Sweet Potato Haircut

Hello, sweet treasured beloveds who know what the strange string of letters sweetpotatohaircut points to. Here, this lovingly crafted, well intentioned space for continual creating and sharing.

I stopped posting here when I started taking creative writing classes, irony of ironies. I learned that the big timers start by sending work out to literary magazines and getting relentlessly rejected until one day, something happens. And the cycle repeats until people recognize your name, and you publish a book, and so on. I learned that by posting work on a private blog, that work becomes inelegible for publication, because it has already been posted somewhere. They want first rights, these magazines. The privilege and power of first publication. I became afraid, hearing this. Here, in this microscopic corner of the internet, I may constitute some of my prized poems as dust collectors, shelf sitters. So where to go from here.

I also, however, have declined from sending work to magazines, even when invited and prompted by professors who work for such institutions. Why? Because it doesn’t feel right to me, giving my work away like that to be claimed by claws of the powerful media, for my heart appointed lines to sit blurred between the words of so many others attempting to climb the slick iced slope out of anonymity. I think of Ram Dass here: “The game is not about becoming somebody, it’s about becoming nobody.” It makes nothing easier or more clear, but something settles in me to think of it, becoming nobody. Is not all language a bridge between our quietest realities, a translation toward some unspeakable shared truth?

When I think back to my year of making devoted weekly posts here, I realize that I wrote more then than I do now. I felt the pull of wanting to share something, anything on each Monday at 11:11 (my decided time slot for the magic of it, and to bring something fresh and perhaps worth contemplating to the start of the week) even if no one read it by my parents. I felt accomplished to create something with such routine.

Part of me, too, wants to scrap the whole system. In large part, the system that has etched into my mind: finding the right way to produce the right sort of work for financial stability. Before I even begin writing, I’m fretting over what will entice today’s audience and what’s too wild for the masses. Trying to appeal and appease and erase the parts of my work that won’t be marketable. Even writing this, I feel disgusted. How did this expectation plant into my concept of creativity? When did it change from a free, unbound practice for navigation of the world and the self to something that must be squeezed through the capitalist straw? As a creative person, it makes sense to try to find a financially supported way to navigate the world doing what I love. But I can say for certain that at this rate, it won’t be what I love anymore. 

So here we are. There are no easy answers, no guaranteed way to create wildly and protect my work and propel it through the humansphere. But I woke up thinking of sweetpotatohaircut, the raw creative engine that drove it, the raw consistent work I shared. Thanks for being there then, and thanks for being here now, and may we walk with the answerless questions, hear the yearning in the asking. 

Talk soon,

Daisy