Grapple Friends to Your Soul with Hoops of Steel
On the importance of artistic communities. This is how I found mine.
Before I begin I wanted to mention two excellent publications that have opportunities with fast approaching September/October deadlines! Carpe Diem!
New Verse Review is running a poetry submission window from September 15-21 for a special Halloween-themed mini-issue. From their website: We are looking for gothic poems ranging from the horrifying to the hilarious, from the uncanny to the atmospheric. We are also interested in other poems appropriate to the season and its holidays: autumn, Hallowtide, Día de los Muertos. The issue will be dedicated to the memory of Fred Chappell, a great poet of the weird and fantastic. Submit up to three poems to submissions@newversereview.com.
Please see this link for specific submission guidelines!
The Peripheries Inaugural Poetry Competition is now open until October 15, 2024. From their website: Please submit up to 3 poems or less in one document. Each poem should be no longer than 2 A4 pages, using 12-point font. Please only submit once. There is no theme. The contest will be judged by Josh Bell. Please do not include your name in the document. The competition will be judged anonymously. If you have any questions, please contact us at peripheriesjournal@gmail.com.
Please see this link for the submission form.
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried,
Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel”
- Polonius from Shakespeare’s Hamlet
On a recent episode of Versecraft Elijah Blumov recently interviewed the great formalist poet, Timothy Steele.
It is worth listening to all of the show, but my favorite section is at the end where Blumov, who is 29, asks 76-year-old Steele for advice about establishing one’s self in the literary world. Part of his answer is the launching point for this post:
Find like-minded spirits and grapple them to thy soul like hoops of steel as Polonius says. Find a community — and it doesn’t need to be a big one — but if you have a community, if you have an audience, if you have a forum to exchange ideas, that makes all the difference in the world — and you will keep going forward. You’ll keep getting better as a writer. Your thinking will become more rich if you do so.
This reminds me of a conversation between James Matthew Wilson and Dana Gioia at this discussion about Fine Arts and the Future of Christian Culture:
At about the 23 minute mark Gioia talks about the MFA program that Wilson had just started at the University of St. Thomas and the importance of good criticism:
I think what you are doing is calling creative artists, calling writers, into community so that they can understand that no one exists alone. We exist in relationship to each other, and not only to have the creativity happen but then foster the conversation.
Wilson then tells the story of speaking with Gioia for the first time at a long dinner. After describing his beginning efforts at writing poetry, Gioia gave Wilson the card of the organizer of the conference and said to him, “You shouldn’t be working alone.”
This gets back to Timothy Steele’s advice: Find a community.
The question: How do you find it?
The short answer is through choice and chance. More opportunities will present themselves to you when you continually make decisions that are in line with who you are and what you value. When you do this and create the art that you need to make you must to go out into the world. You have to show your art, share it, communicate it. Communication and community stem from the same Latin roots that have to do with what we share and have in common and performing the gift of service for others.
The thing about communities is that they are people of all levels of skill, resources, and abilities. In listening to the whole conversation between Dana Gioia and James Matthew Wilson I get the sense that a certain young graduate student could have toiled in obscurity, in some academic ivory silo, if an elder statesman of the arts had not given him advice and championed him early.
If you are fortunate, you may find such a guide in a community who may do any of the following things for you:
Offer you encouragement. You need to hear this when you do well or when you are struggling. (Moral Support)
Connect you with other artists who are doing the same thing. You find others with whom you can collaborate. You can inspire each other. (Networking)
Give you advice and feedback either once or over a sustained amount of time. You can’t get better without critique. (Mentorship)
Tell others about you. (Promotion)
Provide you with material resources so you can continue making art. Patronage is the breath that fans the flame of culture. Many artists cannot create soul-flourishing work without financial support. (Patronage)
But as the saying goes, You make your own luck. You’ve got to put yourself out there. Propose papers at conferences. Bring your work out to the public. Take risks. Be humble. Be open. People will find you, and when you realize they are your friends you must grapple them unto your soul with hoops of steel!
As a 43-year-old mother of five young children, I started self-publishing amateurish free-verse poetry on an effectively unseen blog. I wanted to learn prosody but I didn’t know how, and there were no free or affordable courses for me to learn formal verse. It was not until I attended the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas — a mere two years ago when I was 48 — that I actually met people who encouraged me, gave me advice, and provided constructive feedback.
At the conference I met Christina Baker at the Well-Read Mom lunch who told me about the poetry critique groups with the Catholic Literary Arts. I had coffee with Ron Hansen. Amy Wellborn gave me rides to and from the hotel and the college campus. I attended the talks of and spoke to the poets Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and Philip Metres. I even had drinks with Dana Gioia who generously provided me feedback on what would later become my first published poem. Yes, this is the same Dana Gioia who encouraged James Matthew Wilson, the founder of the masters program that I am now enrolled in.
Step 1: Find out who you are and what you value.
How to do spend your time? The things you spend your time on are often the things that you value. Time is the one thing that you cannot make more of. It is a finite resource, and how you choose to spend it says something about who you are. If you are an artist, make art…
Step 2: Make art. Make lots of it. And make it better.
If you are painter, paint. If you are a musician, play music. If you want to be a writer then be a writer. Write and revise. Make your craft better by practicing it. Nulla dies sine linea.
Step 3: Interact with others online.
Find forums where you can appreciate what other writers and artists are doing. Substack has been far more effective than any other media platforms in connecting writers to each other. A lot of it is not work but just fun conversation. This leads to inspiration and thinking creatively. We introduce each other to new books and poems.
recently tagged me and others for poetry recommendations for her first year students. She was looking for 8-14 line poems that would be appropriate for young people to memorize. The whole thread is gold, but we can still keep this going. What poems are you glad you carry around in your blood? What poems have you memorized so that they are a part of you?You can comment on her Note:
Here is
’s latest Note. He’s studying one of my favorites: The Iliad!
Group will be open to all questions and thoughts on poetry on the 1st Thursday of every month at 8:30 PM EST. (Christian based. All welcome.) Register here.
has monthly poetry discussions for paid subscribers, too.There are many online literary communities outside of Substack. I have found a wonderful group of like-minded thinkers at The Catherine Project as well.
Step 4: Attend in-person events, conferences and retreats.
Do an internet search of events that seem interesting to you. They don’t need to be big conventions. The Frost Farm Conference I recently attended in Derry, NH had a maximum of 40 attendees. In a few weeks my friend Sarah Cortez from Catholic Literary Arts is leading a five-day writing retreat on Enders Island, Writing Life’s Spiritual Lessons, from October 13 to 18 with a limit of 10 participants.
If you like things that are much bigger, this year the Biennial Catholic Imagination Conference has joined with de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture to present Ever Ancient, Ever New: On Catholic Imagination at the University of Notre Dame from October 31–November 2, 2024. I will be there for all three days. This is the conference that changed my life. I would not be writing at all if it were not for the 2022 Catholic Imagination Conference in Dallas.
Every summer, the MFA in Creative Writing program that I am enrolled in hosts the Summer Writers Institute: a three-day immersive program in the Catholic literary tradition. It takes place on campus at the University of St. Thomas, and the date is set for June 12-14, 2025.
Image Journal has their Glen Workshop. has their Inkwell social events.
even has a cruise! This year the theme was “Emperors, Conquerors, and Saints.” (Their 2022 “Homer” cruise featured Emily Wilson who now has her own Substack.)You have probably noticed that many of the things I mentioned reflect particular things about me. That I am Catholic, a poet, and a formalist, and my specific recommendations reflect that. But the general advice I have given applies to just about any artist who has felt like they were working alone and stagnating their craft. I hope this helps some of you. And for the rest of you who have been reading along, I think this post gives you an idea of my plan and how everything is going. (It’s going great!)
Thank you for reading, and a very special thanks for those of you who are paying for a subscription to . You have given me the richest community yet: the students and instructors at the University of St. Thomas in Houston at the MFA in Creative Writing Program.
I hope you know that by helping me you are giving me the ability to help others, too. Your generosity is not lost on me.
I would love to hear from you.
Have you found your artistic community?
If you did, how did you find it?
Do you have any advice for others?
If you have not found your people, maybe I can help you…
So many opportunities! You are an inspiration. My problem is picking one or two. I do have to say conferences are a great avenue. At last year's 2023 Frost Farm Conference I met the former poetry editor of the Journal of Christian Nursing and I now have 3 poems published in their current issue!
I have the distinct pleasure of spending time each week with Zina in our online classes for the MFA at St. Thomas, Houston. I’d always thought that it seemed like Zina knows everybody — and this piece proves that my hunch was right.
To the theme of her essay, my father often said, “Show me your friends, and I’ll tell you who you are.”
Thanks, Zina, for putting this all in such good order.
Chris