Following up on my Part I & Part II of my series on creating a chapbook, I will offer a little sneak peak to say there are two chapbook interviews lined up, one with Cati Porter on her delightfully illustrated echapbook what Desire makes of us and one with Laura E. Davis, founder and editor of Weave Magazine, who has her first chapbook Braiding the Storm forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, but for now we’re onto Part III: How to create a chapbook: the character driven series.
My Character Driven Experience. Sometimes when you write poems, you will feel there is a character driving each poem into creation. This happened to me while I was writing the series of poems that became My Imaginary. Though I’d written short stories and had characters that I followed around from place to place as the short story culminated, the character my imaginary was the first REAL character I’d ever had while writing poetry. It was an odd experience for me because I didn’t feel in control of the writing process and I didn’t feel driven to find inspiration. Inspiration came. It came often. It came as a wellspring, really. I would be driving through the two-lane highways in Iowa and see odd structures like a “Sale Barn.” I didn’t know what that was, but I knew, just knew, there was a my imaginary poem there and I had to write it. Or I’d be in my poetry classes and I would give my students a prompt or during a presentation, a student group might give the whole class a writing prompt, and suddenly I had a my imaginary poem I had to write. In one such instance, my students asked everyone to write a poem about morbidity and death (it was post-Halloween) and suddenly I began to write an undead, vampiric my imaginary poem. Maybe it was because I was in phd school. Or maybe it was because I’d recently moved from the über-hip and feminist environment of Tucson to (seemingly I thought at the time) nowhere Nebraska. Or maybe it was because I was seeing suddenly a whole lot more of my hometown. Or maybe because Mars was in retrograde. Or maybe because I’d eaten some bad take-out. Or maybe it didn’t really happen at all and it was all a dream. Whatever the reason, I think I needed to laugh and My Imaginary is a funny, crazy silly, LOL chapbook. And I HAD to write it. The character my imaginary made me. I wrote 50 or 60 poems with that character, with the voice of that character driving me through ideas, scenes, instances.
Your Sprung from Your Head Character(s). Once you have this character (or maybe there’s more than one character moving among these poems that are clearly a series), take all the poems that are published and see if there is a narrative arc, a story, a small set of circumstances that would be just enough for a chapbook. The easiest and best part about this type of chapbook is that you don’t need to revise or rewrite a lot of your poems. They are already working together. They already have the theme (or maybe several). It’s your job to decide how you want to deliver this theme in the little chapbook you’re arranging. So maybe pick 20 poems (or enough poems to fill a 20-26 page collection) and edit and revise them just enough until they work together, until there is a story, a narrative. They don’t have to your BESTEST-EST poems ever, though they might be or they might be a few of them. Ultimately, they have to be poems that work together. They must speak to each other as the reader turns the page.
Your Character Driven Chapbook. Once you have a story, not the only possible story, but the story for this chapbook, revise, proof, double-check for errors. Maybe show it to a few friends. Maybe send it to your sister. Once it’s perfect (or perfect for now), send it out to contests and open reading periods. If there is an editor in your life who has told you time and time again, “I want to publish a chapbook of yours. Send me something ASAP,” send them this little collection (of course everyone in the world envies you, I hope you know this, because all of us wish for such an editor with a near-promised publication ). However you send, submit, or enter, try it. Maybe you’ll get lucky.
My Character Driven Chapbook. For My Imaginary, once I had a decent manuscript, I submitted it to chapbook contests and open reading periods. It was a finalist in four contests. Four! Wow! And then Dancing Girl Press picked it up. Yay! I was thrilled because now my imaginary had a home (well, actually my imaginary wasn’t done with me yet. there were more poems my imaginary demanded I write, but at least a part of my imaginary had a home.)
