THE FOREST FOR THE TREES is about writing, publishing and what makes writers tick. This blog is dedicated to the self loathing that afflicts most writers. A community of like-minded malcontents gather here. I post less frequently now, but hopefully with as much vitriol. Please join in! Gluttons for punishment can scroll through the archives.
If I’ve learned one thing about writers, it’s this: we really are all alone. Thanks for reading. Love, Betsy
Someone recently asked me if my clients wrote a lot or had trouble writing during Covid. One writer called me three weeks into the pandemic and said, “I have an idea. I want a contract. If I don’t have something to do I’ll go crazy.” Another client calls every two weeks to describe in detail why she couldn’t write, obsessed with every detail of Covid. But everyone else mostly chugged along, many grateful for their screen and keyboard, their sandbox.
Early risers, midnight writers. The charcoal hours. The deep eddy. The driftwood. The light inside the refrigerator. It’s inky, still, the quiet click. All over the world, crickets are singing. Word, line, paragraph, page. Accrual like paint. This is a long, slow process. The hundreds of days, the one thing you forget on a shopping list, an insult from more than a decade ago. What you wish you would have said and then the world and all its false starts and sad endings might have turned out.
Do you read book reviews? Do they influence you? How do you find out about new books? Authors? Can you get to your local bookseller. I’ve always been a fan of staff picks. Do you have that friend or cousin or acquaintance whose always recommending a new book? Do you go the library and take out books wrapped in glassine, the pages worn smooth as stones. When you find an author you love do you devour their backlist? Do you read blurbs on the back of books, the first line or paragraph? Author photo?
I don’t garden, cook, crochet, scrapbook, take photographs, do crossword puzzles, no birding, boating, butterflying, biking or hiking. I like to take walks, go to movies, poke around bookstores and antique stores. I like to scroll. Writing is pretty much all I do. Sometimes I think this is tremendous focus on my part. I’ve been known to spend 12 hours at my desk, happy as a mollusk. Other times, I think I am hugely missing out on life. I mean I know how to walk down a beach, appreciate a sunset or moonrise. Oh, almost forgot, I love to people watch. Could sit on a city bench and do that ALL day. I don’t like to bake but I’m good at it. I’m good at plucking eyebrows. Is that a hobby? Oh, for god’s sake, I play bridge, though I haven’t played since covid. Thank you for reminding me. I guess what I’m saying is I’d rather be writing.
I can no longer remember the name of the first poems I got published or the name of the magazine that published them. I remember sending them out, individually typed on onion skin paper with polite cover notes and self-addressed stamped envelopes. I remember my two tone Smith Corona with the ribbon cartridges. I remember seeing my poems in the magazine and not feeling all that much. Angels didn’t sing. My parents didn’t suddenly understand me. Young men didn’t flock to me, leave love notes, swing from trees. I think I knew then that getting published was really good, was the goal, but it wasn’t the end. It was a hole on a putting green. A little plastic flag.
When I was a young editor, I signed up lots of writers, many without agents. If I saw a great one woman show, I’d sign the actress. If I read a cool article in an off beat magazine, I’d track down the writer. My best friend at the time loved hearing every detail of every deal and he called me Star Maker. I’d always feign humility, but I loved his attention. Loved the idea of finding a writer under a mushroom or beside a stream and help elevate their work. We’d eat dinner at the bar at the Brasserie at 11:00 at night drinking dirty martinis. We’d walk through the east village, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Sid and Nancy. Holly and Paul. We were beautiful nobodies.
I started this blog in December of 2008. I’m lousy at math, but I think that’s 13 years. My husband really tried to dissuade me from blogging. He was anxious that I would be too unfiltered, that I’d fail to respect boundaries, that I’d get in trouble. The reason he worried about these things is because he has lived with me for thirty years and he knows that I’m not happy unless I can be provocative. For a long time, I carried a can of spray paint withe me just in case. So I created some ground rules: I would never talk about any of clients, any projects that are in play, or talk trash about publishers. And for 13 years, I’ve abided by these rules and nothing bad has happened, unless you count the guy who threatened to lash me together with Patti Smith and lodge an axe in my heart. I was so young and cute when I started writing about publishing and writing. Now, I spend most of my time adding finger nails and bat wings to a boiling cauldron incanting prayers to the publishing gods. Don’t eat my children. Don’t unravel. Don’t give up. Don’t give up. Don’t give up.
Sometimes a single sentence will transform into an eight headed snake, will roll up like a blood soaked carpet concealing a murdered body within, sometimes a breast plate of iron will grow emerald moss, or a pile of New England potatoes will heave as frost churns the frozen ground. I wrote for sixteen hours and never opened the door. My ass is mowed and my raincoat tattered. Once I played in a fort of cement blocks, we lit matches and started small fires of gum wrappers fashioned into tiny tents. I could see my house from there but I couldn’t tell you whether I was an old woman or a caterpillar about to smoke a cigar.
What do you do when you hit a wall with your writing?
Every year for Christmas, my husband gives me ten poetry books. He usually includes the year’s prize winners, but also collections he’s heard about. It’s overwhelming to be face so much new poetry and I usually don’t even crack one until April. Last night, I started reading one. Here’s my method: I read the first poem. I read the title poem. I read a random poem. And the last poem. At that point I have already declared whether the poet is a charlatan or gifted and of interest. If I think a poet is a phony, is cliched, has no clue how to break a line or just shreds some prose in the name of poetry, I become despondent as if the whole human project has been defiled.
It was my birthday yesterday and out of the CLEAR BLUE SKY, I received a birthday message from an old high school acquaintance. A nice chatty message filling me in on his circle of friends. Here’s what I remember from high school, the lockers breathing in and out as I acclimated to new medications. I remember the sound of the boy’s voice who did the morning announcements and how i cursed his cheerfulness. I remember a secret friendship with an athlete who also wrote poems, exchanging our diaries. I knew I had to get through it and life would start later, probably in New York City. I didn’t join the paper, the lit mag, the theater, the debate club. I pined for a boy who came over one night and we lay on the roof of my father’s Monte Carlo and got high, the stars obscured by the clouds.
Betsy Lerner 