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Palmetto Rose, or What Showing Up, Revision, Practice, and Knowing Your Audience Really Looks Like

He starts with the palmetto leaf, long and lean. Three dozen more rest in a satchel at his feet, dangling inches above the cobblestone. He sits on a brick ledge, a planter of azaleas. He leans forward in army surplus: pants and jacket. Sandals. Palm turned toward the sky, fingers calloused and dusty. A smile.

Some days it is sunny and warm. Today it is cloudy. A breeze. It will rain. He runs the leaf between forefinger and thumb, feels the strength of the stem, folds the green edges together. His movements are practiced. The toes of his dangling right foot curl, pulling the heels of his sandal up against his calloused soles, and then releasing. He sits on a planter, or a fountain. He nods to passersby.

With a quick motion of his wrist, he separates the stem from the flanking plant tissues and breaks it from the whole, except for a few inches resting in his palm and against his wrist. The leaf now in two parts, he takes one blade and folds it over the other at 90 degrees. He grips the second and folds it over the first at 120 degrees.

Then again.

Then again.

And again.

The rose is born from the repetition. A repetition practiced many years. Raindrops begin to fall. The few early morning tourists walk quickly.

“Welcome to Savannah.”

They do not slow down or show interest. Colorful shops open their doors. The people enter. Leave with t-shirts, shot glasses, slogans to commemorate their navigation of airports and bank accounts that led them here. Souvenirs for those they left behind in offices, and classrooms, and homes.

Washington and Michigan, Texas.

The raindrops come more quickly. They darken the cobblestones and bricks, land on the protective plastic coverings of smartphones. The people run. They retreat. They rush to indoor seating, hotel swimming pools.

***

When the clouds are away and the people are out, he is a teller of stories. He is the teller of his stories, and the teller of the stories of others. The structure of these stories is a rose. He wraps the green blades around each other with forefinger and thumb. Always smiling, always talking. He is the Gullah Man. That’s what he is called. It’s not his name, but it’s what he is called. He knows about you. He welcomes you to Savannah. If you’ll stop for a second, he’ll tell you something.

There’s a man, who was a boy. Who-nah. This boy wants to be an artist, a master, and when he is a man he will become one. The Gullah Man is like that boy. He’s not a master yet, he tells you, as he closes his eyes and shifts the rose behind his back. He turns so you can see the deft movements of his fingers. He stares blindly up into the sky, the skin around his clenched eyelids lined and wrinkled. Always, if he is not speaking, he is smiling. The rose takes shape in his hands.

***

If you stop, he’ll tell you about his ancestors from low country and Angola. He’ll tell you about years of military service, and his discharge. He’ll tell you about studying business. About pouring concrete, and driving dump trucks and laying brick. He’ll tell you about spreading God’s love and the good will of mankind. He’ll tell you about Spanish moss and Savannah’s ghosts.

He’ll tell you about stories and how their shape is a false rose, woven from palmetto. How he decided one day that happiness isn’t retiring on a pile of money, it’s learning the stories, and sharing them. He has practiced his stories for years. He can hold them behind his back and close his eyelids, and still their rhythms will guide him to their perfect end. He won’t ask you for money, but he’ll thank you when you hand it to him. This is how he makes his living. God bless you.

***

On this day the rain sets with sun, and the people walk out of the hotels into the night, in search of oysters, and pulled-pork, and ribs. In search of Jazz guitar and Georgia home brews, warm air. It is winter in other places of the world. Music doesn’t spill out into the night.

We are no exception, and before we cross the busy streets, and before we fill plastic cups with dark beer, and before we fill our lungs with cigarette smoke, and before we dance with art teachers to Jimi Hendrix songs, the Gullah Man calls out. There are three of us, and him.

“It’s a beautiful evening. Where are you fine young people off to today?”

We stop, reluctant, because we are poor, and thirsty, and we are not looking for stories, or do not think that we are. We stop, reluctant, because he looks homeless and we are not. But we stop. He tells us his story and he tells us ours.

“I want each of you to take a rose,” he says.  And, “You will remember this night forever.”

He weaves the three of us into his narrative. One in which we grow old and are still friends, one in which friendship is something deep and shared. He knows nothing of us, but he knows we are together now, and we are afraid of being alone one day. He smiles. And when we give him too much money he gives us extra roses to pass along to those we want to remember with. “Thank you. This is how I make my living. Thank you.”

As we walk away. We joke together, and discuss how much money we gave and how easily he took it. We debate who is going to buy drinks, and wonder if he is genuine or laughing at us. We give some of our roses away and some of them unravel. We drink, and walk, and dance, and smile. We tell the story over and over again.

Brandon Peters is an MA candidate at Northern Michigan University.

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On Writing Things that Not Very Many People Will Read

I was watching a friend sing at the bar the other night. This was a Wednesday. There are drink specials at this bar on Wednesdays, and the room was full of people: gentle, poncho-wearing undergrads standing in clusters, shouting at each other, waving their arms and spilling their beers and not really listening to my friend on stage, playing her keyboard, singing her songs.

I stood up front with a few other people so I could listen. My friend sang in a rich, overflowing voice, and she hunched her shoulders as she sang, and rolled her eyes, and wriggled her feet on the floor and moved her hands up and down the keyboard. People were finishing their second beers. People were getting drunk and talking louder to be heard over the music, and my friend shut her eyes and sang anyway.

Because my friend is one of those people—maybe you know one of these people, too—who exudes at all times a sunny nonchalance and seems to draw her happiness from whatever’s around her. She sings to herself when she walks down the sidewalk, and drags her fingers along trees and walls and railings, and when I run into her around town she meets my eyes and touches my arm and asks how I’m doing in a voice that shows she means it. This is my friend, and as I stood up front and nursed my beer and listened to her sing, I wondered if I might be falling in love.

The next morning, I woke up early to attend a memorial service for a former student who’d killed herself. She was twenty-two. The service took place on the beach, and, afterward, I hung around by the lake and looked out at the waves and tried to pare my thoughts into something manageable.

I struggle with finding the motivation to write. For a while, I thought of writing only as a stay against loneliness. I wrote for people—I wrote essays to grow closer to friends or family. I wrote essays to women I was dating or wished that I were dating. I wrote essays and thought, maybe this will published, and a stranger will read it, and it will mean something to that stranger, and in that way the world will grow smaller and in that way we will both feel less alone.

But here’s the conclusion I’ve lately arrived at—the people in my life don’t really care if I write. They appreciate it when I dedicate the composition of creative nonfiction to them, but I don’t think they appreciate it more than if I just called them on the telephone. And, though I’ve published things in literary journals, I’ve yet to hear from strangers moved by my work. Because who reads literary journals. I barely even read literary journals.

So what’s the point? it has occurred to me to think, over and over and over.

I talk to my students about this sometimes. I teach composition courses, and my students are freshmen and sophomores, mostly. I ask them to think about why they’re in my class, and, beyond that, why they bother writing anything at all. And most of my students say back: we are in your course because it is required. Or: we chose you as a teacher because we have heard that you do not take attendance, and will grade our essays generously. But I always have a few budding English majors who tell me that writing, for them, for is an act of therapy. They tell me that they write to get their thoughts out of them, and that they don’t even know what their thoughts really are until they write them down. And they’re in my class because they want to become sharper and more articulate thinkers.

I tell these students that I admire them. Because writing has never seemed therapeutic to me. I’ve never kept a journal, and I don’t write anything when I’m upset. I know my thoughts already. I have to live with them all the time. Why would I want to write them out? They’ll still be in my head, only now they’ll also be on a piece of paper. This is what I’ve said to my students. But I’m beginning to understand what they mean.

That morning, when I looked out at the lake, I thought about my friend singing at the bar. She could’ve stayed home that night, and most of the people there wouldn’t have noticed or cared. She knew that. But she sang anyway. And you can go farther with this: most of the people in this town that night were in bed, and didn’t know there was music or drink specials at this bar, and most of the people in this state are only vaguely aware that this town exists—it is small, it is a six-hour drive from the state capital—and there are many maps of the United States that leave off our part of the country altogether. But my friend sang the same way she would’ve if a hundred people were listening, or a thousand, or if she were locked in a closet and singing to herself. She sang in spite of how small a thing it is to sing a song, in spite of how empty and sad the world sometimes seems. I’m stuck on this image—my friend moving her feet around on the floor, my friend’s hands pounding on her keyboard, my friend’s eyes fallen shut and her face coated in sweat—because I can’t think of a better answer to the ugliness of life than to bring your keyboard to the bar, to sing a song that no one will hear, to write a story that no one will read.

Richard Hackler is the nonfiction editor for Sundog Lit. He lives in Marquette, Michigan.

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The Long Hello

By any literary standard, I am having a good year. Ten months ago, despite two decades of trying, I had not managed to sell a full-length manuscript of prose. Today, I have four books under contract with four different, well-regarded independent publishers: My novel, The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up, won the Dundee International Book Award and was published by Cargo in October 2012. A short story collection, Scouting for the Reaper, won Black Lawrence Press’s Hudson Prize and will be published in November. Also forthcoming in November is a second novel, The Biology of Luck, from Elephant Rock Books. And then, next year, my essay collection, Phoning Home, will be published by the University of South Carolina. Yet among all of these triumphs, rendered the more savory after years of famine, one victory stands out. Last week, I placed a short story with the literary journal Nimrod, based at the University of Tulsa.

My answering machine logged the call as coming from the 918 area code. Even before I played the message, I suspected someone trying to help me improve my credit score by investing in Nigerian bonds. The voice on the machine, distant and wobbly, sounded as though it arose from inside the body of a submerged fish. After three attempts, I finally deciphered the name as belonging to Francine Ringold. To her, I was a stranger. To me, Dr. Ringold, the longtime editor of Nimrod, was a minor celebrity. Unfortunately, the hour had passed midnight when I deciphered her name—I had worked the late shift at the hospital where I am a psychiatrist—and it was not until the following afternoon, between psychotic patients, than I returned her call. By then, my fingers trembled as I punched in each digit. To my amazement, Ringold herself answered the phone, and promptly offered to accept my short story, “Paracosmos,” for publication. That proved the unexpected capstone to my year of literary success.

Why was the author of over two hundred published short stories—and soon four books—so overjoyed to place a work of short fiction in a journal that, while both prestigious and exquisitely compiled, is not particularly more prestigious or more exquisitely compiled than other lovely venues, such as the Virginia Quarterly Review and Southwest Review, where he has published in the past? The answer is simple: Because, twenty-four years earlier, his first effort to publish a short story had been targeted at Nimrod. In fact, according to that author’s painstakingly-maintained records, he had submitted eighty-four other works of short fiction to the journal in the interim. On average, more than three each year. What had set “Paracosmos” apart from these others, many of which appeared in equally respectable venues, remains one of those mysteries of taste and fortune that justify, in this age of publishing conglomerates, the ongoing existence of so many independent presses and small journals.

The story that I submitted to Nimrod at the age of fifteen, “Solemn Troops and Sweet Societies,” can only be described as indescribably awful—the sort of treacle capable of bringing centuries of literary innovation to a grinding halt (although I am pleased that the title referenced Milton’s Lycidas). The girl I wrote the story to impress has since married, and divorced, as is now raising a child of her own; I can only hope this young man never writes a tale of military love as tedious as mine. The teacher who urged me to revise the story, and later to submit it for publication, died fifteen years ago of a stroke. My mother, whom I had call Nimrod in 1989, posing as my secretary, to inquire after the progress of that original story trough the slush pile—no successful writer, after all, would dare be caught making his own telephone calls—has no memory of the episode. On the phone, Dr. Ringold conceded that my name sounded “vaguely familiar,” but she had obviously not been rejecting my submissions with as much devotion as I had been submitting them. In short, my quarter-century struggle to earn the approval of the editors at Nimrod has been performed entirely for an audience of one.

If I am lucky, many readers will enjoy my forthcoming story as much as the Nimrod editors did. If I am very lucky, the piece will be reprinted in The Best American Short Stories 2015, and will win an O. Henry Award or a Pushcart Prize, and when I ultimately fly to Stockholm someday, to accept my well-earned accolade, the selection committee will cite this particular story as the pinnacle of my epic literary achievement. But until those victories earn my airfare to Scandinavia, nobody cares about my eighty-four earlier attempts—not Dr. Ringold, not my mother, not even you.

***Perseverance is a peculiar attribute, its value only apparent in hindsight. The man who attempts “the impossible” ninety-nine times and succeeds on the hundredth effort finds himself a testament to hard work and resolve—but had he quit after ninety-nine tries, his efforts would have been dismissed by many as foolhardy. A suitor who asks a woman on a date ten times before she goes out with him, and ultimately marries her, is a hopeless romantic; if she turns him down on the eleventh attempt, he is merely annoying. The same can be said of literary efforts: Until a writer first sells a novel, all of his drawers of manuscript are so much squandered time. Giving up early may reflect a lack of character, but it also reflects good sense—or, at least, better sense than countless efforts that never pan out. As a psychiatrist, I have discovered that the man looking for the perfect mate will never marry, that the jobseeker searching for the perfect placement will never find a post. In his essay “Heroism,” Emerson reminds readers that, “The great majority of men are bundles of beginnings.” Whether those are the same chaps and the fellows Thoreau warns “lead lives of quiet desperation” and “go to the grave with the song still in them” is uncertain—but I am betting they are not. Rather, it is the fools who strive to see matters through to the end—yet fail—who die quietly desperate.

One prominent novelist reportedly tells his students that, if a particular literary journal rejects them three times, they should cash in their chips and stop submitting to that venue—because the odds, and the editors’ tastes, stand against them. I can only imagine what he would have advised Jesus after Peter’s third denial. In contrast, I have always subscribed to the theory that relentless pigheadedness was the talisman to literary accomplishment. That may explain why I have acquired, in addition to my more than two hundred acceptances, over 20,000 rejections during the course of my literary career from countless publishers, editors, magazines, agents and artistic directors. That is roughly eight hundred each year, or two every day. In one case, an editor warned me never to submit to his journal again—and I managed to place a piece in that same journal a decade later, when I attempted again after reading of his death. In another case, I accidentally submitted a story to a journal that had previously rejected the same piece, and they accepted it on the second try, admittedly several years and editors later. For the records, nearly all of my published stories appeared in journals that had previously rejected me on more than three occasions.

Rather than a tale to be emulated, however, my Nimrod saga should stand as a warning to those who place too much hope in perseverance. A quotation widely, and probably apocryphally, attributed to Albert Einstein, describes “insanity” as “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” One does not need to be a psychiatrist to recognize the wisdom in his counsel—although I do happen to be a psychiatrist. The key to my tale of victory is that I mailed a different story to Nimrod each time—and that, presumably, my eighty-fifth submission reflected far more skill than my first. Here lies the crucial lesson that seems to be lost on many of my patients, many of my writing students, many of the hapless souls polishing the same novel for thirty years until it appears as smooth and soulless as a stone. The key to perseverance is figuring out how to obtain the original goal through a different means: a different story, a revised resume, getting down on the other knee. And sometimes the target itself must be moved, if ever so slightly: once the goal becomes “romantic happiness,” rather than “romantic happiness with Ethel,” then Fred Mertz poses less of an obstacle.

All of which is a roundabout way of gloating that I am soon going to be published in Nimrod. Please purchase the journal—please tuck it under your pillow and treasure it, as I will. You can buy my four books too….or you can wait to hear which ones they recommend in Stockholm. The Swedish word for hello, by the way, is apparently Hallå, and I’ve already started to practice. Hallå….Hallå…Hallå…. If I do get that invitation someday, my efforts will seem prescient. Oh, and if you read my books now, instead of waiting until I astonish the Nobel crowd by delivering my acceptance speech in the native idiom, you will be able to say you were a fan before I even knew two words of Swedish.

Jacob M. Appel is the author of the novel The Man Who Wouldn’t Stand Up and the forthcoming short story collection Scouting for the Reaper. Jacob is a graduate of the MFA program in fiction at NYU. He teaches fiction at the Gotham Writers Workshop and practices medicine at the Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City.

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