Spinning it round and round…

I have a confession to make: I love spin class.  And the elliptical machine.  And dead lifts.  And oblique crunches.  But most of all, I love spin class.

Which is to say, for the uninitiated: I love spending time in a sweaty room filled with 30 or so people all on stationary bikes listening to the army-drill-esque shrieks of the instructor telling us to increase our resistance, or pedal faster, or climb the (imaginary) mountain like it's our only path to salvation.  And I love the light-headed, dizzying feeling when I step off the bike and back to earth and the way I need to remind myself—when I am still sweaty, when my feet have made solid contact with the gym floor, when I exit the room and head out of the building—that there is a world and a life I need to deal with.

While I honestly enjoy the actual activity of a spin class, I greatly appreciate that while I am there all I can concentrate on is the present moment: pushing my body to pedal faster, increasing my bike's resistance to support my body as I stand and climb, feeling what it is for so many parts of my body to manage a ridiculous variety of motions at the same time.  There is no mental space to worry about whether I bought more cat food, or how I will find enough time to grade papers, or when I last updated my to-do list, or whether I'm happy that that poem is—like so much of what I have been writing lately—in long-lined couplets or whether I should try shorter-lined tersets.  All that matters is that moment of pushing my legs into perfect little circles on the spincycle.  The rest of the world fades away.

In the strange ways, this gives me hope.  The fact that there are ways that I can exist purely for the moment—or that my experience of life is entirely in the moment—makes me wonder about the individuality and "of the moment"-ness of what I create.  Specifically, what I want to get at here is my manuscript.  To me, it's this culmination of years and years of writing, revising, building confidence in myself as a writer who can find a readership.  There is a history for me over my manuscript that places it within a context that I can't entirely forget.  No matter how much I numb myself to the types of strange, precious attachment I could have to my work, my mind is still an active timeline on the history of this book and how it came to be.

To a reader in a contest, however, my manuscript is not that different from the sweat-bomb version of me atop the spincycle.  My work—57 pages, binder clip, stanzas and titles and metaphors all over the place—is absolutely its own beast.  The context I know is utterly irrelevant.  There is no intimate understanding of the boundaries or signature marks of my aesthetic range.  My work is considered a potential book and only has to answer the question of whether or not it is existing well—completely—wholly—as a potential book.  Just like in the spinning room my task is to climb to the top of a mountain—three times—at the end of an ass-kicking 45 minute workout, my manuscript needs to be solid enough—at the end of my ass-kicking writing process—to rise above the thought that it could be easily rejectable or somehow complete and engaging enough to capture someone's attention.

Last year, when I sent my manuscript to contests, it was constantly changing.  The ever-shifting table of contents, title, and page length left my book anything but able to "exist in the moment" as an individual, complete, and whole entity.  Instead, my book was just the next moment in a string of manifestations.  Any contest reader could pick up my book and know that it still had holes, had obviously come from something, and was still on its way to another state of existence.  I sent my work out while it was still vulnerable to serious edits.  And I would often think to myself, "well, the editor of the press is an expert in this and just needs to know what I'm going for and buy into it enough that he can then do his job" and, well, edit my manuscript into a viable shape.

Now I don't know the fate of my manuscript in this year's contests, but I know that I believe in the actual manuscript that exists—the computer file, the binder-clipped collection of papers, the thing I am sending out to way too many contests—as a complete, ready-to-shelf book.  Without preciousness or needy attachment, I can say that I love my book.  It's interesting, engaging, soulful, and chock full of interesting words and sounds.  I spent a lot of time ordering, re-ordering, thinking, revising, filling in holes.  I spent a lot of time learning how to believe in myself as a writer who can put together a real, worthy, engaging, interesting book.  And now, I can absolutely trust that whoever reads my work will find something that is whole and that exists independently of my authorship or someone else's needs as a reader.  No matter how my book fares in this year's contests, I can at least be proud of that.  And maybe it's coincidence or divine intervention or luck of the draw, but it happens that many of the judges I know about for this year's scheduled submissions are straight from my list of "dream judges."

What about you?  Does your manuscript exist as a nicely whole entity that someone can read without sensing what else might be there—just beyond the words, the line breaks, the pages?  How do you feel about what you're sending off to contests?

October-November is a ridiculous time for book contest/open submission deadlines. more information on the listed prizes can be found on the Poets & Writers website.  Which ones are you submitting to?  Can you guess where I am sending my work?

Carnegie Mellon Press (open reading period, $15 reading fee): October 31
APR/Honickman Prize ($25 fee, Marie Howe will judge): October 31
Canarium Press (open reading period, no reading fee): October 31
Hollis Summers Prize/Ohio U Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
Elixir Press Poetry Awards ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
Lexi Rudnitsky Prize/Persea Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
TS Eliot Prize/Truman State Press ($25 fee, judge unknown): October 31
Miller Williams Prize/ Arkansas Press ($25 fee, Enid Shomer will judge): October 31
Bakeless Literary Prize/Greywolf Press ($25 fee, Carl Phillips will judge): November 1
Walt Whitman Prize/LSU Press ($25 fee, Fanny Howe will judge): November 15
Nightboat Book Poetry Prize ($25 fee, Kimiko Hahn will judge): November 15
Perugia Press Poetry Prize ($25 fee, judge unknown): November 15
Yale Younger Series Prize/Yale Press ($15 fee, Carl Phillips will judge): November 15
Vassar Miller Prize/U. North Texas Press ($25 fee, Lisa Russ Spaar will judge): November 15