In the midst of tragedy, there are sometimes happy moments. I mean that sometimes I feel very happy. I don't mean ecstatically happy, or happy in an epiphanic way. I just mean a sense of simple, calm happiness. Such is the feeling I got when I recently received a lovely letter from memoirist Suzanne Paola. Apparently, my memoir piece of 18 pages has been accepted for publication in the online journal, Drunken Boat. The theme was "The Body Silent." I have pasted in Paola's letter for your happy reading! She is the editor for that particular issue..
It is my pleasure to write a personal note of acceptance for your essay, "Ghost Flower & Wind," for the Body Silent issue of Drunken Boat, which I am guest-editing. I admired so much about this marvelous lyric essay: your brave examination of the body, your beautiful imagistic navigation through so many terrains. It is terrific work. Thank you for sharing it with us.
I have attached a copy of your essay with some revision suggestions done through the "Comments" feature on your PDF. I have never used this method of sending comments before--they are attached as "sticky notes" and I hope you can see them! This is, be assured, not a provisional acceptance, but I would appreciate it if you would consider my comments in the spirit they're offered--your essay is gorgeous. I want readers to see it at its best. Most of these are small matters of syntax and so forth, but one larger issue for me as a reader is the enormous amount of investment in images of Spain and Spanish-related places throughout the first two-thirds of the essay, which then disappears. In an essay this lyric, that moves through associative, lyric leaps, images tend to be what draw us forward through the work, as the beautifully sustained images of sand and birds do throughout. I wanted there to be some echo, possibly just an imagistic echo, of those powerful threads you weave earlier in the essay: the contented, largely limbless woman, the Sabanita statue. Even the silent story of the petroglyphs seemed as if they could reverberate more strongly against that ironic, infuriating testing through story. I have indicated some moments in the essay where I thought echoes of these key images could recur somehow, but they are not meant to be at all proscriptive--merely moments where it occurred to me you could let the earlier images back in to resonate. It is, above all, your work, so just something to think about.
Thank you for sending such strong work, and I look forward to reading more of your work in the future-- Best, Suzanne Paola
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