Fa-la-la-la-Labor
On giving yourself permission to say no - with a writing prompt and an action prompt
About a week ago, I panicked when I realized I had promised two different writers blurbs for their next collections by the end of December. I had already read the books and taken notes, but I hadn’t started parsing my notes and my pulled quotes to make cohesive statements. I proceeded to put aside everything else I’d been planning to work on and make sure they got completed.
Being asked to create a blurb for another writer is an honor, one that I take seriously and one that takes quite some time. (See
’s excellent recent stack about writing and asking for blurbs.) It is the same with writing book reviews, something that I have done A LOT over the past five years. (Thirty-three poetry reviews at Rhino Reviews alone, six at Tinderbox Poetry - plus others at Limp Wrist, South Florida Poetry Review, and other venues. If you add them up, it’s around 10 reviews per year for the past five years - almost one a month.)I’m not complaining. Reviewing has made me a more careful reader of poems and a better thinker about my own poems. I have considered this practice one way of giving back to poetry, one way of giving attention and respect to what poets do. I think about providing space for poets on my reading series A Hundred Pitchers of Honey in the same way, and I hope that Asterales, the new journal I am launching with friend/writer Rachel Bunting next month, will be another way to showcase writers and artists with gratitude for what they create.
But all of these things take physical time and mental energy. The more time spent on blurbs, reviews, reading submissions, website work, booking, and promoting means less time on my own creative and personal pursuits, less mental energy for my own poems or freewriting, this Substack, artwork, or even pleasure reading. (Or other personal things like exercise, time with family/friends, traveling.) For this reason, and for some personal ones (including some travel plans), I have decided to make changes for the coming year.
I have decided I need to learn to say no.
Easy, right? Not so much. I’ll try to explain why.
Asterales will get a lot of my attention in this inaugural year. Therefore, I have decided I will not take on writing any reviews in 2025. I’ve already had to turn down one friend this month, and it wasn’t so easy to do so. Not a problem, you say. You’ve done so many of them. You deserve a break. However, in my head, not reviewing equates itself with disappearing. My head says that if I stop, everyone will ignore me and perhaps no one will review MY upcoming collection. I never thought about writing reviews as some sort of quid pro quo, so this is not a logical reaction. Doesn’t make it any less real.
Asterales will get a lot of my attention in this inaugural year. (Did I say that already? It’s true.) Therefore, I will cut back on hosting readings for A Hundred Pitchers of Honey from once a month to quarterly. I said I was going to do that this year, and then I got sidetracked by requests I couldn’t refuse and ideas I had about conversations, and I only ended up with two months off. There’s some guilt involved in this, as I will be trying to book my own readings for my upcoming collection and I know how hard it can be.
I also need to say to no to blurbs for the coming year, other than one I already agreed to. Again, this feels hypocritical as I recently sent out requests for blurbs for my own book, so guilt again raises its ugly head.
Do you see a theme here? I have convinced myself that these things prove my own usefulness or worth to the poetry world and that, if I pull back, I will somehow disappoint and/or disappear. I would love not to feel this way. Trust me. So I might need you to remind me that saying no is okay.
PROMPTS:
Make a list of ten things you have done recently that you would have preferred to have not done. (Leave a couple of lines beneath each item.) They can be errands, events, work duties, whatever you like. Beneath each one, write why you ended up doing it and what the worst-case scenario would be if you had refused. Use this list to arrive at a conclusion (as I did in the bold print in the last paragraph of my post) OR to write a piece using all the worst-case scenarios.
Consider what you can do to support other writers/creative people that do NOT require large chunks of your time or energy.
Share or repost someone else’s poem/story/book/good news on your social media feed.
Leave a quick Amazon review for a recent book you’ve enjoyed. (I don’t do Goodreads any more, as I have some concerns about it, but if you do, leave a review there as well.)
Read someone else’s poem on Tik-Tok. (I am an old and do NOT Tik-Tok, but if I did, this might be something I’d do.)
Attend an online reading with your screen and mic turned off - you can be multi-tasking but still providing support.
You get the idea. If you have other ideas, feel free to leave them in the comments. Or, say NO. I get it.