3-2-1 Fall for the Book

On Friday I attended the Breakthrough Poets Panel. Brian Barker, Rebecca Dunham, Cynthia Marie Hoffman, Nadine Sabra Meyer, and Sarah Perrier, all of whom are GMU graduates and award winning poets, discussed their lives and journeys to getting published. 

Things I learned:

1.  Read as much poetry as you can. It is important to explore the vast world of poetry to absorb different techniques and structures that can help with your own writing. The more you expose yourself to great poetry the better you will become at recognizing what works and what doesn’t. It will sharpen your senses for when you revise your own work.

2. On average, it takes poets nine years, after they start sending out their manuscripts, to actually get picked up by a publisher. It is a very arduous and expensive process. Perseverance comes with being a writer. Revision is the most important thing. Not one of them ended up publishing the manuscript they first sent out. It took Cynthia 7 years to get her poetry published, and in the mean time she continued writing.

3. You don’t have to have a PhD in creative writing to become a published author. PhD’s are useful if you want to teach creative writing at a collegiate level, but it’s not a publishing necessity. If you want to be published the best thing you can do is enter your poems into contests and send them to any and all publishers without going over budget.

Further clarification

1.     I didn’t hear much about their backgrounds. They mostly discussed their endeavors after college that led up to their current careers. I would like to know what inspired them to first write poetry. Brian mentioned that he didn’t choose the creative writing path until his junior year of college. I would’ve liked to hear about what he had been doing before and why he decided to change ambitions.

2. I wondered whether any of them also wrote short stories. They all studied creative writing, but I didn’t know whether they were focused on poetry as an undergraduate student or whether they waited until graduate or masters to take on a specific path.

Question

1.  How do they choose the themes of their books, and how they figure out the order or structure? Do they decide before hand that they are going to stick to a certain theme or does it evolve naturally? Does the structure contribute to the theme, or are they figured out separately?