Putting it Out There
Like you, perhaps, I tend to struggle wildly with putting my writing out into world. Putting it out into the world means submitting poems to journals, submitting essays or memoir writing to publications, and then the toughest part of the struggle: promoting my work. Of course I know the obvious: if people don't know where to find your work, they'll never read it. But somehow that obvious point doesn't occur to me when I get in my frozen place, the tundra of my brain that goes still and shuts down when I sit at the keyboard and think about submitting my work. It's really a miracle that I have any poems published. One of the last big stretches I made to submit to multiple outlets was because I was in grad school for counseling, and we had to take on our own project about change. This required easy-to-measure goals and a behavior plan. The purpose of the assignment was to teach us soon-to-be counselors that change, the thing that we're asking our clients to do every