Thank You, Kay Ryan 8 comments

By Lindsey Crittenden

Every Sunday afternoon, our local public radio station airs an interview with one of “the most celebrated writers, artists, and thinkers of our day”—to quote the station PR. Yesterday it was Kay Ryan, and I thought Who? Then the announcer reminded me: our nation’s poet laureate. I filed away the announcement, forgetting about it until I got in the car, about forty minutes into the interview. Ten minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot outside Peet’s Coffee for my weekly supply and turned right around again, back onto Broderick Street so I could keep driving and listen to the rest, uninterrupted (even by coffee).

Several aspects of the interview pulled me in. She had an odd way of talking, of pausing an extra split second between words, as if to keep her listeners at the edge of their seats. She was calm, but also, in a certain sense, transgressive.

She spoke of keeping a spirit of lightness and play in poetry (though her poems are not at all “lite”), the necessity for more quiet in our world, the importance of community colleges in turning people’s lives around. And most affecting to me—this is where the transgression comes in—the notion of networking, or as she put it, “what’s now called networking.”

When asked if it were really true that she had written, years ago, to Alice Quinn—then the poetry editor at The New Yorker—with the information that while Quinn didn’t yet appreciate Ryan’s poems, she would come to, Ryan said, yes, it was true. She’d gone to hear Quinn speak and wanted to approach the editor not “as a supplicant but as a peer.”

Ryan went on to say how she operated under the belief that if you worked hard, as hard as you could, to make your poems and send them out, and kept sending them out, they’d find their place. Over the transom, she said, meant to her just that: the way in. “That’s how work got in an editor’s hands,” she said; “not because it was handed there by a friend.”

Quaint, I thought. Sweet. Naïve.

And then, Why not?

Sure, we’re supposed to write flattering letters, to attend readings, to schmooze. If we’re lucky enough to get asked to teach at a conference, or submit a piece, or spend a month in the New England woods while someone else cooks our meals and changes our bed linens, we make the most of it. We take advantage of word-of-mouth, of recommendations and referrals and offers to send so-and-so something. We check out who’s sitting with whom at dinner, and we tick off our mental checklist: peer, peer, supplicant, peer.

Or (ugly confession) I do.

And thereby, Ryan reminds me, miss the point. Her advice might seem old-fashioned, the stuff of one-in-a-million odds, of the masterpiece plucked from the slush—but it’s good advice. Congratulating ourselves on having an in—or angling for the next one—seems the very stuff that goes before a fall.

One morning last week, online, I learned that an editor I’d worked for, an editor who’d warmly invited me to send more work, an editor who’d called working with me “an absolute pleasure,” had moved on. She’d left the publication I’d written for, the same publication I’d intended to approach (through her) as the venue for a follow-up piece.

In the course of trying to find where she’d landed, I came across a blog featuring photos of local writers at recent events. These writers vary in genre, temperament, gender, and publication creds—but they share one trait. They belong. They’re the cool kids, the A list, the In crowd.

And that morning, the topping-off insult to the injury of finding “my” editor gone.

I felt back in seventh grade, my story idea now not only outdated but completely irrelevant. Gawky, geeky, all knees and elbows and too-long neck, I was all alone at lunch with my weird black-olive-and-cream-cheese sandwich while the cool girls ate their PBJs in a tight little circle of exclusion.

Come on, you’re a grown-up now. Forty-seven years old of grown-up, with published books and articles, favorable reviews and flattering fan mail, etc., etc.

So why does all that go poof when I catch a view of the In Crowd, who probably never lose their editors? I become outsider, supplicant.

But aren’t all writers outsiders, solitary folk who observe, ponder, and to some extent will never belong? Or is the seventh-grader in me still casting about for justification at being left out? Because, let’s face it, even (or especially) among outsiders (writers), there is a pecking order based on where you’ve published and how hip your glasses are and how cleverly you write about being an outsider.

And, yes, there’s also the possibility of very real communion. Outsiders or not, In crowd or not, we all need community and support—whether at a cocktail party or sitting alone in our cars listening to the radio. (Or, like Mary Oliver in an article I just read about Provincetown, walking a pine-needle-carpeted trail at dawn.)

The trick, I suppose, is to stay clear on the distinction between solidarity and schmoozing, on the fact that pecking order does not necessarily reward merit, and on the old saw that some people will always have more than you and some less. The trick, even for a combative, competitive, insecure former seventh-grader, is to put the work first.

Ryan, bless her, didn’t for a minute sound precious or snobby, above-it-all or disingenuous. She just made sense. And though I hadn’t placed her name at first, I have a feeling from now on, I’ll never forget it.