Behind the Book: Insight #1

Don’t start with the end in mind, but be deliberate.

Friends, it has been a minute. A few months, actually. I didn’t intend to go this long without posting here, but the process of finalizing my next book (Pine Soot Tendon Bone, winner of the Washington Prize) has taken all of the fractions of my time not devoted to paid-work-working and parenting. I know a lot of you write between the cracks of full-time jobs, caregiving, etc. I see you, and, seriously, how do we …?

I’m lucky to have this problem: trying to fit publishing a new book into a busy life. But getting a book published has little to do with luck. I want you to know that. The truth is that having it accepted for publication was the outcome of many seemingly small choices played out over years.

Certain choices mattered to this book. I’m one poet, but I see similar choices helping my coaching clients and peers and interviewees reach publication milestones, too. So I thought I’d restart this newsletter with a series about what we can do to influence a book’s path.

(And I’m thrilled to be restarting interviews with luminous poets—so keep an eye on this space for those!)

I hope they help you on your publishing journey.

Insight #1: Don’t start with the end in mind, but be deliberate.

In poetry manuscript organization workshops, I always get a lot of questions about whether to write consciously toward a book (having an end in mind) or to keep writing poems without any thought of making them into a book. It’s a bit of a false dichotomy, if you ask me, but I get why people ask.

Poetry publishers do tend to favor thematic manuscripts. So, wouldn’t that suggest that it is necessary to write “on theme,” with an end in mind? Poets who work on “project books” do, writing poems on a particular subject matter or with formal constraints or with some set of rules applied to the development of each poem.

Very few poets I know use the project book method. In fact, most are wary of the approach because, like with a poem that starts with an end in mind, it tends to stymie the work’s potential. 

But that doesn’t answer the question about how to arrive at a thematic book.

The not-so-narrative second book

I worked my first book into thematic coherence through trial and error, a haphazard process that took me five to ten years. Ultimately, poems centered on family history drove the completion of the work and became the backbone of the manuscript.

This latest collection similarly started with no obvious narrative arc, and it never found one. In fact, I saw early on that the poems tended to go in the opposite direction, away from narrative, prioritizing raw details and unresolvable complexities instead. My editor calls the poems “understated,” which I take to mean, in part, that they shy away from dramatic narrative arcs and epiphanies. 

So I knew early in the accumulation process that this new body of work (if it was going to be a book, I wasn’t even sure) probably wouldn’t have a narrative backbone. Still, I didn’t want it to take years and years to discover its coherence, like with my first book. (Actually, this book took just three years.)

Noting themes, working toward balance

I thought about what Katherine Indermaur said about discovering the core theme of her award-winning collection I|I after a graduate workshop pointed out her obsession with mirrors. I also kept in mind how themes emerged for Rebecca Aronson’s Anchor. Both authors became aware of themes in the midst of writing poems, well before completing the work. 

Without narrowing my focus too much, I began noticing themes in my poems. How did they talk to one another? What were their central conflicts? What was obsessing me?

Tragedies in my community appeared in my poems: wildfires, a mass shooting at our grocery store, a family friend killed by a gunman in another city. I was also watching local ecosystems shift due to climate change and land development. So it’s not surprising that grief punctuates the book. But so do moments of intense beauty and awe.

I didn’t want to write a Grief Book. I did want to write poems that refused to look away.

Although I had no clear end in mind, I wrote with an awareness of the book’s territory—grief, clarity, awe, beauty, temporality, geologic time and human brevity. Poems started to suggest primary tones and sub-tones, like a painter’s palette. 

I thought about what Terrapin Books publisher Diane Lockward told me: Most manuscripts she sees don’t have enough variation, so I aimed for variation as much as for coherence.

Takeaways

You can write a book that is highly thematic without writing a project book.

You don’t have to start with the end in mind, but at some point, maybe a year or two (or five) into the process, assess what you have.

• Is there a narrative arc, even a loose one?

• Which themes cross pollinate poems?

• How are the poems talking to one another?

• What are your obsessions?

• What are the poems’ primary tonal qualities?

• To achieve balance, do you need more or less of certain themes?