You Can Be a Winning Writer. Joan Gelfand

       Foreword

      As I sat reading Joan Gelfand’s You Can Be a Winning Writer in preparation for writing this foreword, I decided that I needed to stop and get on with writing it. But fascinated, I couldn’t. Instead, I found myself nodding yes, yes, yes at every paragraph, and often stopping to jot down especially meaningful lines to share with the women and sometimes men in the Zona Rosa Writing and Living Workshops I’ve led for thirty-seven years.

      In this book, Gelfand beautifully and concisely addresses the four seemingly contradictory parts of every successful writer’s life: Craft, Commitment, Community and Confidence—the first two we hone in solitude, our butt in a chair or our nose in book after book; the second two when we put ourselves out into the world to join forces with our literary peers and heroes (who, as she mentions, sometime become friends and supporters). Over and over, she nails the myth of the solitary artist, and rarely has an author described so succinctly what we need as writers—from initial inspiration to the long haul of publication.

      As I read, memories of my own early years as a writer flooded through me, and I realized afresh how fortunate I had been to have had all four of Gelfand’s requirements on my side. As a mother of three, a woman afflicted with post-partum depression, and a high school dropout who had never heard of Emily Dickinson or T.S. Eliot, after I took a class in Modern Poetry at Emory University and the professor read work from great modern poets, I was evangelized in a way I never had been in the Bible Belt Baptist Church I’d grown up in. Next, I took a poetry workshop, and while my kids were in nursery school each day, I wrote and rewrote the poems that had begun pouring out of me and copied poems I loved into notebooks, analyzing how their authors had written them. Craft and Commitment by then became my obsession.

      Shortly after, my teacher—a grad student destined to become a well-known poet himself—invited me to join a writing workshop. The workshop ended up being made of Emory professors and their wives—PhDs who laughed when I could neither pronounce nor spell Nietzsche, enunciated Oedipus Rex as “O-ped-ius Rex,” and when I explained why I’d put an “ejaculation” point at the end of each line. Nevertheless, they supported my work, providing Community and Confidence. Indeed, I was the perfect example of Samuel Clemens’ (a.k.a., Mark Twain’s) words, “With ignorance and confidence, success is certain.”

      Thereafter, and many times during my decades as a writer, Gelfand’s Four C’s for being a winning writer have played themselves out in my life. For example, when I bought my first manual typewriter (on time, and yes, it was that many years ago!) and a typewriter table, and then, twelve years later, when I rented a room away from home in which to finish my first collection of poems (Craft and Commitment again). “If you’re good enough, you’ll be published,” my first editor Jennifer said to me, inspiring me to work harder.

      Several years later, published in both memoir and fiction, I gave myself over to the excitement and pleasure of promoting my second, third, and other books on book tours. The same book tours that put me—after years spent in solitude at my desk—on national television and at large literary venues, calling again on the need for Community and Confidence. While reading You Can Be a Winning Writer, I realized afresh what a large part—and how constantly, as though in a rhythmic dance—Gelfand’s Four C’s have played in my writing life. (And a special note: Gelfand, like me, was a poet first. And she, like me, recommends writing and/or reading poetry—the most concise literary form—to every writer, whatever his or her chosen genre may be.)

      Dense with great examples, bountiful in its outpouring of concrete advice, and full of the joy of being part of a special tribe, You Can Be a Winning Writer is the book I wish I had when I first fell in love with the art of writing. It is a book in which every writer will find the help and inspiration they need—wherever they may be on their writing journey—and I will recommend it time and time again.

      Rosemary Daniell

      ROSEMARY DANIELL is the founder and leader of Zona Rosa, a series of writing workshops attended by thousands of women, and some men, with events in Atlanta, Savannah, and other cities, as well as in Europe, which has been featured in People and Southern Living. She is also the award-winning author of nine books of poetry and prose, including Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women’s Lives and The Woman Who Spilled Words All Over Herself: Writing and Living the Zona Rosa Way, and is the recipient of two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in writing, poetry, and fiction. Rosemary’s work has been featured in many magazines and papers, including Harper’s Bazaar, New York Woman, Travel & Leisure, The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Chicago Tribune, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Mother Jones. She has also been a guest on many national radio and television shows, such as The Merve Griffin Show, Donahue, The Diane Rehm Show, Larry King Live and CNN’s “Portrait of America.” Early in her career, she instigated and led writing workshops in women’s prisons in Georgia and Wyoming, served as program director for Georgia’s Poetry in the Schools program, and worked for a dozen years in Poetry in the Schools programs in Georgia, South Carolina, and Wyoming. In 2008, she received a Governor’s Award in the Humanities for her impact on the state of Georgia. She is profiled in the book Feminists Who Changed America, 1963–1975. For further information, write Rosemary at [email protected].

      Tribe

      By Rosemary Daniell

      A poem written after the Associated Writers Conference in Tampa, Florida, 2018.

      We meet on 13th Street

      in this city we’re not familiar with—

      poets, novelists, memoirists, academics.

      “So good to see you,” we say again and again

      the air thick with ego, desire, aspiration

      thousands upon thousands of us

      the weird ones who spend—some would say, waste—

      our lives putting words, ideas, truths in order.

      Like cat or butterflies filling a vast field

      we radiate, connect with joy

      already thinking of next year in Portland—

      sure for once of our purpose

      and at last, with our own kind.