publish something

Hopefully I can make this happen before I earn my graduate degree. This goal is not to far fetched being that I’ve been told I’m a pretty good writer and I think so too. I write a ton of papers each semester, one is bound to be good enough to be published. If not, I’ll definitely get the ol’ thesis published…all that work for nothing, I don’t think so!

Two students in the Mills College Creative Writing MFA program offered a free six week memoir writing class this spring. Yesterday was our last class and we were encouraged to submit something for an anthology they are putting together. The readers of this anthology will be my fellow classmates, our instructors classmates, and other members of the community who had the opportunity to take a free class with Mills MFA students. A few minutes ago I submitted a piece for the student anthology. The essay describes my brother’s reaction to the clutter of various family members.

I had a haiku published in Teen Speak magazine when I was high school, but I want to publish a better poem or an article or something else and I want to publish somewhere that lots of people will see. A poem in The New Yorker or an article in a main newspaper.

Scientific journal articles, altough I’d be happier publishing a novel or kids book

I’m not thinking a book or anything, or anything that I do for work, but something that I’ve constructed for the sole purpose of sharing with others…most likely an eHow entry or something similar.

I want to publish a children’s book with my mother. She always told the greatest children’s stories and I’d love to have some of them in book form. I have a friend who can illustrate, and my mom and I can write the stories down. I have no idea how to go about publishing a book, but I guess I’ll find out! At least we have the idea now. Just have to get started.

But I’m giving this goal up for now, as I’m not really working on it and I’m cleaning up my list :)

I was just selected to be published in Creative Communication’s Young Poet’s Contest for my poem entitled “Thin”
It goes like so:

Thin

If you weren’t my deadliest sin
Then maybe this could work
Or bend in you favor in any case
But how it happens you never
I never knew
When one day you posed to me
An apple
As crimson as the sun at 7:00
Even more perilous
Than a pear
More of a prince, calling that area below my heart stone pitted
As a gargoyle
Hunger never felt like this
Water
Water
Quench my thirst
Hunger
Hunger
Till I burst

I posted this because I never really thought it could happen and I’m really proud I didn’t just lay it by the way side. Completeling one goal means I can do all of them and that’s just what I intend to do.

The winter edition of EchoImmortalis.net has one of my photos, of a lovely Iowa model I shot in 2005.

So, I’m published. Purty cool… but it’s fairly obscure. (shrug)

so you want to be a writer?
by Charles Bukowski

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
if you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
if you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don’t add to that.
don’t do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

From sifting through the madness for the Word, the line, the way by Charles Bukowski.