Book Proofs and Blunders

Publishing Anxiety, Proof Problems, and The Fear of Letting YOU Down

This week, I returned to Colorado and have a cold, for the first time in 4 years. I had forgotten that, unlike fall or winter colds, summer colds swelter in the high-altitude sun. On the longest day of the year, I watched the sun dip below the house across the street from my sofa. The rabbits outside sunk into the lawn to keep cool. I had set myself writing goals last week that were never met. In fact in just a day or two, I had forgotten them.

It seems that summer writing is hard—summer newsletters too, which is why this newsletter is arriving less frequently on my computer and on yours. Sometimes, it’s hard for me to decipher whether I’m letting myself down with missed deadlines or letting you down, whoever you happen to be. I think this is also the case in authorship.

This week a proof of my next book Blood to Purify the World arrived.

The book is now so old, written a few years ago, I didn’t recognize it. As I walked back to my apartment from the mailbox, my downstairs neighbor asked “Are you Amy?” This was the second time in a week I was unrecognizable to someone I would expect to recognize me. I thought—maybe I am not. Maybe I am someone else now. I think this is also what happens with a book or any piece if art. It is an archive of a moment/a period, which makes it tricky when a poem is a living entity.

Flipping through the proof, I realized I had sent the publisher the wrong file—a much older and simpler manuscript. Perhaps I’d even call it gentler, less altered by politics and political jargon. It’s now unclear to me what is a fever dream and what isn’t. Which version of the book is best to move forward with? I’ve spent the last two years secretly agonizing over this book. Writing and rewriting pieces that were cut from my first book, Red Memory, and then getting too concerned about riding the line between sharing family lineage and the fear of appropriation, when at the end of the day I’m just looking to examine why we can’t govern cyclically, like the moon. What if our priorities aligned with nature? What if we gave up Chronos’ time?

Last weekend, during a Glen Powell marathon, a friend and I were watching Hit Man (which other than the costumes was arguably terrible and not sexy unlike the reviews claimed). On a date, the female lead tells Powell’s character “Our bodies are water and the moon affects the tides, so why wouldn’t it affect us.” Powell’s character leans into a typical scientific explanation that the moon remains unchanged, it’s the shadow that shifts. It was the perfect encapsulation of lunar dismissal in a solar-centric society. It’s also the typical dismissal of female thought.

This week, largely unable to pry myself from the sofa, I have yet to write the publisher to say, “I’m so sorry, that was the wrong file.” In moments like these, I think about social conditioning and Powell’s character’s response. What does it mean to dismiss yourself before someone else does?

In a lecture this week at the Naropa Summer Writing Program, Danielle Vogel talked about how she assesses a situation and creates boundaries as an empathic body of light (who is also an herbalist-poet). She said something along the lines of “I ask if I generally want to step in or am doing so from a place of fear. Once I clock the fear I can step back.” I’ve been dealing with so much anxiety over this book and over the academic choices I’ve made for the school year ahead (big-exciting-scary choices) and I’m spending a lot of time assessing what is done from a place of fear and what about that fear is excitement and what is a fear of failure.

Today, a bee flew into my hair outside the grocery store when I waddled in the heat to find some saline solution and canned 02. I thought, “if my fears about the next semester, jumping into the deep end of new schools, new subjects, and feeling wildly unprepared for my life, are about the fear of failure, maybe that is okay.” There is not enough space for grace in failure. Or maybe there is and I just don’t know it yet.

So, here I am reformatting my most recent draft of Blood to Purify the World line by line into a Word doc. It’s a little like letterpress typing from the comfort of the sofa; as it turns out I don’t hate the book much after all.

My last thought in the viral jumble of the week: What does it mean when we don’t have world renewal ceremonies? (But instead ritual destruction/unritualized destruction). I say this during a heat advisory and air quality alert as my neighbors wheel out their overflowing trash cans. How do we recover what has been lost to us, not just metaphorically, but literally: word-by-word, moon phase-by-moon phase, breath-by-breath?

I realize as I’m writing this question an unexpected answer arises—just ask for something. This is how I’ve found myself this summer taking on more than I imagined, and it might also be how I can write my way out of fear, with grace. So dear reader, if you know someone who wants to blurb a book about the moon, California salmon, mythology, fairytales, and periods, do let me know soon.