Emily’s Question–this is in the series of blog posts answering student questions that come in over the summer via email.

Hi Heather,
I’m glad to read on facebook that you had fun at your recent poetry conference. I hope you are feeling inspired (even now, back at home.)

Emily wrote: I have written a book. This time for real. Five edits. Combed through. Books on plot thoroughly read and incorporated. And today I have had a mental breakthrough as well – I am tired of being scared and embarrassed about my work. I am ready to own it. So, I was wondering if you might be so incredibly, generously kind as to offer me some advice as to how to go about getting it published. (and making a little money?) It is a memoir about my year teaching, drinking, partying, and eventually finding love and peace in Bangkok, Thailand. I think it’s called Finding Buddha in Bangkok.

 I know that I need a “platform”. Is it better to build a blog (yeah, I know, I’m behind in the technology) or to spend time submitting to magazines? Is it even remotely possible that anyone will read my work if I don’t have a blog and/or have published in magazines? Do you have any pitch letters I could look at?

 Forget about the platform. Make a beautiful book. Worry about the plot form.

I have a four pronged approach to publishing. And remember, there’s no urgency here. You can do this calmly, in the same way you shop for groceries or plant stuff in the side yard.

Read—Publishers’s weekly, the New Yorker, The New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement. Read harder books.

Study—with great teachers, going to writing conferences as you are, attending live readings with terrific writers, as you are.

Research—there’s lots of books and websites on how to query agents. Anyone who can figure out job applications or college applications can figure out agent querying. I love the work of Eric Maisel, Elizabeth Lyons, and Donald Maass.

Collaborate—working with other writers, really good ones, who can reliably tell you what sucks and what doesn’t (from your first chapter, to your last, from your cover letter to your synopsis).

 Forget blogging and texting and all things quick and cool. Stay your own sweet slow amazing brilliant separate self.

In sum: Tell the truth. Cling to your oddness. Read even more than you are reading now.

(All of which you, Emily the Great, are doing and have always done and do beautifully, and I miss you much!)

I miss album covers. When we had album covers, every single person in the trailer park had an art gallery on the floor of the living room, several feet thick. Now we are you-tubed and art-starved.

I love all art and I love to hear artists talk about their work. In college, a great boyfriend, the one who always brought me little wonderful presents that I loved—stones and collages and books of poetry—gave me a Gary Panter poster, signed. I think it’s the only object I have left from those days, besides D’s blue sweatshirt and a Screamin’ Jay Hawkins cassette tape with Iggy on the B side.

Gary Panter’s person-ness is art, and I love his interview in this new issue of the Believer.

Panter does comics and light shows, collages and installations. He’s a musician and literature student/professor and he paints, etc.

Here’s a little excerpt from his answer to the question, “Do you worry you spread yourself too thin or that your head is going to explode?”

Panter: “when I want to do something I think of doing it in a practical , non-extravagant way…. It would be fun to spend a few hundred years on each medium but it’s not going to happen so I avoid certain difficult mediums like oil painting. …you have to make peace with limitations, with what you can do. Then think about what you’d really like to do, which is the hard part.”

Students: what do you want to do? Not thinking about what you feel you should do, what’s popular or publishable or expected or right or rebellious and trendy and hard or easy. What do you want to do? It’s summer. You get to pick. Do that.