a thought on publishing

I need to find a place that will take 'new' writers. Everyone seems to want 'emerging' (meaning been published before) or 'established' (someone like OSC) but no one wants the new. How else am I supposed to get out there? I don't lie on my resumes, I'm not going to lie and say I've been published in the college literary magazine, when in fact they rejected me and never told me. I found out the day the magazine came out and I wasn't in it. talk about a let-down! granted the poem did suck, but I got a B in the class. But my point being, there has got to be a lit journal somewhere that will take my creative nonfiction! as of yet, I'm having no luck. Not that I know what I'll submit yet, but I should probably work on my drafts. Here's my second workshop piece, before I've fixed it up (and it needs it I believe)
and y'know, the comments on the last piece I put on I'm going to incorperate. Maybe the new era will publish me or something if there's religious meaning behind it :)
and OSC is doing a writing workshop this summer at UVSC and I'm too broke to attend. Maybe I'll just transfer to SVU for a semester and take a creative writing class from him, that would be cool.
anyway, here's my piece. in the workshop, someone said I should title it "rooftop loneliness" which I like.

(Insert: A cool title that I can’t think of yet)

“I had a strong sudden instinct that I must be alone”

–F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, pg 521

I was hit with the desire to get out. I didn’t know where it came from, what part of my brain decided to turn around and say “Hey! You have got to be alone. Right now, be alone”. All I knew was that I couldn’t get rid of it. Sitting in my Shakespeare class, trying to understand the characters in King Henry the Eighth or something like that, I realized that I had been staring at a pine tree blowing in the wind for the past half hour. For Freshman Orientation, I’d always volunteer to be the back up guide on the campus tours. I wouldn’t have to talk to the Freshmen, I could meander around campus, bringing up the rear. While the front guides would explain about the admin building, I could sit on the steps by the fountain, lost in the trickle the water made coming down the rocks, watching the leaves twirl under the bridge.

More often than not my roommates had to say my name more than once to get my attention. A textbook would be sitting in front of me on the table, but my thoughts weren’t involved in the pages. I was imagining being in the mountains, just me and the wilderness. Some place where I was by myself and didn’t have to concur with society. My evenings were spent up on the roof of my house. I’d lie there, trying to ignore the noises below me, staring through branches into the dark sky. The stars were few with the street lights that surrounded my house, but my mind would calm down for a moment, when it was silent, after my back was numb and everyone else had gone to sleep. It was then when my urge to be alone simmered down, content for the moment. But come the next morning, it returned with a vengeance, realizing it had been fooled by a rooftop.

In the afternoons, between work and school, I would go for walks. My head would fill up with the things going on around me. I didn’t really pay much attention to the houses and the streets, as I did the sense of things around me. In fact, I avoided the streets I knew would have kids playing on them, or other people. I chose a path that would lead me around Cedar that most people wouldn’t take for any reason. I knew exactly where to stand on one street so I could turn one way and smell sage, turn another way and see the canyon, another and watch hummingbirds fight over a feeder.

After two weeks of smelling the sage everyday I thought I was going to explode.

I needed to quit both my jobs, quit school, fill my backpack up and hitch hike to the Appalachian Trail. I couldn’t stand the thought of the ‘real world’ anymore.

I called my sister up one night, the night when I couldn’t take it anymore. “I need to get out here” I exclaimed on the phone, “I can’t take society anymore, I can’t focus on my work, I can’t think of anything except taking at least a year off of school and just getting away from everyone. Shoot, in a year by myself I could write the Great American Novel.” She didn’t understand me, she couldn’t comprehend how I could be so close to graduating and want to just take off “You’ll regret it later if you do this, why don’t you just come up and stay with me for a weekend?” she told me before I ended the call. The last thing I wanted was to spend a weekend with my sister in the Salt Lake Valley. It would be easier to take a shovel to the hole I knew was growing inside of me.

And it was a hole; it was a deep dark hole that was trying to take over my life. There was actually no trying; it was taking over my life. There was a part of my brain that was fighting back though. It knew that I couldn’t leave, no matter how much I needed to be alone, like Fitzgerald, or else I would most assuredly crack-up. Reason slowly took over and talked me out of it. But when I sit on my front porch watching the storm clouds move in over ‘C’ Mountain, I’m hit with it again. The instinct that I must be alone. And as the rain slowly starts the pelt the ground in front of me, as the shadows from the clouds darken the cement, I know that this time I can’t resist it, reason won’t be able to stop me from being alone. For whatever reason, I know that I have to be alone. So I’ll walk down the street, stand in the right spot and turn around; smell the sage, look at the canyon, and watch the rain drench the hummingbird feeder.