Three Submissions a Month for Twenty Years: An Interview with Melanie Faith

Melanie Faith is a writer, editor, and teacher whose books about writing include In a Flash, Poetry Power, and Photography for Writers from Vine Leaves Press. She’s also the author of This Passing Fever from Future Cycle Press, a book of poetry set during the 1918 influenza epidemic; and Her Humble Admirer, a pseudonymous regency romance novel.  Her short fiction, poetry, and nonfiction have appeared in over 250 publications, and she teaches online for Southern New Hampshire University and the WOW! Women on Writing program.  On top of all that, she’s a photographer whose work I’ve scattered throughout this interview.

Melanie’s also the developmental editor of my upcoming novel, MFA Thesis Novel, and after a few back and forth emails I realized she’d be a perfect person to interview about her creative work life…

 

I. I Wasn’t Really Sure Journalism Was What I Wanted

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: You’re from Pennsylvania —where did you go to school?

Melanie Faith: I went in-state to Wilson College, and at the time it was a small liberal arts school for women.  There were male students, but they lived off campus.  There were just two hundred women in my graduating class.

BIAHADJ: Oh wow, that is small.

MF: There weren’t a huge number of us in the English department, so we were a tight-knit group.  I loved it—I’m an introvert, and I really like smaller schools where there’s more attention and individual interaction than at a big school.  I knew I wanted to major in English, and there was a major in professional writing that included creative writing, but it was mostly journalism.  I was there from ‘95 to ‘99, and when I first started there were one or two computers on the whole campus that had dial-up internet. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Oh wow, the early days when some places had internet and some places didn’t.

MF: Yeah!  It’s pretty wild to think about that now.  We used to sign up for 15-minute increments to check our emails.

BIAHADJ: What was your college experience like?

MF: I did a lot of volunteer work, I tutored elementary school kids in a migrant workers program, I was in the choir, I wrote for the school newspaper. I also worked on the literary magazine editorial staff. Since it was a small school, you could try a lot of different things.  In the beginning I also enrolled in the education program, but then I realized when I was a sophomore that it was going to take me a full extra year of money I didn’t have to get the double major.  I was a scholarship student and I was doing work study, but I was also borrowing a lot of money.  I had a realization one day that I didn’t want to be in it for the fifth year and was just going to be an English major to graduate on time.

BIAHADJ: Was the migrant workers program your first tutoring experience?

MF: No, I’ve been tutoring since middle school!  When I was in eighth grade the guidance counselors needed students who were responsible and who could communicate well to volunteer tutor a student who was two years younger, and I was like, yeah, I can do that.

BIAHADJ: What kind of work study jobs did you have?

MF: At first, I worked as a choir-music librarian for the choir director, which was quiet, meditative work. Then, I was the research assistant for the English department for two years, which I absolutely loved. I also worked at a newspaper one summer, because that was something I could definitely do.  I needed an internship, so it really worked out well that the internship was willing to pay me.  Like I said, I was a scholarship student, and my parents also, thankfully, paid a portion of my tuition.  I was really grateful for that because otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford the awesome school I went to.  I’d save the money I made during the year, and the rest I took out loans for.  I was an undergrad at the time, so the idea of loans was in my head, but the reality of paying every month wasn’t. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: One of my favorite parts of In a Flash was the nonfiction piece “A Pivotal Moment” where you talk about the character’s uncertainty about whether to pursue a teaching degree and how to become a writer.  What was your own thought process when you were an undergrad in terms of what you wanted to do after college?

MF: With that particular experience, I was getting ready to graduate and I really wasn’t sure that journalism was what I wanted to do with my life, because I liked sitting at the desk and interacting with the people more than I liked being sent out to basketball games or interviewing people about stoplights. [laughs] I was a little scared because I didn’t know what was going to happen—all I knew was that I wanted to write short stories or poetry, but no one was paying for any of that—no one even wanted to publish any of that!

BIAHADJ: That’s wild that you were having those thoughts so early—I tend to imagine the ‘90s as a time when books were still a force to be reckoned with.

MF: When I was in high school I entered a famous contest, the Seventeen magazine literary contest that Sylvia Plath won and that other writers have won who’ve gone on to have huge careers.  I thought for sure my story was going to win or place, but I got a form rejection, so I stopped submitting work to outside of school journals for four years.  It really hurt me—but I never stopped writing.  I just knew whatever it took, I was going to do it.  I don’t care if you’re a writer in 1870 or 2020, you have to have the momentum and determination.

BIAHADJ: That’s a good point—I think I fall into the trap of envying writers from earlier eras and thinking they had it easier even though there were plenty of obstacles back then, too.

MF: It wasn’t until I went to graduate school that I realized it’s really typical for awesome work to get rejected consistently.  If it’s a big literary magazine, maybe they have twenty-five slots for short stories and twenty slots for poems, and there’s probably two thousand people submitting, and if it’s poetry they’re submitting three to five at a time!  So I don’t feel so bad now.  Even as a professional writer now I get turned down 70% of the time—which is considered a really good number!—even after having professional books published.  I didn’t realize any of that when I started out.

 

 

II. It’s Very Hard Financially as an Artist

 

BIAHADJ: How did you learn the value of editing in your work?

MF: It was around when I got to graduate school and I was workshopping really consistently.  We had a no-talk rule in my workshop, and you know all about that feeling of being in workshop and thinking, “Augh, they’re reading it wrong!” or “Hey, this person got it right!” [laughs] and you’re just trying to keep a zip on your lip.  I would take notes so my face wouldn’t do stuff in the middle of the workshop.  I also learned that I couldn’t take all of their suggestions or the piece was going to be like Frankenstein’s monster and it wasn’t going to be my work anymore.  But maybe this person had a cool idea, so I’d write that down.  Then maybe this other person had a totally wrong idea from what I wanted it to mean, so I had to figure out what part of the story was so fuzzy that it wasn’t saying what I wanted it to say.

So it was good for me that I couldn’t go to grad school right after college, because I would have been way too sensitive about my work.  I spent six years writing on my own before enrolling in the MFA program. Before then I don’t think I’d thought about editing as a serious process—before then I thought editing was annoying and it was a step between me and getting published. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: I think if you can develop your own process through grad school then the experience is a success.

MF: For sure.  I sort of made a goal for myself once I got my first publication, that I was going to figure out a job that would let me have some free time to write somehow, which is how I fell into tutoring again, this time for money, because I knew I could do it well.  I liked interacting with students, and I could share what I knew, but I could also have free time because of my schedule.

BIAHADJ: And this was right after college?

MF: That was right after college—so I’ve been submitting at least three submissions a month since the year 2000.

BIAHADJ: Wow.

MF: Unbelievably, that’s been twenty years.

BIAHADJ: …that’s an incredible number of submissions and I’m in awe.

MF: [laughs] Thank you.  They’re not all brand-new work—I’ll simultaneously submit about 20%, and I’ll also pull older work that I think still has merit, look at it, edit it, maybe send it out again after a year or two.  Then I’ll retire some other work.  I might submit the same project and if it gets rejected I’ll take it from a novella down to a short story or something—there’s a lot of variables at work.  But I had a feeling that if there was more of my work in circulation then I’d have more success.

BIAHADJ: Was the tutoring job full-time or part-time at that point?

MF: No, it was part-time.  Actually, almost all of my jobs now are still part-time—I juggle about four or five jobs, but they’re all part-time jobs.

BIAHADJ: How many hours per week was the tutoring?

MF: Back then I think it was four or five nights a week, maybe three hours a night Monday through Thursday, and then on Sundays I’d work from 1:00 until 10:00 at night to meet students.  So that was my marathon day.  With that kind of schedule I could sleep in—sleep is very important to me! [laughs]—but I could also get up just a little bit earlier and get some writing time in.  In the summers sometimes I taught in programs full-time, like at some summer camps, and there was just no time to write anything creative at all.  And when I had the journalism job in college for one summer, I didn’t really write anything except for one short story.

BIAHADJ: Was that because you didn’t have enough time, or because your energy was taken up writing about basketball games and stoplights?

MF: For that particular job all of my energy was taken up with the stoplights, yes. [laughs] If I’d been a full-time teacher when I first graduated, then all my time would have been spent grading papers, making bigger lesson plans—and at the prep school where I tutored I would have been teaching a sport, and I am horrific at almost all sports. [laughs] So I never would have had any time for writing.

BIAHADJ: A lot of creative people I talk to say that their Day Jobs just take up too much time and interfere with their creative work time.

MF: My ultimate goal was always twofold: one, to figure out financially what was going to happen, but more importantly to preserve some time to write.  I didn’t write every day, but I did write most days, for maybe an hour or an hour and a half.  Then I’d find people in my community—most of them were older than me at the time, but they liked to write, so I’d go to open-mic events where I’d just meet some other people who wrote.  I really didn’t have a lot of other writers in my life, but they were connections that encouraged me.

BIAHADJ: When I was young and out of college I had a tremendously hard time finding people in the real world who were writers or wanted to be writers—most of what I learned about writing came from either reading books or meeting writers in college.  So having writers in the community you could talk to feels incredible to me.

MF: I have a lot of students who tell me they don’t have a mentor.  Part of what I do as a teacher and editor is a kind of mentorship—I want to make it easier for writers because it’s a tremendously challenging path, but I want the people who have that spark to keep going because their words are needed.  I knew a lot of people in graduate school who immediately after they left, life took over and they haven’t written since, or they’ve been working on the same book for ten years.  And that happens.  Maybe they have three kids now, or maybe financially they have to work a full-time job and a part-time job—I understand.  But at the same time, it’s very hard financially as an artist, and part of my goal and my hope is to find the people who have the spark and keep them going.

BIAHADJ: Was studying journalism in college helpful for you further down the line?

MF: At the time I valued learning about all kinds of writing, and I still use my journalism skills in my creative nonfiction and my books that I write. I’m really grateful that I worked for a newspaper, but it didn’t light me up the same way that creative writing did.  When I creative write and I really get into it, it’s like I’m transported—that sounds really cliché, so if I were writing that I’d write it better. [laughs] I feel like I’m in the groove, I’m doing what I’m meant to do, and that someone will find value in it—but even if no one does, I love it.  I knew I was on the right path when I had that feeling.  When I did my journalism, I felt like I did whenever I wrote a really good analytical essay and my teacher bumped me up from a B+ to an A.  I felt accomplished because I put all the research in and I got my A.  But it wasn’t the same spark.

BIAHADJ: How do you feel about your passions now?

MF: I really want to pursue all the writing projects I love, help all the writers that I believe in, and get really good work out into the world.  I also have a passion for photography and it’s getting bigger and bigger, so now I’ve got these two passions that I’m juggling simultaneously.  With my writing I’ve learned a lot and get to share with others, but I’m still a practitioner.  I’ve been doing my photography a long time also, but I haven’t been publishing it a lot.  So now I’m at a point where I’m wondering what I can do with my photography, and can my writing and my photography speak to each other?

BIAHADJ: And you wrote a book about that relationship, yes?

MF: I wrote that book Photography for Writers because one day I went on Amazon and thought, I really want a book that talks about writing with photography, which I’d never seen—I couldn’t find one.  So I thought, Huh, that’s a gap in the market, I’m going to write one!

BIAHADJ: That’s a really smart marketing decision—and a way you can naturally link your interests to a gap in the market.

MF: I think that’s something I’ve learned recently.  When I started out, I wasn’t that insightful into marketing—for me, that’s probably been a journey over the last eight or ten years.  I’ve never been a person who was passionate about money at all.  I only want money to the extent that it’ll give me time to write.

BIAHADJ: That’s a really sensible way of looking at money—it’s a tool like anything else.

MF: In graduate school I only remember talking about money in one seminar, and it was from a journalist who told us how we can pitch articles to different places to try to get money.  It was an optional seminar, but I’m so glad I went because I learned things that stewed around in my unconscious, and then when I realized that poetry didn’t pay very much and I really wanted to make more money so I could write more, I started thinking about writing nonfiction books.  I had students tell me that I knew a lot and that I should write a book, but I still didn’t have enough confidence.

But once I hit thirtysomething I had a whole new set of debt, which was graduate school debt, but I had a whole new set of skills I could market, so I needed to get busier than what I was already doing.

BIAHADJ: That makes sense—I think the necessity of figuring out how to pay back debt can be a powerful motivator.

MF: The only drawback after I had some success is that there was so much I could do, I needed to figure out how to say no to certain things—like, knowing beforehand to say no, not in the middle.  I want to see things to a conclusion if at all possible, but I’m learning that part of my challenge is balancing my writing with having a life outside of my writing also.

BIAHADJ: Which can be tricky…

MF: COVID is such a nightmare, but the small gift was that it taught me that I have a great life and a lot of friends and family.  I want to know people even more in my personal life, as well as figure out more ways to look off of the computer and out into life.  If I can connect more offscreen, than I can harness even more passion than I have now.

BIAHADJ: Experience is such a cliché, but it’s important to have something outside of the work to keep the ideas flowing.  It doesn’t have to be a trip to Spain for four months—that’s the cliché.  It could be just hanging out with friends on a Saturday and talking about funny things—it doesn’t have to be a Jack Kerouac-type wild adventure.

 

 

III. When You’re Determined You Just Figure Things Out in Another Way

 

BIAHADJ: How did you get into online teaching?

MF: When I was finishing graduate school, knowing I was going to have more debt, I was asking my friends from all over the country if anyone taught online.  I’d tutored for a long time, and I thought I could do both at the same time—work online and still have time to write, and I wanted a job that paid a little more.  A friend of mine was teaching at an online school and told me to give them her name—and I was super pumped.  Nowadays, online education is very estimable, but back in 2007 people didn’t take it seriously.  I told them, Look, I can bring quality to this place! [laughs] Obviously I’m an optimist, but they didn’t even call me back!  I was young, but I was no lightweight, and it didn’t even matter that I had my friend’s name, I couldn’t get anybody to answer a thing.

But it was OK because by that point, having submitted at least three pieces a month for seven years, I knew that a no was just a no for that person—it wasn’t a no for everyone.  So I kept going, and I sat down and made a long list of places that seemed like they were looking for English teachers.  I applied for two or three years to teach online.

BIAHADJ: Oh wow, what was that process like?

MF: In 2007 when I applied and wrote down the whole list, I was looking mostly at traditional schools or schools that had established online programs.  There weren’t very many from 2007 to 2009, but I was still applying consistently every two or three months.  And I’d put new publications I was getting on there—I know Publish or Perish is the cliché, but if you’re going to teach in higher education, it can’t hurt to have a whole bunch. [laughs]

And then I thought, I’ve worked at accredited schools, why couldn’t I check for a non-credit program?  I don’t know why I thought that way, but when you’re determined you just figure things out in another way.  And that’s how I found Women on Writing—they took a chance on me because they were starting their online classes, and I’ve happily worked for them for several years now.

BIAHADJ: That makes sense—especially about opening up your field to non-accredited programs.  I feel like when so many people look for jobs they get a really narrow vision about what kind of job they want or that they’d be suited for, so they miss out on a lot of other opportunities.

MF: I’ve always been the kind of person who doesn’t want to follow the crowd—I have my own idea of what I want to do and I’m going to come up with a creative way to do it.  It’ll probably take me a lot longer, and it’s probably going to be surprising.

 

 

IV. I See It Differently Now From the Other Side of the Desk

 

BIAHADJ: You mentioned earlier that a lot of writers can’t find the time to work on their projects because they’ve got family or job or other commitments—and there’s a battle between the two.  Maybe they can do it, but it’ll take ten years or twenty years—so it raises the question of how we can encourage writers who want to find that time but would have to sacrifice some other commitments, and how best they can do that.

MF: I have some awesome students at Women on Writing and SNHU who wake up at 3:30 or 4 in the morning to do their homework—they’re working with tremendous odds, and they’re making it.  I love working with students like that who are making those sacrifices.  I know how much time—and how much sleep!—they give up.

BIAHADJ: Yes—it’s this terrible balancing act that doesn’t get talked about enough.

MF: The time crunch is very real for a lot of writers, and so is the money crunch—oh, if only I had a money tree! [laughs] But if I had a money tree, I’d probably be pretty lazy.  I always looked at writers who had a couple of books out and thought, Wow, they’re living off their books, this is awesome!  Now I realize that they’re probably working several jobs or a full-time job—I see it differently now from the other side of the desk.  I was optimistic and naïve at first because I thought that when I became a bigger writer I’d have more time to write, and then the money would take care of itself. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Did it take some time to figure out how money was going to work in your life?

MF: I’m not the kind of person who spends a lot of money on anything except books—and maybe shoes. [laughs] But mostly books—and you can get books at the library for free.  I’m not a big spender—fancy cars don’t really do it for me, my purse is $9.99 from Target, I don’t care, I like it!  I didn’t have expectations that I was going to be rolling in it or impress people with the way I dressed—I’m not a slouch, but I don’t really care what the tag is.  I care more about how people think and how I feel, so I didn’t really have those kinds of expectations.

BIAHADJ: I think living a simpler lifestyle is a really powerful tool.  If you can live with less money coming in, it can help you support the life you really want.

MF: I grew up in a blue-collar family, and we knew that hanging out with people and connecting was going to be a bigger jewel than having a fancy car, because that was never going to happen.  I grew up with that mentality, but I also saw my parents struggle—they did a fantastic job with the little resources they had, but I think that’s why I have that little kernel of myself that worries about money a little.

My parents really supported my education, and they also told me it didn’t matter how much I made, and that I should be happy with my job, because I was going to work there a long time.  It was a huge gift. I had friends whose parents were like, You need to make this much money, or You need to have this kind of lifestyle or we’re not supporting you—you know what I mean?

BIAHADJ: I know exactly what you mean—the pressure from family can be either direct or indirect…

MF: Yes!  It was a phenomenal thing for me to have that kind of background.  The only two things I ever spend a lot of money on are travel tickets, because I want to see my nieces and my sister because they’re invaluable to me and the time I get to spend with them is very small, so I want to make every minute count.  Travel and then paying back my loans were my two big expenditures.  While I would go out and have dinner sometimes, or treat myself a little, I knew that connecting with people one-on-one was such a big encourager for me.  Not a crowd, and not a bunch of friends, but really getting to know a person and what they’re thinking.

BIAHADJ: I think warm, human relationships with people you care about are so important to living that kind of balanced life, so you can’t overlook that.

MF: But also my free time—I’m such an introvert that at the end of the day after teaching numerous jobs, I just want to sit down and do something either mindless, or work on my writing, or listen to music.  That was such a gift yesterday, I listened to music for an hour and twenty minutes. [laughs] It was amazing, I felt like I was seventeen again!

BIAHADJ: Yes—creative pursuits take up so much energy and there’s such a drain that comes with that. If you don’t replenish your energy, you’re going to be in a rough place.

MF: That’s so true.  I don’t know that I had enough foresight when I was younger to realize what it was going to be like living years down the line.  When I envisioned being a writer I did envision some of the things I do now—which is sit for a long time alone, and enjoy it. [laughs] But I didn’t realize the business end of it, I didn’t realize all the jobs I was going to be doing.  I didn’t realize there would be email, and that’s a chunk of time!

BIAHADJ: And email takes up such a deceptive chunk of time because you think you’re just logging on to check your inbox, but then you see what came in and realize some of it’s urgent, and then other emails take up attention in the back of your mind.

MF: I usually break emailing into small chunks—some in the morning, some in the afternoon, sometimes before bed if there’s a really important deadline, but that’s three hours I don’t get back.  I feel pressure from emails sometimes, because everybody gets them on their phones—it used to be I could have a day or two to think about it, and come up with a better response.  One of the things I used to do was take a No Email Day, and sometimes a No Email Weekend, and I’d give people advanced notice.  That time was so beautiful.  For 2021 that’s one of my goals—I want to give everybody as much as I can but I want to look away from the computer too, and I think that would be really refreshing, because then I can be even better when I’m at the computer.

 

 

V. Parents Who Write Are Amazing to Me

 

MF: Most of my friends have children, and that takes up such a huge amount of time.  Before COVID when I’d go out to visit my sister and nieces and live with them for a month, it was such a joy, and I learned how many variables there are to being a parent.  So parents who write are amazing to me.

I understand that when you have children, they’re just going to take up a lot of your time.  A lot of my women friends have disappeared for months at a time, but I know they still care.  I don’t think I realized that at all when I was twenty—when you’re travelling in a pack in college you think it’s always going to be you and the people you’ve connected with, but there’s ebb and flow when you get into your thirties and forties.

Once I turned thirty, I started to realize that most of my friends had disappeared—they’d gotten married or they’d had kids, so I was going to have to meet new people pretty quick.  I noticed a lot of my friends didn’t have free time anymore, but I can handle that now.  I still want to make new friends, but I know that some people will come back.

BIAHADJ: Yes—when people first start drifting away you’re afraid they’ll be gone forever, and that can sting.

MF: And I don’t think that’s talked about enough.  There’s a huge divide between people who are single and people who are married and/or have kids or are stepparents.

BIAHADJ: It’s that idea that family and creative pursuits both take up such a tremendous amount of time and energy, and to manage both takes so much power and focus and follow-through—God forbid trying to work another career into that—so doing creative work and having a family often seems like a dichotomy.  I think that dichotomy is inherently false, but it can seem that way in the moment.

MF: Speaking from a woman’s point of view, I never had a huge burning desire to biologically have children—I love children and want them in my life, and I love my nieces so much—but I always felt ambivalent about being a mom.  A lot of what I do as a teacher is caring and being there for people, and I wouldn’t be able to do that with as much energy or time as I currently give if I had a small child.  At this point in my life my fertility window is very small—that’s always something to consider if you’re a woman artist, because if you want kids, you really have to prioritize in a different way.

It would have been a much bigger struggle if I’d been like a friend who knew since she was eight that she wanted to a child of her own—which is a beautiful thing, and I wish I had that kind of clarity.  I knew I wanted to be a writer with the same amount of clarity that she knew she wanted to be a mom.  I think whatever your passion is, if you want to be an Olympian or a hairdresser, or whatever you want to be—if you can connect with that when you’re young, then go for it.  But when it came to having a family, I wasn’t sure—but I did know I wanted to keep writing.

BIAHADJ: It’s that idea that if you’re ambivalent about X goal, but you know you’re passionate about Y goal, it just makes more sense to follow through with the Y goal, and if the X goal if something you can work in on the side or something you fall into naturally, then you can go for that too.  The mistake is when people feel pressure to pursue one of those goals just because society says it’s more important.

MF: That’s really true.  Time is super precious, whatever it is that I do.

BIAHADJ: Where do you see your future going, in terms of your writing, your photography, your teaching, your editing, all of it?

MF: I definitely know that I want to write more books, and I want to do everything I’m already doing, pretty much.  I’m at the point where I’ve maxed out a lot of goals and I need to make new ones.  But some of those goals are more personal than professional.  There’s a lot more books that I want to write, and there’s a lot more writers I want to help with their books.  I just want to continue every day to create things and be amazed by whatever it is—and I want to share whatever I’m doing with people I have real, authentic connections with.  To me, having a real authentic connection with people is better than having a rock-star famous crowd or something.

And I’ll definitely continue teaching, which is really fulfilling.  It’s hard because it takes up a lot of time, but what would I do if I wasn’t teaching?  Who would I tell this stuff to? [laughs]

 

You can find more about Melanie Faith on her website, check out her Etsy store, or follow her on Twitter or Instagram.