It’s not that I like rejection. I vacillate between responding well to it or ignoring it or putting it in the appropriate context and then sometimes taking it personally and deciding it’s a sign I’m the biggest loser. Or not even the biggest loser, just a pitiful loser, too pitiful to be the biggest loser.
But I keep putting myself and my writing out there, and that involves A LOT of rejection.
This Sunday, I’m presenting the amalgamation/transformation of rejection from a couple of places–a poetry book competition and a playwriting competition. Both were encouraging, but the answer was no.
I have this idea I’ve been working on since 2021. I write plays and poetry and want my plays to get produced and my poetry to get published. Somehow, in the month before I was set to have a hysterectomy (which coincided with a book competition deadline), I decided I should combine narrative poems written in the voices of particular characters into a play.
Wouldn’t that be cool? I thought and still think, to have a play that works well onstage and a book you could just open up and read the poems in order or randomly or whatever.
I got the manuscript done in time for the deadline, had the surgery, started attending a food behavior class from UW Eating Disorders Clinic, and went back to work, etc. etc. etc.
Since then, I’ve started and finished a lot of other projects (started way more than I’ve finished, if I’m honest). But the play-made-of-poems stayed in my head. It’s called Impelled. Here’s the news release I wrote & the poster I’ve been sharing on social media & putting up various places:
NEWS RELEASE:
There’s a lot of drama—and poetry—in an ordinary day.
Impelled, a new play by Marnie Bullock Dresser, premieres onstage in Spring Green on Sunday, April 27 at the Gard Theater from 2-4, with a staged reading and a talkback. Terry Kerr is the director for the one-act play set on the campus of a formerly-Baptist college. An administrator tries to help a student and a professor is sort of helpful, but under the surface of the everyday, these three characters express a huge range of thoughts and feelings and questions.
The actors for the staged reading are Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson, all familiar to audiences in the River Valley and Madison theater scenes.
Marnie has published poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and journalism, and taught English at UW-Richland for more than 30 years.
Impelled is made up entirely of poems. But also jokes, sex, food, and God. By the end of the day, our characters are not just indulging in really good barbecue from a food truck on campus; it’s almost as if they have gathered together for communion.
A grant from River Valley Arts provided the opportunity for table reads, revision, editorial feedback, and the staged reading itself.
Note: due to adult themes and spicy language, the play is not recommended for those under 17.
I’ve been sucking it up and ignoring the awkwardness I always feel when I’m self-promoting. Yesterday I recorded a segment which I think will appear tomorrow morning on WRCO’s “Morning Show,” which you can listen to live or later.
All this is made possible by two things:
retirement means I can spend time not just on writing, but also on follow-through (the thing I struggle with the most, and the thing I found most impossible when I was working full-time).
I got an Artistic Development grant from River Valley Arts, a wonderful organization you should consider supporting.
It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.
I’m hoping Sunday’s staged reading will lead to more good stuff for Impelled, but even if that’s somehow the end of the line, it’s been an amazing ride to get to work with the poet Rita Mae Reese on editorial feedback, and with Terry Kerr as my director, and three fabulous actors: Melinda Van Slyke, Douglas Swenson, and Hannah Jo Anderson. I asked my cast in an email if they had a word or a sentence they thought of when they thought of Impelled. Hannah said “rhapsody,” which honestly makes me feel rhapsodic, and Doug said “It’s like growing carrots: on the surface it’s an ordinary day but below you may have giant carrots.” And he included a picture, which I think is a good way to end this particular post:
The penny will certainly live with the dodo in the part of heaven reserved for extinct things if I defend it. I have a knack. I never vote right in the primaries, and Tommy Herr was traded to the Twins the week after I got his Cardinals card. Nonetheless, I can't quietly watch the penny become the business of second hand shops and children bored with monopoly money.
It has in its favor these things: its name, the name of a girl or a lane; its color, the sign of good plumbing; its heft, just right for dead eyes; its love of prime numbers, seventeen cents and forty-one cents and seventy-three; its president, symbol of my native Illinois, a hard working man who would respect me for saving my pennies and rolling them up and spending the quarters I get in exchange in Laundromats and newsstands only; the only president to wear a bow tie on his coin, the only one tall enough to carry off a coin worth so little, worth one more than nothing, worth saving.
[This poem is actually 25 years old or more. Relevant again.]
Dick Van Dyke isn’t from Southern Illinois where I’m from, but I do have a remote connection because my Aunt Pat dated him when they were both in high school in Danville, Illinois. She wasn’t my Aunt Pat then, and would never have been my aunt if she’d stayed with Dick Van Dyke, but I didn’t understand that at first–I remember saying “You mean if she hadn’t married Uncle Leroy, Dick Van Dyke could’ve been my uncle?” Nope, because Leroy (who later went by Foster and became an art professor in Texas among many, many other things) was my blood relation, my Gran’mommy’s brother.
Uncle Leroy and Aunt Pat at (I assume)their wedding.
Of course Dick Van Dyke feels like family because I’ve known about him my whole life; Mary Poppins was released not quite a year before I was born. He’s just always been there.
I’ve been thinking about Dick Van Dyke because of the director’s cut released last week of the Coldplay song “All My Love.” Honestly, it’s the most I’ve ever listened to or thought about Chris Martin. Not that I disliked him or his band before–just hadn’t really entered my attention span much. Watching Chris Martin with Dick Van Dyke in that video and then both of them on Jimmy Kimmel, it was so clear they have a real friendship, that they’re both incredibly talented, and what a gift to see such a rich tribute to the man for his 99th birthday, not for his passing, which as he says, could be any day (and it sounds as if the current fire season almost made that day happen this week–news stories report that neighbors helped him and his wife evacuate, and they’re back now & only minor damage to a guest house–and all pets accounted for).
Today is Dick’s 99th birthdays and the official video was released, but honestly, I like the director’s cut better.
I think I’ll return to it for comfort as the years go by. The mix of music and dancing and family and that light in his eyes, along with the still very solid clown work he’s got going–well worth revisiting.
I feel like I’m forgetting some important ones, but these are the ones I revisit when I need to get revved up or remind myself what’s important or just need some comfort and joy. And even though I’m not related to him, I’m happy to have one more way Dick Van Dyke is adding comfort and joy to my life. Thanks to everyone involved in the video for that, and thanks to the neighbors who got him in his car!
What are some of your fave comfort/rev up videos? Post a link in the comments!
Drunk on the blaze of my personal arson
and good Tennessee whiskey, I staggered
backwards twenty snaking yards
from my trailer to an oak with a view
of Kiwanis fireworks.
Never mind the drought
Southern Illinois was in the middle of–lighter fluid arced
half a halo in front of me sending undergrowth
crackling and hissing in ashes to heaven.
The blurred outline of my friends through the wall of flame
spurred me on. They were the wicked, quenching
my prophet’s fire with an earthly garden hose,
mortal buckets and tea kettles of unholy water.
It was vision I was after, miles of it,
punctuated by pink and green screaming meemies
and roman candles.The bottle rockets we’d shot
at each other merely tickled and I wanted to scrape
the sky to yell at the Almighty. I scrambled up the tree
in time for the hollow finale, a giant dandelion
of Sousa flashes that sent me disappointed down
into the gentle arms of a blackout.
I woke unable to articulate
“hangover,” the wet-ash smell of war thick as ink,
the charred path behind my trailer still smoking,
beer cans and the pitiful skins of firecrackers
dotting the yard.I stayed in the shower forever grateful
for fire that burned so far and no farther
but I could not cool the sting of vision limited
by recklessness so easily halted: the blank slate
of acres on acres of hardwood forest burned
uselessly might have rendered more wisdom
than my crooked destruction, meager
in scope, unnamed ivies already rooting again.
_____
So much has changed since the late 80s when this event really happened. I no longer live in a trailer. I no longer get drunk. In fact, I almost never drink at all. Prolly a good thing. This poem was published in Cutbank in the early 90s, once I’d begun teaching in Wisco.
These were the days when we’d buy a bottle of Jack Daniels for a party and throw the cap away. “Won’t be needing that,” we’d say. Hey. That rhymes. I wonder if….
Oh–also, I’m sure I could name the ivies now. My guess is that a fair bit of it was poison ivy but also Virginia creeper, or as in the above photo, grape. Which we probably need to clear off our window before it comes inside.
There was also a lot of honeysuckle around that particular trailer, which I knew at the time, because some of it had worked its way inside, into the shower stall, which I liked, because it was so fragrant. I am no longer charmed by plants working their way inside my house from the outside. So much has changed.
I dreamed I saw a Wooly dog descendant—
wiggle-butted, scruffy, ornery, clearly
one more in a long line of poodle-terrier mutts.
His owner said, “he’s a Rottweiler,” but
no way. Just too much Benji evident.
Black against the giant foxtail. Curly
in every way—tousled coat, bent tail,
wagging walk toward me when I called.
When I was little, we let our dogs run free
all day and shut them up at night. Also, we
got the girl dogs fixed, but not the boys.
Thus all the Wooly dogs in Southern Illinois.
Every single thing was looser then.
I was happy. My dogs were my best friends.
The trees and hills are at that awkward point
of winter, snow on the ground but nowhere else,
a bald guy with new implants too spread-out
to be attractive. I can’t wait until it all melts.
I had a dream once of climbing a hill like that.
I stubbed my toe, looked down to see bright pink
instead of white—blood mixed with snow—I think
that’s why hills look like heads to me still. What
dream book should I consult for giant head with tender scalp and kicked-up bleeding crown?
I was part of a dream journaling experiment back then
and had a wicked crush on the therapist who led
the group. He had snake dreams. We all said
a snake means sex. He said no, not always. It doesn’t.
At 22, I was a nearly-manic mix of depressed
and horny and drank too much one time and tried to find
his house. I knew it was by a lake. If I found
his house, he didn’t answer the door. Which is good.
That night felt like a dream, but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t.
She tattooed a purple armadillo on her ass
but wouldn’t say why. Also a caption that read,
“The armored possums are advancing fast.”
She’s always been the type with lots of worries,
chief among them, ways she could end up dead.
She tattooed a purple armadillo on her ass
then said she felt as though she’d run out of gas.
As though nothing made it fun to get out of bed.
The armored possums are advancing fast
already into Southern Illinois. They crossed
the river bottoms by letting out all their breath.
She tattooed a purple armadillo on her ass
but she still makes so much sense to me. At least
I think I can guess why she did what she did.
The armored possums are advancing fast
is just her way of saying everything’s gone past
recovering. There’s precious little hope in this world.
She tattooed a purple armadillo on her ass
because the armored possums are advancing fast.
I’m trying an experiment this month–meant to start in January, but didn’t–I’ve picked a color to look for when I’m driving, all month long. It’s an attempt at mindful driving. To see my commute differently. To meditate on the colors I notice. The color for February is green, and when I think green, John Deere is one of the things I think of, and also one of the things I see on my commute. So this poem is a meditation on green. And on John Deere.
Where does ramshackle end and squalid begin?
How do you know when you’ve crossed the line?
Thanks for your help. Just asking for a friend.
Wow. One matchbook collection more and you’d be in
a clutter monkey reality show of your own.
Where does ramshackle end and squalid begin?
And if there is a demarcated line, can
you live inside the shape you’ve bent it in?
Thanks in advance. Just asking for a friend.
When your life falls apart, what does that mean?
Will your house ever be clean, ever again?
Where does ramshackle end and squalid begin?
What if you remember one scary time when
one of your cousins seemed way too interested in
your secret parts. Asking for a friend.
You don’t recall his touching you like that back then.
So why his interest? You were so scared. So why?
Where does ramshackle end and squalid begin?
(I know you know it’s me) asking for a friend.
—–
(This is actually an organized spot in my house, where we store paper to recycle and reuse. But it LOOKS messy.
It’s my cousin Jodie’s birthday today (she’s a year older than me and we’re old enough that her age is starting to startle me) and I was trying to think of a childhood memory to share. Here’s the one I decided on:
Growing up out in the country, there weren’t a lot of people around and the people who were around were mostly family. My Gran’ma Roane (great-grandmother) lived right behind us, my Aunt Becky kitty-cornered to her, and in the other direction, Gran’mommy and Gran’daddy and then just a little past them, my cousins Jodie & Rob and their parents. We rode our bikes back and forth A LOT.
One early spring day when we were 10 and 11 or so, which means Rob was around five, we pulled an old shower curtain out into the middle of a soy bean field. It was just dirt and dried up remains of soy bean plants–too early for anything to be planted. We tromped across the field to a place where it dipped down some. You can see where in the picture, about halfway down–east of the road, there’s a curving green stripe that I think was a creek. We were on the west side of the road, and on that side, it only resembled a creek when there was too much rain for a long time. I remember we wanted to be where no one could see us. But this is the flat part of Southern Illinois, before you get into the driftless region with the Shawnee National Forest and other gorgeous variations of height in the landscape. So however hidden we thought we were, I’m sure Gran’mommy could see us from the north, and Mom and Dad could see us from the south.
Jodie & Rob’s house is the green square. Gran’mommy and Gran’daddy to the left of that. My house was down where the road curved. See what I mean about not very many people?
But we felt unseen, and saw ourselves as explorers. A ship on a sea? I think so, but it might’ve been a wagon. Not a spaceship, I don’t think. Our main spaceship adventures happened in my closet.
I don’t remember anything happening. We just tromped in a field, pretended something for a while, then tromped home.
But wow–what a sweet time that was, to be able to amuse ourselves with an old shower curtain in a bare dirt field for probably hours.
marniere 