A Room of Her Own Foundation interviewed Melita Schaum, winner of AROHO's Fall 2010 Orlando Prize for Creative Nonfiction. You can find more about the Orlando Prize as well as AROHO's other prizes and contests at the bottom of this post or at aroho.org.
Melita Schaum is an English professor at the University of Michigan-Dearborn and the author of A Sinner of Memory, a collection of personal essays, as well as several books about the poet Wallace Stevens and women’s issues. She has received numerous nominations and awards including the A Room of Her Own Foundation $1000 Orlando Prize in Creative Nonfiction for her essay, “Constellations.” The essay, which was published in The Los Angeles Review’s Spring 2011 issue as part of the Orlando Prize, earned her a nomination for the coveted Pushcart Prize. What can she tell us about the mysterious process of submission and that most elusive of goals—publication?
You can find a full version of this interview, as well as a sample of Melita’s new experimental work in sound art and media mixing here.
Melita, what would you say has been the biggest result of receiving the Orlando Prize and the subsequent Pushcart nomination from LAR?
Receiving the Orlando Prize, then later a Pushcart nomination from the Los Angeles Review was just the greatest feeling of being supported--I felt literally embraced, held up. The day I learned I'd won the Orlando Prize was the day my husband went in for triple bypass surgery, a sudden and unexpected operation. I had that dazed, terrified, deer-in-headlights feeling--and I literally learned of the Orlando Prize on the Internet in the waiting area of the Mayo Clinic cardiac surgery. Ironically, my husband was the man I'd written about in my essay "Constellations," the man I was back then just getting to know. The notice of the prize was so unbelievable, like a blessing or promise, something coming full circle. He came through the operation just fine. But it was as if the encouragement from both AROHO and LAR supported more than just my writing--it gave my whole spirit a boost, reminded me of the bigger picture.
How much time to you typically spend revising or rewriting a piece before you submit it? How do you know when it’s “ready?”
There's no set formula for this--a piece can come together in an afternoon, or it can take years. A better way to put it might be that all writing takes "years" to come together, if you count the whole process: the living, the reflecting, the simmering of ideas, the gradual growing urge to give it voice. The story taking shape in words is only the final short act of a long drama.
I recently published an essay titled "Adam's Curse," which also was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, that I had wrestled with forever and almost given up on. I wrote the opening five pages, then drew a blank. After setting it aside for four years, I came back to it with a fresh outlook, and finished the piece literally in a weekend. It took an entirely different turn than I'd expected, but I suppose all that time it had been simmering, waiting for me to catch up to it.
You know a piece is "ready" when the ideas fall into place at last, but it being "finished" is something else. I'm a compulsive reviser, polisher, tweaker, rewriter of sentences. Once the structure of an essay comes together, which feels effortless and natural, the technicalities need to be perfect, which is plain hard work. I'm one of those writers who will take a comma out and put it back in twenty times before I'm satisfied.
Do you have any tips for women who are submitting their work for publication or for contests such as Orlando? Any “do”s or “do-not”s?
DO submit, put your best work out there, keep it circulating! DON'T take it personally if a piece is rejected or doesn't win--there are so many variables that decide publication, and many outstanding submissions. I probably shouldn't confess this, but "Constellations" was rejected by numerous publications before winning the Orlando Prize. It's an experimental piece, so I think few people wanted to take a chance on it--until the Orlando Prize and LAR. It sounds like a cliché, but stay true to your work.
Do you have any tips for getting back "in the flow," for getting inspired, or for maintaining discipline in your writing life?
I'm a great believer in "sacred drift," to borrow a Beat-Buddhist term: setting aside some time--an hour, a morning, ten minutes--to walk somewhere without preconceptions, open yourself to the unexpected. I do this with photography sometimes, launching myself into the streets with my camera and whatever silly, arbitrary "rules" and directions come to mind--walk three blocks in any direction, turn left and walk until you see something blue or hear music from a car, photograph the first thing you see that represents "openness," or "connection" or "conflict," etc. For writing, this kind of wandering works to shake your head free of expectations, reminds you to pay attention, even though it might just be three blocks from home. Life never disappoints with new material if we just become beginners again and again.
The deadline for A Room of Her Own’s Orlando Prizes in creative nonfiction, fiction, flash fiction, and poetry is coming up soon! Prize-winning submissions per genre will be published in The Los Angeles Review and will receive $1000. Deadline to apply is July 31st. You can also submit a previously unpublished collection of poems to AROHO’s To the Lighthouse Poetry Publication Prize contest. The winning manuscript will be awarded $1000 and publication by Red Hen Press. This year’s judge is Pulitzer Prize Winner, Tracy K. Smith. More details for both prizes as well as the ongoing #radbrief challenge (for radically brief literature, with a chance to win publication as well as a ticket to AROHO’s next Retreat for Women Writers) can be found at aroho.org.
This post's Guest Editor: Alex Martin, A Room of Her Own Foundation Development Associate
