Putting it out into the Universe

 My roommate went on a walk last night brought home a plaque. He’d been walking past a house with a sign out front urging passers-by to take a sign.

Even before Covid I’d been used to seeing Little Library or Corner Pantry or other pop-ups. Whenever I visited a friend who once lived in Charlottesville, VA there was a neighbor who had an outreach of original poems. She’d compose them and copy them and have out front in a Plexiglas container for people to take. It was a way to get her work out there and be a blessing.

Recently I’ve had a run of acceptances. An essay taken by Quananzine, a humorous story by Funny Pearls also out of the UK, a flash in SCBWI-IL Prairie Wind, and another flash in Teach. Write. In addition, my daughter had something appear in Coffin Bell. In nearly all these instances neither of us were paid or offered payment.

I’m beginning to see what I do as the equivalent as the workshop guy or poem lady.

I’ve written here before—or should I say whined—about the tension of being a writer in an age of “content.” Meaning: my words/stories are merely fodder, teeth in the cog of someone else’s blog.

Now if this is why I did it—to get paid—I’d be miserably poor. After a string of publication successes I did just that. I only submitted to journals that paid. Things slowed down, in fact, I had no acceptances. The rolling numbers I was used to posting at the section of my blog called Other Writing nudged to zero. I wasn’t happy.

So I’m not happy not getting paid, but I also don’t like not getting published. See, as a writer, I write to share my work. I want to be read. In The Wife, the book and movie about a wife/mother who was the actual author behind the celebrated husband who claimed all the honors and fame, there is a line in the film where a woman author in the late 50s/early 60s tried to school said young woman: "a writer has to be read".

This is the juice that keeps me going, though I’d also like to be compensated.

I am now approaching having over 100 pieces accepted and probably made a total of $100 over the past ten years. The math is terrible!

This small blog (which I’ve decided not to monetize), started at the urging of a good friend Mary Jo Guglielmo, gets about 4-5,000 hits a month. I am being read (or at least “viewed”). I am putting myself out there. Or at least my little sign into the universe.