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"This is America. Decide what job you want to do and become the person who does it." ~Bobbie Barrett, Mad Men

I'm a socialist if in no other way but my writing. For years I've extricated myself from the world of competitive submissions, which from my perspective exists only to prove a false sense of meritoriousness. In graduate school I was editor of New Delta Review (a job I got, by the way, because someone or other saw me as more likable than the other candidates), and I've been to AWP conferences and only now that I've got a distance from that world can I see how ridiculous it all it. AWP exists so that editors of journals, who are also always writers, can find an in into a journal. A few years ago at AWP in Chicago, I met a very cute poet named Dave Lucas who I thought chatted with me to exchange contact info, which we did, and I was all bugginess till I realized he was interested in my role as then-poetry editor of NDR. We published two of his poems because they were pretty good and he was cute, and a recent Google search shows that he's since been published in Poetry, Slate, Blackbird, Paris Review. It's safe to say we hate this capitalist bastard in all his horned-rimmed glasses cuteness, this CEO of 29-year-old writers.

Maybe socialist writer is the wrong term to describe my approach, maybe it's about communal writing. It matters to me to have a small group who loves what I do, and while I wish this group perhaps loved me a little less so that they might impart more critical judgments, I feel that if a connection happens then I'm bugginess all over again. I love when I hear famous writers lament in interviews how lonely the process is, how they pad around in bathrobes and feel very nothing about themselves. Thing is, writers literally need other people: to publish them, to read them, to love them. I already have some of that happening, thus I already feel somewhat successful. Why should it make me feel better to have the words Georgia Review laced beside my name?

Yes, it does matter to be thought grand by those who are in a place to make that judgment, but every teacher (and, I suspect, parent) knows that certain students (or, children) are favorites. What gets published involves so many factors which unfortunately bother me: different schools of aesthetics, literal schools the writer attended, the worry of inserting too much or too little personality into a fucking cover letter. Why can't I submit a nameless, address-free, cover letter-free essay and, maybe with a Post-it on the first page of my draft, write a note saying, "Do you like this? If so, call 504-606-4337, and I'll tell you who I am." Simplicity. No room for it in free enterprise, I suppose.

Of course this may sound like sour grapes coming from someone who positions herself above this world, but is transparently scared to join it, thus does not submit for publication: ever. Literally it's been four years since I've tried. Instead I'm happy to blog for free, for both my friends and myself. My hope is that each word I type is filed away somewhere. Somehow, I'll remember doing this, I'll remember what felt good about certain words and phrases and what felt odd about others. If nothing else this is just hand practice, my learning to hold my wrists just at the edge of the laptop, my hands folded starkly over the keys when I'm considering my next thought, my fingers flying by when I believe in, if only for a few moments, exactly what it is I'm typing.

This has been a Mad Men weekend for us; we're halfway through Season 2. The show is sultry in its foreignness. Everyone is beautiful and smokes and drinks from sun to moon, and in advertising the sale is god but everyone is unhappy, even when he wins. This is a world where capitalism reigns, so in many ways nothing's changed. If one is not getting ahead, then he is falling behind. One character in the show nearly quits Sterling Cooper because one of his co-workers (same age, educational background, etc.) was getting paid one hundred dollars more per week. Similarly I often want to give up writing altogether because a colleague who is two (two!) years younger than I am has at least twenty publications on his c.v. While I feel all this has only just begun, that I'm just beginning to brush away the insecurities that whisper I must not-not-not running this race at all, motherfucker is crossing the finish line. So I'm already behind in a life I haven't been born into. Whatever analogy I finally decided to go with here, you can see how royally fucked I feel.

My first impulse when justifying the quote Iused at the start of this blog is to tell you it shows how unlike Bobbie Barrett-type gal I am, how I'm not the type of person who just decides what I'm going to be and makes it happen. I don't want the reigns, don't want to hold them, don't want to see them. You take them. I can't even submit to journals! Often I'm scared to have even my husband, whom I trust, read my work!

But there are twinges of Bobbie in me. A long ago memory keeps recurring lately, and I don't know why but here it is: I'm in grammar school and in love with the Babysitter's Club books, but especially with it's Kristy character, the club's president. Over one hundred books were written in the series, and what interested me then was how the writer, Ann Martin, had to remind us of each character's traits and background at the beginning of each book (in case you were a newcomer). The word that recurred for Kristy was outgoing. If I'd been a few years old I would've thought her a bossy bitch, but no, Ann convinced me she was outgoing, which seemed a magical way for a girl to be. Want something? Say it, find it, get it done. These seemed impossible feats, but not for the outgoing. So one day I wrote up a quiz for my mom to take in which she had to rate my character traits. I created a 1-5 scale and included such traits as funny, smart, athletic, and of course, outgoing (and now, embarrassingly, I'm thinking of the white boxes under my blog, and feel like I'm in grammar school again, and want to die).

I don't remember the rating mom gave me on any of these traits, even the outgoing one, but I know the score on that particular one wasn't good. She gave me a 1 or 2. I remember feeling majorly affronted, and showing this on my face as I insisted upon more of an answer from both her eyes and the scale in my hands.

"But you're not really outgoing," she said. Then, to quell my horror, "Maybe kind of outgoing, a little bit."

Faced with the veracity of her words (I did not like speaking up, ever, and was scared of new--and some old--people), I decided that in order to be some more proper version of Brooke than I was, I would have to try outgoing. Work at it. Be assertive. And somewhere around that time, in the fifth grade, I ran for student body president. For that endeavor I shook hands and walked with my head up. It only took six posters and weeks of mom-anxiety, but I won the election. Partly this proved to me that I'd become outgoing, or at least was on my way, and though I didn't check this box off on myself I soon after began to work on the Beautiful box, and what torturous times were those subsequent eighteen years.

Perhaps I'm writing this because, at 29, I'm still deciding on the job I want to do. What seemed rather straightforward at ten years old (1. decide to be outgoing, 2. do it) is proving nebulous at best these days. All that's certain is that if I'm going to be a writer that more than five or so of my beloveds read, I've got to get into the submissions game.

But this is practice I love, that my fingers can fly over and not want to rend each other when they stop. It's form-fitting, and it's free.