Rereading and revising the past 20+ years of short stories, sudden fiction, and performance texts has been an experience. And somewhat uncanny doing it in the month before I turn 40.
I had completed a manuscript for a story collection a couple of times in the past. The first time, my agent and I decided to focus on shopping around
my second novel instead, as story collections are a harder sell, and I've never been in any prestigious literary journals or won any awards for my stories (although they've been in several notable and award-winning anthologies). That version of the manuscript was shorter and focused on male relationships.
The second time I submitted it to a writing contest that had an experimental slant. For that version, I added more performance texts and experimental writing, some short things that I wouldn't call poetry but are probably as close as I get to verse. I also took out some of the edgier gay stuff in that one, I think.
The third version was for when the
publishers of
One of These Things... wanted to bring it out. For them, I added some new stories I'd since written and evened out the prose/experimental balance.
This go 'round, for
Rebel Satori, I thought I wouldn't have much work to do. But I reread the manuscript and got excited about really rebuilding it from the ground up. The last version was good, but I've been working on scholarly writing so much, I was really excited about digging into a literary project again. So, in addition to rethinking what to include, every single piece in there has been revised and reedited, plus I wrote some brand-new things as well.
But first, I started digging around dusty cabinets and cobwebbed computer files, including one titled "Old and/or Crap," which, to my surprise, had a few gems I'd previously dismissed. Things I'd written for a 'zine that I never heard from again, or an anthology that didn't happen -- I'd remembered them as juvenile, but this time found them sweet and direct.
On the other hand, there was one piece in the current manuscript I finally got rid of. I'd labored over it through different versions, in different publications, and in
performances, but I finally decided to give up on it. It just didn't go far enough, and I'd recently cannibalized some of its best parts in
another essay. Overall, it was interesting to see recurrent themes appear--crumbling and fumbling love relationships, disintegrating families, the influence of urban spaces, explorations of masculine and queer identities--but this also made for some redundancy, so some pieces were cut to reduce repetition.
And it was reassuring to feel continuity in something built out of so many ad hoc works over so many years. Unlike the novels (or, in a different way, the dissertation I'm working on now), where I'm so conscious of the project as whole, when writing stories it's all about that individual moment, expression, feeling, or idea. So it was cool to see that those individual moments added up to something.
Happiest part of it was finally finding an ending to an unfinished piece on Everclear (the band and the alcohol). Also finally getting out a new piece that I've been writing in my head the last couple of years and liking the result. It's set in Little Armenia, about about a guy who wakes up 5 years in the past, in his now-ex-boyfriend's bed.
Biggest surprise was rediscovering a short prose-poem I'd written while researching at the Library of Congress two summers ago and had entirely forgotten about, but rediscovered and really liked it.
Biggest surprise-to-me-only was how dark most of it was. "It's kind of a bleak book," I told my husband. "Funny," he said, not missing a beat, "you usually write such shiny, happy things."
