Z is for Zoom — End of A-to-Z Challenge

I used this photo yesterday for my Fairy Tale Lobby blog post, but it seems so appropriate for today. This image is stenciled on a wall in the Bogota children’s museum. If the Brave Little Toaster ever took a voyage to the moon, this would be his space ship. Zoom!

Zoom is what I’ll be doing tomorrow. I’ll wake up in Media, PA, and zoom! I’ll be having dinner tomorrow evening in St. Louis. And then, for the next three days I’ll be zooming from venue to venue telling stories under the auspices of the 34th Annual St. Louis Storytelling Festival, until Sunday morning, when zoom! The put me on a plane and before nightfall, zoom, I’m back in Media. I thought I’d have to ask Jack to tape the final episode of The Bletchley Circle for me. But no. I’ll be home in plenty of time.

And this brings April, and the A-to-Z Challenge to a close. To everyone who popped in and left a comment, thank you!  To everyone whose blogs I popped in and commented on, ditto! I’ve read some lively writing this month, thought about things that hadn’t occurred to me before, and gained sustenance from interacting with other word nerds.

About this compulsion to squeeze words from our brains and put them in readable form, Dylan Thomas sort of said it all in his poem “In My Craft or Sullen Art.” You can cut and paste that title into a search box and see what I mean. Australia’s Banjo Patterson said it a little more upbeat:

A Song Of The Pen
by Andrew Barton Paterson

Not for the love of women toil we, we of the craft,
Not for the people’s praise;
Only because our goddess made us her own and laughed,
Claiming us all our days,

Claiming our best endeavour, body and heart and brain
Given with no reserve,
Niggard is she towards us, granting us little gain:
Still, we are proud to serve.

Not unto us is given choice of the tasks we try,
Gathering grain or chaff;
One of her favoured servants toils at an epic high,
One, that a child may laugh.

Yet if we serve her truly in our appointed place,
Freely she doth accord
Unto her faithful servants always this saving grace,
Work is its own reward!

“Big Z, little Z,
What begins with Z?
I do. I am a
Zizzer zazzer zuzz,
as you can plainly see.”*

*Dr. Seuss’s ABC — Random House Books for Young Readers, 1963.

Y is for Yawp! — Day 25 of A-to-Z Blog Challenge

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric YAWP over the roofs of the world.” -Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass …

…or if you want the primary grade version of that sentiment:

“Big Y, little Y,
Yawning Yellow Yak.
Young Yolanda Yorgensen
is yelling on its back.”*

This one was published in 1964. Who remembers “Hootenanny”?

When I was still struggling with query letters and cold submissions and slack-jawed admiration for the published romance authors in my creative writing classes, I was so focused on Getting Into Print that I really didn’t reflect on why I wanted so badly to be a published writer. I knew the odds were astronomically against the possibility of making a living as a novelist. But maybe I’d beat the odds. And so in the course of seven years I wrote three novels. Which I submitted and resubmitted. Which got rejected and re-rejected.

With each rejection I asked myself , Why do I do this? What is this compulsion?

I concluded, Obviously, it’s a character flaw.

I was raised to NOT draw attention to myself, to NOT put myself forward. “Blessed are the meek.” And here I was waving my arms, bouncing up and down, hollering “Yoo-hoo!  Pay attention to me! See what I’ve created!” And why? For some sort of pat on the head? So some grownup would say, “That’s nice, dear.”

In the middle of winter semester, 1982, my writing teacher died. Slow rolling suicide: sixty-three years old, and he hadn’t known a sober day since 1938. Amazing teacher. Thirty years before I met him, he had been an amazing writer. But he hadn’t written anything for publication in at least 30 years…I thought.

I ended up being the one who packed up his papers and books — a significant collection of American novels and criticism spanning the 1920s through the 1940′s — getting them ready to send to the University of Tulsa, whose library was willing to accept them. Among the papers I found carbon copies of recent query letters, banged out on his Underwood manual typewriter,  and stapled to them were the originals of recent rejections.  These weren’t rejection slips; they were letters. The editors still knew him, they addressed him personally. But the bottom line was “good luck placing your work elsewhere.”

Hansford couldn’t quit doing it, either, I thought. Is that what really killed him?
…..
It’s all about that YAWP! Making yourself heard. And maybe someone who hears you will feel as though they’ve been recognized.

Dr. Seuss’s ABC. Random House Books for Young Readers. 1st published in 1963.