Iris Has Free Time by Smyles Iris

Author:Smyles, Iris [Smyles, Iris]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Published: 2013-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

3:31 PM

I stop into the mailroom to see if I have any notifications in my mailbox. Next to the copy machine, I spot a pile of free copies of last month’s Associated Writing Programs magazine. I scan the names and titles listed on the front: an essay on memoir writing, an essay on small press publication, an essay called, “Poetry and Self.” The women writers, pictured in small boxes on the cover, have university hair—long, frizzy, gray, brushed straight and pulled back into a clip. They smile as if they were perfectly content to be featured in the magazine of losers who’ve found a way to make losing work.

Their essays are always about “the craft” and the importance of “showing up for the work.” What they neglect to mention is that their showing up is only important to them. No one else cares if they don’t show up. The A WP bears an eerie similarity to self-help manuals. One of the features about memoir writing is called, “Writing to Save Your Life!” Because I love self-help manuals, I pick up a copy.

I take the magazine back to my office. Settled in, I immediately turn to the back and circle a bunch of calls from literary magazines I decide to submit to but never will. I do this every month. They have names like Salamander and Natural Bridge. One wants stories about Southeastern women who’ve been battered. Another, Trout Magazine, wants only stories about trout fishing, specifically about trout and transcendence. I think about trying to write something about trout fishing. I think about trying to adapt a love story I’ve already written by adding a scene with a trout. “Write what you know,” goes the classic advice, but there are never any calls for stories about what I know. I feel hopeless. If only someone would take me fishing and then batter me.

I get an idea for a surrealist story in which a woman wakes up as a chicken cutlet and is worried because how is she supposed to get to work on time and continue to support her parents and her brother’s violin lessons? I rush to write the idea down in my notebook. Then I think of another idea for a realist novel and jot down, “Story about a woman who is just like me but better. Everyone loves her. She drinks and never gets hangovers. She solves crimes and is impeccably dressed. She hasn’t gone to college or grad school or a second grad school and has never for even a moment thought about working as an adjunct in the Humanities department. Instead, she makes a lot of money stuffing envelopes at home—it turns out it’s not a scam!”

I close my notebook and pick up the stack of final portfolios from Monday’s class. I’ve asked each student to do a self-evaluation, to collect all their work from the beginning of the semester to now, and then attach a cover sheet with a brief paragraph assessing their work, along with the grade they think they deserve.

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