Done! Well, this step anyway… / by Helen Hajnoczky

The snow has melted and been replaced by grey skies and a pervasive brownish tone all over the city but the Gawain-weather inspiration carried me through—I’ve finished thirteen new poems that are a kind of ambiguous, Steinian retelling of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from the perspective of the Green Knight. Proofing them today I’ll say I’m quite happy with how they turned out. And with that, I have a complete manuscript ready to send out for consideration.

Now, I really don’t want this to become a blog of unreasonable and only semi-truthful representations of productivity. This manuscript is one of those things that seems to have taken two weeks but in many ways took much longer. For me poems often take a long time to germinate. I first met Gawain in my second year of undergrad and have been fascinated with medieval English writing since then, and hoping to do something with a medieval source text in my own writing for just as long. That’s the part that usually takes the longest for me… encountering the idea, and mulling it over for a good, long while before the idea for how to do the writing bit becomes clear. The writing part’s the fastest for me, but I don’t usually get going on it until I’ve done the protracted mulling. And of course, in this case, the bulk of the manuscript is Bloom and Martyr, a sixty-five part poem I finished years ago. So this is definitely not a case of “look I finished a book in two weeks!” but rather the end of a long journey, which I’m happy to celebrate.

And now… once I write a cover letter and all that off it’ll go to a publisher for consideration. Finishing a manuscript is just the first step in a long journey to a book, but I do hope this manuscript will become a book soon—i.e. in the next year and a half or two. Fingers crossed.

Also, thanks for reading along. Blogging about trying to get things done gave me the focus I needed to do this. I’ve been wanting to cross one of these projects off my list for a long time and it feels really good to do so. Now I can’t wait to get started on the next item… I just have to decide which one is next! I’ll leave that until another day though. For now I’ve got to start writing that cover letter…