RECIPIENT REFLECTION

Mentorship recipient:
Despite
​Mentor commentary:
Laura Maylene Walter

ON THE REVISION PROCESS FOR "DESPITE"

by Nan Wigington

Members of my online writing group challenge each other with Monday morning prompts. This July, Linda Niehoff asked us to use five lines from a poem to jump into a story. At first I thought, “That's hard. Too many good poems to pick from. And who cares anyway. There is so much wrong with me and the world. How can poetry matter?”

I almost ignored the prompt. I was wading through an awful summer. My mortality was showing. I had turned 60 and had little to show for it. I had in no way changed the world. I was two days away from a reunion I dreaded. My summer projects had stalled. I didn't have the faith to finish them. And my grape vine, my beautiful, beautiful grape vine was overrun with chomping, chewing Japanese beetles.

But I was also knee-deep in John Brehm's excellent anthology, The Poetry of Impermanence, Mindfulness, and Joy. Inside those pages was Jack Gilbert’s “A Brief for the Defense” and, toward the end of the poem, this stunning line: “We must admit there will be music despite everything.” With that line, I had a place to jump into a story. I had the aging Stella who, like me, faced an unexpected infestation of destruction. Like me and my husband, she had a grim morning ritual of knocking beetles off the vines, drowning them, crushing them, even torching them. I wrote about Stella and posted to my group’s private page. Part of me was exhilarated for putting down the story, but part of me was disappointed for not getting it quite right.

Another member of my group, Anne Weisgerber, challenged all of us to hit and submit to her list of markets. Gordon Square Review was on that list. I decided to submit Stella’s story mostly because of GSR’s offer of editorial mentorships. I was surprised when Laura Maylene Walter contacted me and offered me one. She saw that I had come close but didn’t get Stella's story quite right. She was one of the best readers I’ve ever met. Her suggestions were never exceptionally cruel or particularly kind. They were human and humane. She opened my eyes and helped me look again.

​Her biggest sticking point was my ending. She was let down by it. (Stella booked passage to India.) I was too. Laura reminded me of what seemed to be the core of the story—the beetles. She helped me think about cycles. I wrote and submitted the story in late summer. I started rewriting with Laura in the fall. The beetles were no longer in my life or Stella's. Not because they'd been eradicated, but because they'd gone to ground. They were waiting in some secret winter chamber, waiting to reemerge. Laura helped me see that Stella was struggling to go to ground, too, to find a place where she could be reborn.

Nan Wigington

Nan Wigington has held a variety of jobs. The shortest was as a stripper for an AKC dog magazine. She has also been an unclaimed property clerk, a property accounting analyst, and an ensemble actress. She currently works as a literacy paraprofessional in a K-2 autism classroom and lives in Denver’s Capitol Hill neighborhood with her husband and dog.