I have been submitting fiction since December of 2019 - over five years of sending out flash, short fiction, novels, poetry, essays, interviews, and book reviews to publishers, asking them to love me. Every once in a while, I stop submitting. Often related to child care or family issues, the breaks are nice. No worry over bad news in my email, or a sense of dread in the Submittable queue. There’s freedom in going to a reading or participating in a Zoom workshop and saying, “I’m not submitting right now, I’m just here to write.”
Like most people with a functioning brain, I’ve noticed the speed at which Trump has broken the country. The news shocks, horrifies, and bruises. There are days when I want to lock my family in the basement with food rations and wait until it’s over. (If?) The internet, the place where I receive feedback from the writing community, has become a scary place, a place of government takeovers and ridiculousness (e.g., Gulf of America) and hate and the bad guys winning.
But you know what? I live in Washington, DC, and the bad guys are here. They are firing my friends and destroying the places I love, with threats to do more. I can retreat from feedback on my writing but I can’t retreat from walking my daughter to school, or viewing art, or volunteering, because all of that sustains me, is my life-life and not only my art-life.
Being afraid of feedback, holding myself back and avoiding the bad news, is not a sustainable project for the next 1,436 days. So watch me submit NOW, and watch me flick you off if you come into my city in a MAGA hat.