Submitting & Publishing Class Starts Tomorrow!

Writing it up in the garden goes big and brave. Plus my Songwriting Lecture.

Hello, friends!

My groups started last week, except for Submitting & Publishing which waited until tomorrow to honor Rosh Hashanah. Likewise, my new Morning Seeding & Tending group starts tomorrow, so my first-day-of-classes excitement lingers. Not too late to join!

Morning Seeding & Tending: open writing time with no strings attached! All for the price of a weekly latte. Zoom only. Weekly, Monday-Friday 10-11am ET.

Submissions & Publishing: Mondays 12:30-2:30pm ET, everything about submitting your pieces to mainstream and literary journals, querying agents, establishing a social media presence and more. Starts this Monday Oct. 3. Zoom only. I still have spots available. I’ve lined up nine amazing special guests with expertise in their fields, and each week we’ll be exploring a different topic. We are going to learn a lot and get our work out there. Here is our schedule:

Sub&Pub schedule-in -progress

Monday Oct. 3—Intro. Set goals. Grassroots vs. Gatekeepers, author toolkit.

Monday Oct. 10- Liz Chang on Duotrope and lit mag submissions.

Monday Oct. 17- Jocelyn Winn on prepping pieces for publication.

Monday Oct 24- Liz Greene on Social media and hashtags.

Monday Oct 31-TBA on submitting to mainstream publications

Monday Nov. 7 Rhonda Zimlich on Querying agents and publishers.

Monday Nov. 14 Linda Murphy Marshall on Independent/Hybrid publishing.

Monday Nov. 21 Chanel Dubofsky on Social media and book reviews.

Monday Nov. 28-TBD on Residencies, grants and fellowship applications.

Monday Dec. 5-Hillary Stern on Self-Publishing novels on Amazon.

Wednesday Evening Writing and Songwriting: Meets 7-9pm ET every Wednesday until Dec 21. One spot left in the class! In person or Zoom. Starts Oct. 12. (no meeting Oct. 19 because of Fruitlands reschedule!)

November Kali Retreat November 4-6, only two spots left. In person, or Zoom, see more below.

What 42 Years of Songwriting Taught Me (And Failed to Teach Me) About Becoming a Writer

Here is the grad lecture (a requirement of my MFA program), which many of you witnessed me working on last spring. I plan on making mini-videos to post on Instagram and Tik Tok once my friend/fellow songwriter/manager and General Amazing Person Kellie gets back and teaches me how.

What I’m reading/recommendation

On my bookshelf:
–Lucy By the Sea, Elizabeth Strout’s latest which I devoured in two days. This might be my favorite Strout book ever, and that is saying a lot. (This review in the New York Times written by my friend and former editor Hamilton Cain!)

–Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, Anne Tyler. I read this in my 11th grade American Lit class, and I loved it then. I thought it was high time for a re-read and a re-discovery of this seminal author.  

–How to Write a Song that Matters, –Dar Williams’ brand new book out now! As usual, Dar teaches me so much. Here are some gems I’m bringing to my own writing and also sharing with you:

• That first inspiration arrives as a gift. Dar calls it “the window opens.” Other writers have other phrases for this phenomenon. One calls it “the tinglies.” In songwriting, I call it “Katryna,” though when it comes to me more organically, I just say, “it arrived.” It’s a bit of artistic direction in the form of a tune, an idea, a line, or a character.

• “I play to work and I work to play…as we court inspiration…we invite creative disruption into our minds and lives. We disorient ourselves in service of discovering new patterns, ordering systems, and poetic priorities that can help us in this artistic construction called a song.” (p. 19).
• There’s the spark of inspiration, that comes from outside of us, that arrives as a gift, but the next step is to ask ourselves, “What’s up with me?” Like Dar, when I connect the gift with my own current “something bugging me,” that’s when the song, or scene, or essay seems to take flight and gain momentum and structure.
• The lesson I’m taking with me from this book is to follow Dar’s example of what is (to me) extreme patience in waiting for just the right word, just the right chord, just the right ambiance. I tend to write songs pretty quickly—sometimes as quickly as two days, more usually a week or two. Others I start, but soon put away and come back to it fresh (“This Town Is Wrong,” “Normandies,” our new song “Comic Books & Movies”). Learning that Dar works on her songs for months, even years, waiting until just the right rhyme shows up, for instance, or just the right structure (“Mortal City”) sounds to me more like the way I’ve been approaching fiction writing.

Amuse Bouche

My sister Abigail read in our Nields Newsletter my little recommendation of the podcast to which she introduced me, Literature and History by Doug Meltzer. She texted me: can I steal your words? To which I replied, “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” So here is what she did with them: