A Break For Honest Feedback

And an Irish cup of tea tutorial

Starting this week I’m taking a demanding course that will require me to—eye roll—write things. Not just things, publishable things. I’ll have to rework them, submit them, resubmit them, I mean, who the hell knows what might be required here?

And of course I knew I was signing up for this. It was expensive and led by some big wig. I just didn’t, you know, read any of the details, or even check the date. I thought it was happening in July sometime¹, until a friend asked me about it and I looked. In fact, every step of this particular class has been friend-led, with me stumbling along behind mindlessly doing things, from hearing about it, to signing up, to being reminded about it (several times), to learning that it was in fact starting this week and not in July.

I am once again trying to learn how to be published in magazines, journals and the like, something I need to do if I’m to sell this book I’ve been working on for coming on two years. The book, I believe, has improved since I started it. My publishing chops have not.

And then there’s that whole business about needing to have something to actually submit.

Peter Mountford is this instructor’s name, and everywhere he is there is also the phrase, “honest feedback.” I’m not sure that’s the flex he thinks it is.

Still, he has a good track record of helping people get published.

The goal of the course is to, “develop, write, and edit a publishable personal essay in six weeks, while building community.” All of that sounds great, so I probably would have signed up for it even if I’d been paying attention. But then, on week two of the syllabus, it says, “Come to class with five ideas and…”

Five? If I had one fucking idea I could have saved this enrollment fee.

These are ideas for personal essays to be hopefully accepted by major venues. They must therefore have wide appeal, or be timely, or universally applicable, or be the right color or something. And I think they all have to have the kind of title they give articles I avoid reading.

I left my husband when I discovered he was dating our goldfish.

I stopped speaking to my mother years ago— now that she’s dead, do I still call it “no contact?”

How a stranger’s peach babka recipe uncovered my Jewish great-grandmother’s Confederate secrets.

OK, I’d read that last one.

All this to say, I will likely not be able to write these Substack posts and keep up with class, though I’ll try.

I hope you’ll forgive my absence as I try to come up with pithy, correctly-colored, universally-applicable, widely-appealing, timely, personal essays for six weeks of honest feedback that I’m betting will result in lots of reworking, and therefore time. Honesty is so overrated.

The titles, though… we can have some fun with those.

I look forward to filling you all in when I return!

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Provincetown is happening in leaps and bounds now, with wall board going up, and the entire outside more or less done.

There are no floors, the insulation isn’t completed—it’s not like it’s a house, yet. But it’s coming along. And to celebrate that, I got my father there for the Blessing of the Geezer. He and I, with the help of friend Gideon, took a tour of the first floor together a couple of weeks ago.

“I wish you’d done this five years ago,” he said.

Me too, dad.

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Morning Teaistisms

While scrolling TikTok I saw this highly educational video.

So for obvious reasons I had to order some Barry’s Tea. Then a friend said, “Yorkshire Gold is better,” so I had to order some of that, too. For science.

I have some Le Creuset mugs, but I rarely use them because they’re not glass. I’ll dig them out for this, because clearly this man needs to be honored.

I shall report back.

1. Ohhhhh - I just looked again. It ends in July. I knew July was in there somewhere.