,
22 tweets,
6 min read
Read on Twitter
Confession time: For the past seven years, I have been writing and publishing using a male heteronym. Now my/his first book is available! You know you want to read it... unsolicitedpress.com/blog/press-rel…
Of course, I've also been publishing under my own name. The heteronym, Elosham Vog, is a fully-formed character with his own interests and writing style. He's also part of a grand experiment related to gender and publishing.
Each time I submit to a journal or press, so does Elosham, from his own email and submittable accounts. I try to make our emails sound different, but I'm only one human...so it's surprising how different our reception/replies can be.
It took almost five years for a journal that had published one writer to publish the other. To date, we've been in two of the same publications. Elosham has lovely e-relationships with editors that span years. Anna does not.
In fact, one editor nominated Elosham for the Forward Prize and still sends him bday messages, etc, but sent Anna rude emails for being out of the UK when published (as Elosham always is, because he's not real).
So, it's probably not surprising that Elosham's book Volcano deals with gender and gender roles in the traditional literary canon. The whole project is both deadly serious and very tongue-in-cheek.
Now, if that doesn't make you want to read the book, the description here might: unsolicitedpress.com/store/p240/Pre…
Many thanks to the kind humans at Unsolicited Press for publishing this strange and beautiful book! @UnsolicitedP
@UnsolicitedP This is the project I talked about on my panel at the New Orleans Poetry Festival! @nolapoetry
Volcano is a hybrid work - a collection-length sequence of poems that work together to tell a (rather surreal yet familiar) story. #womenwriters #writinglife #poetry #hybridpoetry #experimentalpoetry #queerpoetry #allthepoetry #allthehashtags
And it's now on Amazon! amazon.com/Volcano-Elosha…
Another thing that struck me during this experiment was the ways in which gender appeared to inform expectations and reception of the poet and of poems themselves.
Elosham has allowed me to indulge in my love of the surreal and bizarre and the silliness that goes along with it. I was surprised when I began pblishing Volcano poems I wasn’t sure could stand alone without the contextuality added by the rest of the book.
But somehow, editors liked the work. I’ve had very little success publishing surreal or strange poems as Anna. Anna has had much more success with (often faux) confessional poetry. The more titillating the story, the quicker the poems are accepted.
Somehow, it seems to me, it’s at least partly what I’m “confessing” that sells the poem, rather than the poem itself. And somehow editors seem to have more patience and generosity when it comes to playing with form and metaphor when it’s Elosham doing it.
And so Elosham’s first book tells a strange and surreal and heavily metaphorical story through a collection of poems playing with form. And Anna’s first book tells an interesting and juicy story through a collection of first person poems.
But both books are about relationships. Both play with ideas of repressed queerness. Both are talking about breakups and aftermaths. It’s just that they are doing it in very different forms - the forms the two personas each had the most success pursuing.
An editor once read a single poem of mine and told me I should pursue self-publishing. Nobody, he said, wants to read about relationships and domestic or women’s troubles. I should have replied, that’s only true if it’s women who are writing those poems. 🤣
An editor did once ask Elosham to remove a line they felt was evocative of the male gaze. Yes, I replied, that’s the point. I’m criticizing the male gaze. But that was perhaps open to misinterpretation coming from a male poet, so the line was cut.
Anna was also once asked to remove a line. Interestingly, it was a poem about pregnancy, imagining the body as a polluted ocean. I was asked to remove the fish (the baby). Still not sure what the (male) editors thought the poem was about.
Friends, what are your most interesting or strange or funny stories relating to gender and publishing or writing??
I still want to know! Tell me your stories, please. :) :)
