Doing the Work with Chelsea DesAutels

In part 2 of my interview with Chelsea DesAutels, we talk about doing the work in terms of facing rejection and creating community out of crisis. 

Chelsea DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books, 2021), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice and described by Publishers Weekly as a “lush and transformative debut” (starred review). Chelsea writes and teaches extensively and is the founder of Freshwater Writing, which offers writer-focused, community-centered retreats, writing circles, and mentorships.

Show Notes: 

• Connect with Chelsea on her website (chelseabdesautels.com) or Instagram (@freshwaterwriting). 
• Read her essay, The Poetry of Minneapolis, here.

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• On my website: lauraswalker.com
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Transcript

Episode 88: Doing the Work with Chelsea DesAutels (interview pt. 2)

Laura Walker: [00:00:00] Thanks for listening to Writing Connections. This is the second half of my interview with Chelsea DesAutels, a Minneapolis-based poet. Chelsea is the author of A Dangerous Place and the creator of Freshwater Writing, a platform for the generative retreats and writing circles she runs. We start out this episode discussing rejection and how it plays a role in the life of a writer.

(Good Idea Ding)

Chelsea DesAutels: I think being rejected—I say this a lot, and I mean it—is a sign that you're doing the work, is a sign that you've made something and you are trying to release it into the world, and that's all of our job. That's it. That's the whole job, is to make something and try to release it.

I can remember being poetry editor of Gulf Coast while I was at UH, and even at that point, seeing names of very famous poets whose work we couldn't take, who were submitting like the rest of us submit. I don't think that's something you ever fully are away from.

I handle rejection as a [00:01:00] writer a lot better than I handled rejection as a lawyer, because it just feels so much part and parcel of what this life is. You know, for every acceptance, for any measly poem that gets published, how many rejections do I have next to that? Definitely handfuls. I don't think it would be honest to talk about rejection as a writer, to not say that sometimes it stings. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes you really wanted that thing or you feel like you really deserved it, or you came really close. Or sometimes it would've made a big difference if you had gotten that thing, if that publication or that grant or that award or whatever it was, let's be honest, would've made a pretty tangible difference in your writing life and maybe even your financial life. And the fact that it happens all the time doesn't mean we stop writing.

So, I guess the role of rejection in my writing life is just that it's my friend. It's just always right there. I might as well make friends with it 'cause it's not gonna [00:02:00] go away, and I don't want it to get in my way.

And I think I have some real type A behaviors around failure. And so I think I'm just realizing this as we're talking now, I don't look at rejection as failure as a writer, and I think that's really important to me. Because I think feeling that you failed can stop a person, but feeling that you've been rejected doesn't necessarily have to stop you.

Laura Walker: I'm struck by the significance of looking at both sides of the rejection. I feel like I've been in the writing world and the writing mindset for long enough that I have sort of slung my arm around the shoulders of rejection and gone like, "Hey, here's my buddy over here." 

Chelsea DesAutels: Yeah, absolutely.

Laura Walker: But I forget sometimes to just pause and let myself also feel the disappointment about it, and to look at it and say, "Yeah, this really could have made a big difference for me." My last year [00:03:00] and a half since I stepped away from full-time teaching, has been absolutely riddled with one form of rejection or another.

I don't say that to garner sympathy points, but because I've gotten so used to just getting back up every time I fall, I forget that sometimes it's okay to just sit down for a minute and be like, "That really hurt, and it's okay for me to not hop right back up and, get right back to it every time."

Some of these rejections have come with pretty significant losses in terms of where I could be right now with my writing versus where I am. They've also come with tremendous, absolutely unseen and unexpected opportunities like this podcast, so I want to acknowledge that, but it really is super important to acknowledge both sides of it. 

Chelsea DesAutels: I agree completely. And I think one of the things that is, for some of us, a [00:04:00] little unnerving about the writing life is there's just no way to plot your future. There are so many careers where you can say, "This benchmark will come along at this point," or "I'll check this box here," or " If all goes according to plan, the promotion comes in these many years,"—whatever it might be—and that just doesn't exist in the creative life. You just cannot anticipate when the opportunities are going to come, when they're not going to come, and there's not a lot we can do to control it.

I can't, at least, sit down and say, "I want to win that award. I'm going to write an award-winning poem. Let's go." That's just not the way it works. When I was practicing law, and I was like a baby lawyer and I had just started, I was working with this senior attorney who'd been there for years, and one of the things he said, and this seems so obvious, but he was like, "You can't ride the highs too high, and you can't ride the lows too low. You have to try and stay somewhere in the middle." And I think that [00:05:00] that is super true in writing. If you get something, let's say it's a dream publication or it's a prize or whatever it might be, that's wonderful. Celebrate that. And also, that was chance, right? In the same sort of way that a rejection is chance.

As you were saying, like, allowing ourselves to grieve a little bit when something doesn't pan out that we were really hoping for and also celebrate when something does, especially if it's something unexpected or something that we've worked really hard for.

But I think the more we can stay in that, have those moments, feel those things, and then come back to the middle place where we write, I think that's really important and really difficult and I fail at it all the time.

Laura Walker: I've had the interesting experience of being able to be on both sides of this at the same time, because I recently became a reader for a local literary magazine. It's a national magazine, but run locally here by some friends of mine, [00:06:00] and I'm thinking about what you said about when you were part of Gulf Coast and were seeing the big names come through and knowing that you weren't going to be able to accept every piece. 

And there have been so many poets that have submitted just absolutely beautiful, stunning poetry that I'm thinking I would love to hold on to a copy and read it and reread it myself, but I know it's not a good fit for this particular magazine for whatever reason. I know the rejections don't always mean this poem isn't good enough at all.They don't mean this poem isn't good or good enough. It just means this, for whatever, for any of a dozen different reasons, this isn't going to work right now. 

And so that's been helpful just in terms of letting myself feel the sting, but then also getting back out there and submitting again so that I can eventually find the place where it is, you know, going [00:07:00] to be a good fit.

Chelsea DesAutels: I just think it's such a great experience to be on both sides of editorial work, and so many journals are looking for readers regularly. As I'm sure everyone knows, often it's a volunteer position, so that's something to keep in mind in terms of what you have for time or don't have for time at any particular moment in your life.

But as someone who's making work, it can be really encouraging to be on the other side of it and to see how many people are making great work. Not because, "Oh my gosh, there's competition," but because everyone is living this life. People say it all the time, but what we see publicly from other people, by and large, are their wins and not everything else that is going on, and so to see that we're all shoulder to shoulder together in this, I think can be a good reminder. 

Laura Walker: Anytime you can get a glimpse behind the curtain, I think it's going to be beneficial to the overall... not the experience, but like the way that you're experiencing it.

That would be great advice just for people who are submitting and feeling that rejection cycle, that try-fail cycle, as we [00:08:00] call it in fiction writing, to try to position yourself so that you can see the other side of it as well.

(Good Idea Ding)

This idea of shifting your position so you can see multiple sides of a thing is becoming increasingly important to me. Widening your view can help assuage the sting of rejection and combat what could otherwise be a paralyzing sense of failure. But I'm recognizing, too, that this same idea can help us process all sorts of dilemmas by positioning ourselves in what Chelsea referred to as the middle place and what I like to call the messy middle.

This is the space I used to talk to my students about all the time, especially in my class on Writing about Culture and Identity, where I emphasized the importance of learning to be comfortable with discomfort. We grow so much from being in the uncomfortable middle space where we can see what's up close and scary, along with what's far away and possible; where we can recognize it all and let it all in—the grief, the loss, the beauty, and the hope.

In her January [00:09:00] Substack, my friend Emily Grubby wrestles with her own messy middle space. In describing the experience of grief and loss, she writes, "My heart and mind have felt caught in a Chinese finger trap; one pulled toward the consuming work of remembering, the other caught up in the current of the still-living. It's astonishing how polar these two needs can feel sometimes."

As a writer, I feel like the same tension exists between bearing witness to tragedy and trying to live a life of hope. This experience has become particularly fraught in light of current political circumstances, which is what Chelsea and I discuss next.

(Good Idea Ding)

So, before we wrap up, Chelsea, I do want to address the tragedy of what has been unfolding in your hometown as a Minneapolis-based writer. And this isn't something that I want to “silver lining” [00:10:00] (as a verb) in any way, or to treat as a sort of sound bite. But because this is a podcast about writing and about connections, I guess my question is, during times like this of loss and tragedy and confusion and everything else that is coming along in this political moment, what would you say is the role of poetry?

Chelsea DesAutels: Thank you for the question. We're almost two weeks in Minneapolis after the killing of Renée Good, and as I think a lot of people know, things have only intensified since then. The sheer breadth of the brutality here is pretty remarkable. I, for example, just before we got on, saw a video that there are loads of ICE vehicles surrounding a hospital right now, and that's just one of hundreds of things that's going on across the metro at this moment.

I've seen women trying to find doulas to come to their house to give birth because of ICE presence [00:11:00] at hospitals, because they don't want to go to the hospitals. Children have been left alone when their parents have been taken.

I would say 80% of the videos of arrests and detaining that I've seen, they have people hogtied, people are being beaten. Documented and undocumented folks alike just being picked up off the street left and right. It's a really hard time in our city and I will say that I think a lot of us here feel that if this isn't met with resistance, the loss will be a lot greater than just here in Minneapolis. I think a lot of us feel the responsibility to our neighbors and to our community and to the country right now. This feels very big.

I was giving a reading earlier this week, I think? No, last week? Time has started to blur. That's where we are in the middle of the chaos and all of that right now. And someone asked about the role of poetry in political times, and here are some things that came to mind then, and I'll [00:12:00] expand on them, too.

What I'm seeing in response in Minneapolis is remarkable. I am watching incredibly organized information systems being utilized to take care of people, I am watching people on street corners with whistles alerting folks to ICE, thousands of volunteers bringing food to people who are sheltering at home or people who need it right now, parents are bringing other parents' children with them to schools. I can't even begin to articulate the amount of caretaking that is happening in Minneapolis right now.

And I want to say how creative and innovative some of that caretaking and resistance is. There are protests where people are simply singing, humor and levity is coming into some of these protests, and protest isn't even the right word. Most of this is literally just caretaking. It's not marching, it's showing up and trying to be a help.

That being said, that response requires skill that I think poetry gives us. We learn to be attentive [00:13:00] in poetry, we learn to take care of that communal space on the page between reader and speaker. We learn to be brave in sharing our poetry. Sometimes we write something we didn't know we thought, and we find a reserve in ourselves that we weren't aware of that can surprise ourselves.

And these are things I'm seeing out on the streets right now. I'm watching people so vigilant and attentive and able to spot unmarked vehicles. I am watching people care for the community in that same communal space that the page gives us. I think people are finding reserves in themselves or they're able to surprise themselves with what they can do in this moment.

All of these things are actually skills we work on when we write in any genre. So certainly poetry can spread awareness, certainly we can and should be making art about this, certainly poetry can be protest and resistance, but I also think it's important to remember [00:14:00] that just the practice of reading and writing literature, of reading and writing poetry, helps us practice skills that are necessary right now.

Laura Walker: Really beautifully said. I think poetry can also very much be a kind of holding of space too, where it's just acknowledging and making room for a voice or an emotion or an experience that otherwise wouldn't get to be experienced. 

Chelsea DesAutels: I was thinking about something similar to that, about how one of the reasons we turn to poetry is because it seems to hold truth. It values truth, it seems to hold truth of all different shapes and sizes, and I've been thinking about all the people who have become so dedicated to the truth that their cameras come out so quickly, how much we would not know about what is happening right now if folks weren't dedicated to recording the truth. Yes, a cell phone camera is different than a poem, [00:15:00] but I do think there's an impulse there that's very similar right now. 

Laura Walker: It is really interesting to think about that metaphor right there. Thank you for that, Chelsea, and just for the courage and vulnerability to talk about this, especially in this moment.

Chelsea DesAutels: It's important to make sure that we're talking about it outside of just our neck of the woods too, because this is for everyone. This is about everyone. 

Laura Walker: Absolutely. It didn't happen anywhere, but it could and I believe, quite frankly, still can, which is the scary part of it that I don't want to speak out loud, but it's true. So, yeah. Thank you. 

Chelsea DesAutels: Yeah, thank you. 

Laura Walker: Okay. So before we wrap up, where can people find you and your writing online or in the real world? 

Chelsea DesAutels: Probably the best place is my website, which is chelseabdesautels.com, and you can get to my book through there, you can get to recent poem and essay publications [00:16:00] through there. When I have retreats up and running again, they will be posted there.

So that's one great place. And then I'm on Instagram for example, @freshwaterwriting, various places like that. 

Laura Walker: Thank you so much again for being here. I really, really appreciate your time.

Chelsea DesAutels: Yeah, back at you, top to bottom.  

(Good Idea Ding)

Laura Walker: Not only is poetry vital in times like this, but I believe all our connections as writers are, and the same can be said of our connections as people doing the hard work of being good humans.

Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of Writing Connections. And please check back in March for my interview with Erin McGuire. Erin recently founded a new retreat space in Central France, and you are not gonna want to miss her story. Until then, keep on connecting. 

Show Notes: 

Connect with Chelsea on her website (chelseabdesautels.com) or Instagram (@freshwaterwriting). 

Read her essay, The Poetry of Minneapolis, here.