Page 26 of Kill Your Darlings

The self-addressed envelope arrived in the mail, its return address from Kenosha University Press. It was suspiciously thick,

although Wendy still assumed it was a rejection letter. She’d entered her manuscript into Kenosha’s First Book Poetry Prize

back in the spring.

Still, as she teared at the envelope, a tiny pulse of hope went through her. The letter began: “Dear Ms.Eastman, We are very

pleased to inform you that your manuscript, SPECIFICS OMITTED, has been selected as the winner of 2004’s Jeremiah Hull First

Book Poetry Prize.” Wendy stopped reading, suddenly possessed of a mix of competing emotions. She’d wanted this for a while—for

no other reason than maybe validation—but now that it had arrived, a sense of trepidation took over.

She went with the letter to her favorite reading chair, which sat by the bay window in the front living room of their second-floor apartment.

She read the whole thing. The book would come out in one year, the fall of 2004.

She would receive $1,500 and she would be flown out to the university for a book-launch reading at a time to be decided upon.

Included with the letter was a three-page contract, plus a print-out of the deciding judge’s citation on why her manuscript had been selected.

It was written by Elizabeth Grieve. Wendy took a breath and read the entire piece.

Specifics Omitted is a remarkable book of poems by a young writer called Wendy Eastman. She is a neo-formalist who uses convention to peel

away at layers of understanding. Her lines—usually iambic tetrameter—and her rhymes—often slyly slant—take mundane objects

and make them glow like bioluminescence across a nighttime ocean-scape. To quote from “At the Sculpture Park”: “There is a

wagered immortality at work/that seems to say: We must not be outshone by trees.” The title poem, coming as it does at the

end of the book, posits a world shed of identifiers, and in so doing refutes its own thesis.

By not being specific these poems become overtly specific. By not naming the dark, darkness imbues every word. Eastman is

here to tell us that in the realm of her poems the world will reveal itself through the details of nature, through the constriction

of form, and through the simplicity and complexity (not a contradiction) of these startling works of art.

Wendy, after reading the short essay, stood and wandered aimlessly through the rooms of the apartment, trying to order her

thoughts. There were so many. On the most basic level, a part of her was still processing that she had won a poetry prize

and that she was going to be a published author. And she was also processing that ludicrous essay by Elizabeth Grieve, which

made her book sound like the second coming of The Waste Land . But she had been chosen, hadn’t she? Presumably she was not the only poet to enter this particular contest. And it was even

a possibility that Elizabeth Grieve believed what she had written. She found herself back in her chair, rereading the piece.

She stayed seated, now plagued with sheer horror at what she’d just read.

In some ways, the judge had understood her perfectly, in itself a discombobulating thought, to the point where she saw her poems as confessional in nature, something that Wendy had never intended.

Or had she? The very first poem that Wendy had written had been about her time in Mendocino with her aunt Andi back when she was fifteen.

She’d described her aunt’s disheveled cottage, the nearby cliffs, the tall pines.

She remembered thinking that she should include in her poem the reason she’d been in California but decided against it.

And that had been her directive ever since.

She’d been appalled when she began to read the poems of her fellow students, all those free-verse confessions that sounded like diary entries that had been chopped up willy-nilly so that they somehow appeared poetic on the page.

She’d known at the time that her own poems, with their end rhymes and stanzas and descriptions of nature, must seem equally ridiculous.

But she’d stuck to her guns. Well, mostly.

She had written one poem about Thom back then, but even then she’d disguised it to make it seem like it was a poem ostensibly about graveyards.

And now she was getting published because a judge believed that she was a confessional poet. Ironic, because she had worked

so long to not use the first person in her poetry, to not dissect relationships, to not fall into all those traps that her

contemporaries seemed to fall into, with the constant flaying-open of their bodies and lives for public consumption.

She was just starting to read the judge’s citation for the third time when she heard Jason call out to her, having woken up

from his nap.

A few hours later Thom called to say that he was on his way back from Boston University and to remind her that he was picking

up Indian food.

“I’d forgotten all about it,” Wendy said.

“You mean you’ve cooked us a giant meal?”

“Strangely, no. But I do have news.”

“You know you can’t say that and then not tell me.”

“I’ll tell you when you get back.”

“Are you pregnant again?”

Wendy thought it was an odd thing to ask, since they’d already decided that one child was more than enough. “God no,” she

said.

“Seriously, you’re not going to tell me?”

“It’s good news and it’s no big deal.”

“Should I get Champagne?”

“How about you get a nice bottle of Chardonnay.”

An hour later Thom came through the door while she was on the floor sorting plastic dinosaurs with Jason. “I figured it out,”

he said. “You were offered a permanent position.”

Wendy was currently subbing at Cambridge Rindge & Latin for a teacher who was on maternity leave. “No,” she said. “Better.

I won a book contest.”

“What?”

“I won the first-book contest from Kenosha University Press. It’ll be published next fall.” Just now, saying the words made

her realize for the first time that she’d beaten Thom to a dream they both had. But she saw no jealousy on his face, just

pride.

“I don’t know what to say,” he said. “I’m so proud of you. Jason, are you proud of your mommy? She wrote a book.”

He held up a pterodactyl and made a roaring sound.

After dinner, and after they’d finished the wine, Thom insisted on going back out to buy an actual bottle of Champagne. “This

needs to be a proper celebration.”

While he was gone she cleaned the kitchen, and managed to put Jason down for the night by reading One Monster After Another twice through.

Thom took so much time buying the Champagne that she began to think he’d gotten into an accident and died, which would make quite a story.

Get a publishing deal, lose a husband. Maybe that’s how it should work.

Good things should be balanced by bad things, and vice versa.

She supposed that, in the end, it probably did work out that way.

We are all equal at the close. Slowly backing out of Jason’s room then heading back downstairs, she heard Thom fumbling at the door.

She let him in. Instead of carrying a single bottle of Champagne, he had a case in his arms. “I see,” she said.

“I told Al the good news, and somehow he convinced me I needed to buy a case of wine to celebrate. There’s one bottle of Champagne

in there. It wasn’t cheap.”

They went out onto their front stoop with two glasses and toasted the book. “You’ll be next,” she said, then immediately regretted

it.

“No, your second book will definitely be next. I’m a big fat maybe. But I don’t care. Maybe families shouldn’t have two writers.”

“We do have two writers already.”

“No, I know. I mean published writers.”

“Well...” Wendy said, trailing off.

“So how did you feel when you opened the envelope?” Thom said.

“It was such a bizarre mix of emotions. I felt glad, but also instantly... something. Anxiety, maybe. Terror. Mostly, I

felt like somehow I’d put something over on them, like I’d gotten away with something. And then I read the judge’s citation,

and it just got worse.”

“What’s that?”

“The judge of the contest, she wrote a piece about why I was selected.”

“I want to see it.”

“It’s awful.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s so embarrassing. She talks about me like... I mean, read it yourself.”

Wendy went inside to get the piece. Walking back to the front door, she could smell Thom’s cigarette smoke coming through the screen, and as she got closer she heard him talking to somebody.

She stopped just inside the door, listening.

He was speaking with Lilith York, who would be out walking her Akita.

She heard him say, “It’s called Specifics Omitted .

We’ll have a huge party when it’s published.

” The words made her heart hurt a little.

When it had been quiet for a moment Wendy stepped back out onto the porch.

“Sorry,” Thom said, about the cigarette, flicking it in a high arc so that it landed on the sidewalk, sizzling then dying

in a puddle.

“No worries,” she said. “You’re going to need another one after reading this essay.”

“Read it to me.”

“Okay,” she said, and managed to get through reading it aloud without being violently sick. “It’s a lot,” she said, at the

end.

“What if she’s right?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe you’re a major talent—I mean, I know you’re a major talent, but what if the rest of the world is about to find out?”

“First of all, no one will read this book. Elizabeth Grieve is a poet herself, so she knows she has to make it sound like

she’s selected the next Anne Sexton in order to make her feel better about her own life choices.”

“About becoming a poet?” Thom said.

“Exactly,” Wendy said, suddenly enjoying herself, even considering smoking one of Thom’s cigarettes.

“Still, she might be right.”

“She’s not. I mean, who knows, maybe I’ll sell a million books, but that wouldn’t change the fact that everything she wrote

is total bullshit.”

“Are you sure you’re going into this with the right attitude?”

“I’m loading up on the armor. Trust me, no one will read it.”

“You sticking with the title?”

“Oh, definitely.”

“Okay,” Thom said. He’d been trying to convince her for a while to rename the manuscript The Moth Party after his favorite poem in the collection.

That night, Thom fell asleep first, a rare event. He would normally toss and turn for at least an hour, while Wendy could

recite a few of her favorite poems to herself and be deeply asleep in twenty minutes. But that night she lay there listening

to the rotating fan struggling to cool the room. She kept thinking about the words in that citation, and how embarrassed they

had made her feel. Why had she wanted to publish her poems in the first place? For fame and money? She didn’t want to be famous,

and she had plenty of money. Besides, this was poetry. To advance her career? No. She had never had any real interest in academics.

Then why? She racked her brain. She’d called her mother earlier in the day to tell her the news, and her mother had been happy

for her but hadn’t asked any follow-up questions. She did say that Wendy’s father would have been proud, and she wondered

if that was the case. It probably was. Her father’s flaw, well, one of many, was that he had a desperate need to succeed at

something and never managed once to do it. Maybe Wendy had a little bit of that in herself as well, a need to win. In some

ways she just wanted to see if she could get a book published, but she hadn’t even considered the possibility that she would

be opening herself up to scrutiny. One of Elizabeth Grieve’s lines went through her head: By not naming the dark, darkness imbues every word. Jesus, she thought, what have I done? Something close to panic rose from her stomach through her chest. Was this what Thom

felt like when he had his little attacks? She sat up in bed, staring at the glow of city light against the pale curtain.

What finally got her to sleep was a strange little fantasy more amusing than anything real.

She imagined Elizabeth Grieve becoming obsessed with her, parsing every word to find out everything she had done.

Wendy would have to travel across the country, hunt her down, silence her.

She imagined multiple gruesome possibilities for doing the deed, finally landing on strangulation, using Elizabeth Grieve’s long ponytail as the murder weapon.

Wendy began to calm down, just thinking about it.

Right before finally falling asleep, she did make a promise to herself: no more poetry.