Email gets a bad rap. Well, actually, it might be largely deserved, but that’s not the fault of email itself. Everyone loves the ding of a good email showing up. A unique part of being a writer is waiting a long time for an email only to have it be a rejection. Writers, then, especially need some nice emails. Long story short, Mitch Nobis wanted more good emails, and because he also likes interviewing writers, Inbox Wisdom: Email Interviews on Creativity was born.
Donna Vorreyer is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Unrivered ( 2025), To Everything There Is (2020), Every Love Story is an Apocalypse Story (2016) and A House of Many Windows (2013), all from Sundress Publications. Recent work has appeared in Ploughshares, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Colorado Review, Harpur Palate, Baltimore Review, Salamander, and many other journals. Donna lives in the western suburbs of Chicago and runs the online reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey. She is the co-founder/co-editor of Asterales: A Journal of Arts & Letters.
[Interviewer’s Note: It took me a while to get these interviews posted. When I interviewed Donna, her new book was still off in the future, but it is now released and available here!]
You and I have talked online before about the way writing, or rather seeking publication for your writing, can feel like running repeatedly into a brick wall. How do you keep at it in the face of an unsupported system? (I phrase it that way purposefully because I’m convinced the vast majority of editors and publishers are good people and that most problems in publishing result from miserable arts funding in the U.S.)
We have, and it’s something that writers commiserate about for a reason. We all believe that our writing is worthwhile, that it will have meaning to others, if only people can find it. If we didn’t believe this, we wouldn’t be trying to publish, particularly as poets. Even the most famous of poets are mostly “poetry-famous” – the general public wouldn’t recognize the names we hold in the highest esteem—so wanting to publish our poems is a tiny yelp into the void that we hope someone will hear. And having a journal or press want to publish your work is validation that wouldn’t come from self-publishing or posting on something like Substack.
I thought about this quite a bit while sending out my most recent manuscript, mostly to contests and to some open reading periods. The “unsupported system” of which you speak is the reason that we as writers pay entry fees for someone to read our manuscripts on the slim chance they will be chosen. Writers are not alone in this. Visual artists pay entry fees to enter gallery shows. Dancers and musicians pay for specialized training and equipment in the hopes of showing their talents. No one making art gets any guarantees. I think this is why we, as observers or consumers of art, can be so moved by it. That poem or painting or sculpture or song or choreography that moved us was made by a person, a person who didn’t know how it would be received.
So I guess my answer to why I keep at it is that, if it resonates with another person, the struggle of getting it to that person is worth it. Sean Thomas Dougherty’s wonderful poem “Why Bother” sums it up perfectly: “Because right now there is someone/out there with / a wound in the exact shape/of your words.”
I love your answer, and I also love Dougherty’s poem and think of it often. It also reminds me of the old John Lee Hooker song “Boogie Chillun” where he sings, “It’s in him, and it’s got to come out.” It seems artists are going to make art regardless. I think that’s my case–I started out focusing on fiction but shifted more attention to poetry when I became a parent. Shorter chunks of writing time meant shorter pieces of writing, so, poems came out because something was going to come out either way. Like a lot of people, I wrote for years before even thinking of submitting for publication. A teacher-writer mentor, the great Janet Swenson, encouraged me to seek publication, and after a while (years, really), I listened to her. Long story short, I think I had always imagined a reader in an abstract sense, but hadn’t before then thought about actually being read. How much does that thought play into your writing? To what degree do you consider audience when writing? None? Some? A lot?
It sounds like, for the most part, we had similar paths to starting to publish, though I always wrote poems. (I think that started with me writing songs in high school and then poems for my K-12 students at the beginning of my teaching career.) Teaching already sucks up so much of your energy and time, so if you become a parent AND you’re teaching, stolen moments are what you learn to use. I wrote my first three full-lengths and all of my seven chapbooks while I was teaching/parenting—in the car during guitar lessons, at track meets, during boring staff meetings, on summer vacations…whenever there was a free chunk of brain space. It was actually intimidating when I retired – I wasn’t used to having large swaths of uninterrupted time!
As for audience, I don’t write “for” any particular audience, just as I don’t only read books targeted at a particular audience. (I shudder to imagine what my reading life would look like if I only read books targeted to my demographic. Let’s just say that cozy mysteries and romance novels are NOT my jam.)
Audience is significant to me in the sense that I want to do my best job as a writer to convey what I want to convey, but I don’t think much about pleasing an audience while I’m writing. The drafting process is more private to me. I am the most important audience for trying to articulate the feeling or idea that is stuck in my head or surprising myself with an unusual connection or thought. This goes along with our earlier conversation – I would write even if I never sought to publish again, to make sense of the world I inhabit, to say things that I wouldn’t say otherwise.
The time to consider the reader for me is usually in the revision and polishing stage, as that is when I’m deciding whether or not this is a poem I want to submit. (There are SO many poems that I don’t feel are ready for publication in my computer, even though I know some writers who submit everything they produce.) Instead of relying solely on my own compass for what is working/not working, I have several talented and trusted first readers who will flat out tell me if they are confused or unsure of what a poem is trying to do. Sometimes they will just say “here is how I received your piece as a reader” and sometimes “This isn’t working right now.” (I love my FRFs – first reader friends – they pull no punches.) In the end, it’s still my decision, but having a few people who can point out places that might be sticky for a reader is a huge gift.
It really does sound like we work in some similar ways. Dozens, probably most, of my poems were first drafted in a camp chair at baseball practice or in the bleachers at basketball practice or in the car during lunch break. Then, most of them end up in a file literally named “Dead Letter Office” (shoutout to R.E.M.). I’ll occasionally go through that file and pull out an idea or two to resuscitate. I have a long poem that no one else has seen yet that’s a Frankenstein monster of sewn together previously discarded lines, stanzas, and images. This is a real poetry dork question, probably, but how do you manage your work? Like, where do the poems you self-rejected go? Do you delete, keep but stow away never to be seen again, or raid them for parts like I’ve done with mine? And a follow-up question: how do you know which poems to continue working on versus which ones get put away? Like, how does a poem end up in the self-rejected pile?
I do a lot of different things with abandoned work! I definitly have used the “Frankenstein” approach – once every few months, I go through my files and pull lines that I think are salvagable from poems that aren’t anything and throw them into a document called “lines to steal or rework” and I keep that running document for each year. The first way I know if I think something might be worth working on is that I bother to transfer it to the computer, since I still draft 80-90% of my poems longhand. I use Google Docs, so I mostly organize drafts by year/month and move the poems into a different folder if they’re published.
I “self-reject” (I love that term, by the way) much more than I decide a poem is ready to submit. I would say that at least 60% of what makes it onto the computer never sees the light of day. I’ve been trying to loosen up about that since it seems like the “oddball” poem in a packet – the one that I don’t necessarily consider as good as the others – is often the one that ends up being chosen for publication. Conversely, poems that I consider to be among my best have ended up in my collections but were never picked up by a journal. (I actually just did an inventory of my poems that have been published but don’t appear in any collection, and the number is much larger than I imagined. But could they be a book? I don’t think so…but who knows?)
I know poets who revise VERY little and send out almost everything they write, and that idea just gives me hives. I love to revise, and I often spend a LOT of time on poems that I can’t get right, at least to my satisfaction. I think the poem needs to do a few things for me to consider it done: it needs to sound good on the ear, it needs to have surprised me in some way, either through language or turn or perspective, and it needs to either tell a satisfying story or make me feel something. If it can’t do any of those, then it stays put.
I keep those poems in their original folders. I might pull lines from them at some point, or go back with fresh eyes and see a path to revision that might change how I feel about them. But often they just sit in those folders or in my journal, and that’s fine. I used to tell my students that those pieces in their notebooks/journals were like batting practice or repetition of a dance move…practice that develops skills and moves that will show up when it matters. I believe that for myself – trying something never hurts.
It sounds like we have eerily similar systems. I prefer to write first drafts in my terrible chicken-scratch handwriting. I don’t always get to do that, and it feels like poems come out a little different when I go straight to the computer. Not better or worse, I suspect, but they have a different feeling to me. I’ve also shared that experience of having the poem you think is the all-star of the batch get rejected over and over again while the one you thought wasn’t quite right gets accepted. We’re not the only two poets to say this–it’s a fairly common observation in writing communities online. What do you think is behind this? Is it that we’re often our own worst critics, or something else?
I think the phenomenon many of us have experienced, with our favorites being passed over for what we consider to be “lesser” poems in some way, might have something to do with distance. I’ll try to explain.
The poems I agonize over and struggle to get just right, the ones that feel right in my bones, are often ones that mean a great deal to me emotionally. Maybe they go on a journey from one mindset to another that provided clarity or comfort to me. Maybe they achieved something technical that I managed to exactly match the feel I was going for. Either way, I’m deeply connected to these pieces that seem to not land.
On the other hand, many that get picked up are still poems I’m proud of in terms of language, sound, construction, etc., but they are perhaps more of an imaginative or intellectual exercise for me. They don’t live in my body the same way my favorites do. Perhaps this distance translates to a broader sense of appeal to other readers.
I wrote that like I knew what I was talking about, didn’t I? But I truly have no idea. I also don’t fish, but I’ll use a fishing metaphor here. I’ll keep casting out my line and hoping someone bites. Sometimes they’ll take the worm, sometimes the piece of cheese, and sometimes the expensive lure. Once in a while, I hope they will also be drawn to the hand-tied fly that was made with care and love.
By Jove, I think you’ve got it! I think that’s completely it. We are, after all, readers ourselves, even of our own work. For example, I just read Sweet Will, a book by Phillip Levine I hadn’t read yet. He’s one of my favorite poets, so I knew I’d like at least some of the poems, and, of course, I loved some, liked most, and could take or leave a few. But again, this is a poet whose work I love, so why wouldn’t the same be true of what we write ourselves? Some I love (for all the reasons you mentioned), most I like, and some were fun to write but don’t necessarily “mean” much to me. That doesn’t mean they’re bad poems, though. Those ones do, for me, become hard to place in a manuscript, though, because their “vibes” are off compared to the others. You’ve mentioned that you write far more than sees the light of day, so how do you go about deciding which of your poems go together to make a book versus which get left out? (This question is for poems you have finished and maybe even published, not those ones already self-rejected.)
Decision making about which poems make the cut for a manuscript has a lot to do with flow and connection. How are the diction, the narrative, the emotional tone, the images speaking to one another, echoing or adding layers as the poems proceed? I’ve published a lot of individual poems that are not in any collection because they don’t work and play well with the others…it doesn’t mean I’m not proud of them or don’t like them as well. Sometimes I feel like some of my best pieces don’t make it into books as they were stand-alone pieces.
And sometimes poems I love and want to include aren’t right for the manuscript. That happened with the new book. Editors at Sundress noticed that a couple of poems didn’t flow well or really fit in their sections, so we pulled some and replaced them with newer poems that were more suitable or just removed the misfits altogether.
My favorite last question: What’s your most recent book about? Tell us a bit about it, where we can get it, and maybe what you’re working on next?
My new book Unrivered, which is in pre-orders until its release date on October 7, addresses how different aspects of ourselves are drained from us as we age: losing parents, stepping away from a career, changing friendships, questioning beliefs, and of course, the betrayals of the body. It seeks to address how one can accept and reconstruct a new self when they’ve become “unrivered.” It can be ordered (on sale during pre-order) from Sundress Publications at http://tinyurl.com/4pj96v59.
As for what I’m working on now, I am in a period where I am writing whatever comes. I meet with a wonderful group of writers periodically (at least a few times a month) where we read poems and then create prompts and write for 30 minutes. Those sessions have sent me in directions that are new and interesting to me. With the focus on promoting the new book, I’m not forcing new work, not seeing any themes, not trying to make anything a project or a manuscript. I like these periods of getting back to just enjoying the writing after a book makes its way into the world. It’s like a long exhale after holding your breath.
Wonderful answer, and thanks again so much for doing this interview series, Donna!
Inbox Wisdom is an interview series conducted by Farmington writer Mitchell Nobis. He is the author of The Size of the Horizon, or, I Explained Everything to the Trees (Match Factory Editions, 2025). He also hosts the Wednesday Night Sessions reading series for KickstART Farmington, facilitates the Teachers as Poets group for the National Writing Project, and co-founded the Not at AWP (NAWP) reading series. For more, see mitchnobis.com.