Hello, the manifesto

Hello dear internet, I am not new to you, but this blog is. Today is January 19, 2010 and I have just been laid off from my job. It is a retail job at a small independently owned shop in a hip part of town. It's a place I have enjoyed working for the past two years, and it is a place that I would have continued working at for as long as I could. It hasn't been the best job, I admit. I am underpaid and under appreciated. But that's life, right?

For too long I have stagnated without putting proper efforts into submitting my writing to publication or making attempts to "break into" the writing and publishing industry. I have a BFA in modern poetry and creative writing from Emerson College and yet I am woefully inadequate when it comes to submitting my work, finding publications, finding jobs within my field, getting noticed, and getting PAID FOR WRITING.

In the past five years I have worked at a toy store in a busy tourist area that let me know it was closing by my showing up to see a "Closing in one week, everything must go!" sign, a museum gift shop in a basement full of rats, a porn and adult novelties store working alone long past midnight, a children's clothing store in a posh neighborhood that treated me like an animal, a gourmet food shop where I was screamed at daily, and a little shop of trinkets and baubles made by local artists that I loved, truly loved, but did not belong there. It isn't to belittle retail or retail employees. I was, and still consider myself one of them. I'm just saying that there has to be more than this. There has to be more than being yelled at by customers because you can't conjure some item from the back room, or have someone shoot eye laser death beams at you for using the word obsequious while on the job. Yes, that happened.

I have never, not once, been paid to write.

I live to write. I am, above all else, a poet at heart. It's something that I feel so strongly about I went to college for a degree in POETRY. I mean that's just wacky. What kind of weirdo gets a degree in a nebulous thing like poetry? Me. That's who. I should have known then what I was getting into. I mean obviously this is a path of the Victorian dandy clutching a pen in one hand and a bottle of absinthe in the other. Last I heard, poetry and witticisms and other Oscar Wilde approved endeavors didn't exactly rain in the dough. And gone is the era of just finding some well to-do monarch or rich person to fund your endeavors as you sip sherry in their parlor and "immortalize them in verse." Feh. Still, I love to write. I don't even think love is strong enough of a word. I NEED to write. At my best of times, at my worst of times (especially at my worst of times), writing both poetry and fiction has kept me alive. Sometimes pretty literally. It has brought me back from the edge of whatever it is that keeps us silly humans sane, and has been a saving grace in my darkest hours. See? Look at this purple prose. I couldn't stop being a poet if I tried.

And yet here I am, a few weeks shy of 26, nothing to show for myself in the world of writing save for ONE publication (Post Road Magazine, issue 8. And even that was in the "etcetera" section) and nothing on the horizon in this realm. (though I am self-publishing very soon! exciting!) I don't know what the hell is wrong with me, truly. A lack of motivation? Fear of failure? I couldn't say. It's ridiculous. I will stand for my own ineptitudes no longer.

So what's the point of this blog? To keep myself motivated. To chronicle the ups and downs of these attempts, and my general attempts to go on existing after being crushed by the soullessness of the American economy. To find out what happens after falling down. To pick myself back up and look forward. To climb back onto that horse of writing and ride off into the sunset. Other such axioms. Et cetera. Ad nauseam.

I already live to write. I am going to write to live.

Now the trick is figuring out how to do it. Stay tuned, intertubes.