Fury to such a class and presenting it as my own work just to see how the rule makers would deal with Faulkner's writing. However, this morning as I sat down to my writing and began to look at the "it"s liberally sprinkled throughout my text, I began to eliminate some of them and to find other ways of expressing the pronouns. Imagine my pleasure to find I liked the changes. The changes added clarity and precision to the novel.I'll continue in that way from now on.

So...as you see, even a 75 year old writer with much experience can learn if he listens.