Justin Bigos: First, congratulations on getting your first book, Carnavoria, accepted by H_NGM_N BKS. What was your experience of sending out your MS, and how did you decide to send to H_NGM_N?Laurie Saurborn Young: Thanks very much, Justin. It was a long slog and a learning experience. I sent it out to well over 150 small-press contests and open reading periods since I graduated from Warren Wilson in 2008. I never got the guts up to query bigger publishers like Copper Canyon or Graywolf. The more I worked with the manuscript, the more it became my own. I was constantly writing and adding and subtracting poems—I learned more firmly that poems and manuscripts are not static entities; that I’ll be making changes until the editor rips it from my hands. And the work became stranger. It’s not conventional, and at times I truly despaired of ever finding an interested audience. Though I got a couple of nibbles early on, as I continued adding new poems and removing others, the nibbles disappeared.
Once I referred to this phase (of not having a book out) as “limbo.” This was at a dinner here in Austin for the poet Harvey Hix, who taught at UT in the Spring of 2010. As I recall it, he said, “That’s a nice way of putting it. It’s more like hell.” A couple more rounds of sending it out into the Vacuum of No Reply and I changed my “limbo” to his “hell.”
Ultimately what I think was most valuable was that I became more certain of my own voice, more confident of my approach. It also taught me how to persevere, and made me certain both of myself as a poet and of my poems. When the rejections came in, I didn’t say, “Oh my God, how can I change this so someone will like it?” There is no way to predict which editor or committee or guest reader will like whose work, so that’s a non-productive, exhaustive line of thinking. Poetry is not about pleasing people (and this is a southerner talking). For me, it’s about finding readers and listeners interested in what the poems are saying—or what they interpret the poems as saying (something over which the poet has little, if any, control).
When Nate Pritts, editor of H_NGM_N BKS and fellow WW alum called me this past spring and asked if the manuscript was still available, I was absolutely thrilled. A couple of weeks earlier I read Matt Hart’s Wolf Face and Alexis Orgera’s How Like Foreign Objects. Honestly, H_NGM_N was the place I truly wanted to be published—but I didn’t hold out any particular hopes, given my pile of rejections. I love the books H_NGM_N publishes, and am extremely thankful to be included in their line up. But then I started right in on my second manuscript. Now it’s out in the world for the time being and I’m working on a third. I like hard deadlines, and I like sending out a manuscript and not knowing what will happen. Hope and feathers, as Dickinson would say. Reading Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning at an early age definitely helped motivate me, though it took a while for me to build up my confidence. Time passes whether I write or not. I’ve decided I’d rather it pass while I’m engaged in this productive, invigorating, challenging art.
