A Man with a Promising Past

by Kevin Brown

 

           Between 2009 and 2014, I published three collections of poetry, two chapbooks of poetry, a memoir, and a critical book. One of those collections and one of those chapbooks won contests with small presses. The first collection had a poem in it that Garrison Keillor featured on The Writer’s Almanac and a linguist ultimately used in a popular book on grammar. I did readings at local libraries and colleges, including my alma mater, but I was also invited to regional events. I even had a festival fly me to Boulder, Colorado, to be part of a festival there. During those years, I came to believe that they were the norm, that this stretch was the beginning of what my literary career would look like. A decade later, I’m wondering what happened.

            Let me start out by saying that I’m not angry or bitter about the lack of development in what we’ll call a literary career, though I don’t actually think of my writing in those terms I am, first and foremost, a teacher. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, and it’s where I find my truest sense of self. I’m not a writer who pays the bills by teaching; I’m a teacher who happens to write on the side. Along the way, I had a run of writing success that surprised me, but that was long enough to make me believe it would continue. I’ve kept writing, much as I did during that stretch, but, again, my primary focus has been on my teaching and my students. But I’m still left wondering how I went from publishing a book almost every year to only having published one in the intervening decade.

            At various points in the past ten years, I’ve wondered if I simply ran out of ideas or didn’t have anything left to say. Perhaps, I thought, I’ve mined my past (I did write a memoir) and shared my thoughts about the world, but now that vein has run dry. There’s an old belief that U.S. writers only have one good novel in them, and they write it over and over. Having spent much of my life studying and teaching that literature, it’s not far off. There’s a reason we usually only teach students one or two works by an author, as many of their other works don’t measure up. I’m not comparing myself to the greats, of course, but perhaps I only had one or two stories to tell, and I’ve used them up.

            I’ve also thought about my writing process, that, perhaps, I had changed something that led to a change in the quality of my work. Thus, there were times I went back to the same way I had been writing during those years, which usually entailed putting an idea in my head, taking a walk in the morning, and crafting the poem in my mind as I walked. When I got into work, then, I would write it out, revising it a bit from what was in my head, then revising it again when I typed it out. When that approach ceased to be working (or at least delivering the results I had hoped for), I tried others. Over ten years, I’ve tried a variety of methods, some driven by a change in my working schedule, some by a move from walking to running on a more serious level, but, clearly, none have led to the results I had during that six year stretch.

            There’s also the chance that the literary environment has changed, and I was unable to change with it. There have always been writers (or artists, in general) who are unaware of the move from what they’ve been producing to a very different approach to writing or art and, thus, who get left behind. The question of whether one should pay attention to those changes is a valid one, in fact. Some artists believe that they should keep to their vision and produce their work—see Robert Frost during the Modernist movement, for example—while others believe that they should change and grow, learning from those around them. However, I know my place in the literary food chain. Even during my strongest run, when I was publishing in journals I didn’t believe would publish my work, I was far from the top-tier publications. The writing world is too wide in the twenty-first century for there to even be those types of movements any longer. There are enough journals to publish almost any style of writing.

            Of course, that does lead to the question of whether I was doing a solid job of matching my work to the journals where they would best fit. I’m probably not the best at making sure that happens, as I’ve often taken a scattershot approach to submissions. However, I have worked to return to journals that have published my work in the past, as they’ve clearly thought the type of work I do is worth publishing. However, editorial staff changes mean a change in focus for the journal, so that’s no guarantee of future success, even if one is producing work of the same caliber. But perhaps my work is simply no longer of that caliber.

            Also, during that run of publications, I was working on my MFA degree. Now, most people’s first thought would be that those years should be my most productive, as I would be generating work for that degree. However, I had been writing for more than a decade before I pursued graduate work in creative writing (I already had a doctorate in literature). My first book came out the year before I went to graduate school, in fact, and it’s the book that had the most obvious success. I had also written many of the poems in the second and third book before I started graduate school. Thus, I don’t think I can credit the degree program with that success.

            In fact, there have been times I’ve wondered if it was attending graduate school that led to my struggles of the past decade. My approach to writing poetry didn’t really line up with other students’ or my professors’, for better or worse. The positive side of that is that I was able to see a wide variety of styles and processes. The negative side is that I had some readers who wanted me to write different types of poetry. Of course, the best professors and peers wanted to help make me the best poet I could be. Again, we’re back to the idea of keeping to one’s vision in the midst of change. I didn’t know if I should change my style or approach to be more like the people I was meeting and reading or if I should double down, even when it led to dismissal of my work. Sometimes, it just led to criticism, which is always welcome, but there were some who simply dismissed what I was trying to do.

            Of course, I don’t know why I haven’t had the successes of that six-year run. If I did, I might make whatever changes I needed to continue that success. I say might because we’re back to that question of vision. Or, really, back to the question of why we write at all. At least, why I write. On the one hand, I would like people to read my work. That entails getting published. However, I also write because it’s how I process the world. Even if nobody ever reads this essay, it’s helped me think through my relationship with publication and what I mean by success. I enjoy the challenges of constructing a poem or essay, and they help me see the world in a different way. Thus, I have kept writing throughout the past decade, though with a bit less consistency (again, partly due to a change in working schedule, but there’s always time to write if one wants to badly enough).

            This question of why I write never really goes away. When I was having that run of success—or publication, at least—I was continuing to write because that was how I processed the world. I wasn’t obviously thinking of how I could angle my writing for the next book, though I did start thinking in terms of producing books. Perhaps that change was enough to change my approach to my writing. Perhaps, in the back of my mind now, I’m always wondering if what I’m writing will get published. Perhaps that’s the change in thinking that has changed the way I write, perhaps in ways I can’t perceive. But that’s a perhaps I’ll never know. Instead, my job is (or, at least, should be) to do the work. To sit down and write, then leave the future of my poems (and this essay) up to the vicissitudes of chance. To be happy with thinking through the question, which will shape me into somebody different, even if nobody else ever sees it. Perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps.

BIO

Kevin Brown (he/him) teaches high school English in Nashville. He has published three books of poetry: Liturgical Calendar: Poems (Wipf and Stock); A Lexicon of Lost Words (winner of the Violet Reed Haas Prize for Poetry, Snake Nation Press); and Exit Lines (Plain View Press). He also has a memoir, Another Way: Finding Faith, Then Finding It Again, and a book of scholarship, They Love to Tell the Stories: Five Contemporary Novelists Take on the Gospels. You can find out more about him and his work on social media sites at @kevinbrownwrites or at http://kevinbrownwrites.weebly.com/.