My Big Break

(On getting published in a literary journal)

I’ve only been publishing here on Substack for something like 10 weeks, after a 22 year silence, but I’ve been writing poetry all my adult life because it brings me, well, maybe a degree of understanding. It was something I shared rarely, and only with close friends.

Then in the mid 90’s and early noughties - having myself an early mid life crisis perhaps - I decided to “go public” and I sent some of my work out into the wider world, with a packed lunch, a hopeful heart and an almost total ignorance of publishing reality.

Somewhat to my surprise I won a few regional and national poetry awards and my work started to receive wider recognition within my own country.

It was gratifying but also at times bewildering, and occasionally comedic. Australian literary journals then - and now - tend to be tiny affairs, and publication within them can seem as if it is limited to a rather restricted and inward looking club - like a small party in an abandoned inner city warehouse where everyone obviously knows each other and you most definitely do not.

My first publishing success was with one of my occasional political pieces - written in exasperation at the height of public debate over sensible Government legislation to restrict gun ownership, following the appalling Port Arthur atrocity in otherwise peaceful (leaving aside the massacres of colonial invasion) Tasmania.

However, the success of my poem was, as you will see below, decidedly partial.

Thankfully, the success of the gun control legislation was much greater and (so far) Australia has managed to avoid a repetition of the terrible events which led to it - a lesson our neighbours across the Pacific could learn from….

So here it is, underneath a photo I took in Dublin which has nothing at all to do with the poem, other than illustrating the rich comedy of life :)

My Big Break

Gun Lobby -
that was the title of the piece.
I liked it well enough -
dashed it off in a rage
one night
after watching the news;
printed out the page
and stuck it up at work
for all my colleagues
to read,
and misunderstand.

I posted it
to Ulitarra
in the end,
sending it in 
with my 40 dollar sub,
(a not so subtle bribe),
and a friendly note saying -
“here’s one more
you may not like.”

Weeks went by
and Laura rang.
They liked it after all,
and "could it go in 
issue 10?  This 
is the bit 
we want..."

It was only then 
I realised why 
she sounded
so nervous....

They only wanted
8 lines
out of 30.

“But JS says 
the first 8 
IS the poem...
Do you mind?”

What could I say?
It had been that
kind of day all week.
I wrote back 
straight away
and this is what I said -
“Theres no law yet
prohibiting
sawn off poetry,
so please,
by all means,
go ahead.”

They did…

This is how I coped…..

For anyone interested in the Australian approach to controlling firearms:

Postscript:

If you have read this far, and perhaps feel a shred of sympathy (all Poets get rejected, I know), it may lighten your heart to hear that - just 4 years later - I won the Ulitarra Robert Harris National Poetry Award, which of course was a blind judging process, and Ulitarra had to publish that one in full!

A year later, Ulitarra folded.

Maybe I killed it? :)