Michael Copperman
@MikeCopperman
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Author of TEACHER. CNF/essays, fiction, rep David Dunton at HK. Prof at MSU, literary organizer, boulderer, runner, former wrestler, gardener.
Lansing, MI
Joined February 2010
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This is our frog-friend. All summer long he has perched atop our doorbell most evenings and even some late afternoons now that fall is here, high and regal. I hope he never leaves.
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@SuzanneKiera
You know, he doesn’t. We’ve been calling him “our frog-friend.” I am the same person whose childhood stuffie was a monkey named Monkey
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@row_ie_argument
Yes, you put it perfectly— how it seems she ought to be the most capable person on earth of seeing what had happened and what it meant (and her own harm and complicity), and how her personal failure just feels so much worse because of that. If not her, then who?
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Over 292 days (9 1/2 months), I sent 252 queries on my hybrid literary memoir/narrative nf book “Seeking Eden.” 19 full requests later (13 still open), I got an outstanding offer of representation today. In 2 weeks, I will have an agent again. BUT—
#amquerying
#writerscommunity
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Instead of AWP, I submit a field of spring flowers, on a hike off Valley Circle, with M. and her mother. No schmooze, no booze, no thick scent of narcissism and desperation. Just clouds, before the rain.
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@JoyceCarolOates
JCO, this is a really really bad take, and I love Alice Munro’s work deeply. We are talking about real people in the real world, and real harm that occurred. The violence was not done to a character. Damage to legacy or reputation is not a priority (artist, art, redux).
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@GraceLP
I’m sorry this happened to you. It happened to me with the bookstore around the corner from my house and the high school I attended— the owner just brushed me off, though I sold nearly a thousand copies in that town the first year. So ridiculous— what are local bookstores for?
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@JEOTucson
I am glad to have a toad if that is what he/her/they is! But earlier this creature looked most more like a treefrog
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Placed another cnf piece today. That makes five essays and a story published this summer— and an agent who’s taking me to sub soon. I’m doing ok I guess
#writerscommunity
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I wanted to give up so many times. SO MANY TIMES. So, truly, persist y’all. If you don’t believe in you, who will? But also, it feels like something has to change. It feels terrible and random and impossible because it is, for everyone involved.
#amquerying
#writerslift
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I am so exhausted, y’all. That much rejection has ruined my mental health. This system is straight up broken. It doesn’t make any damn sense. And it’s bad for everyone….Today this agent told me why it took him two months to respond to my query (he read in 2 days)—
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You can tell the days I have finished all work and writing, and have time for the harvest art!
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Franzen’s idea of what “nature-writing,” is comes from his white, urban/elite/suburban-American, not-very-well-read idea of what it means to write about folx and the world. He wants— MAN—1st! Not the infinity of the mystery, and the immutable truth of man’s smallness.
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@poetjohncompton
This seems like an extremely poor use of one’s time and energy, especially because using following as an indicator assumes everyone else is paying sufficient attention, which they aren’t
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@DonotInnovate
Totally. It’s called “damn squirrels” because my wife grows sunflowers and the squirrels appreciate her contribution to a well-rounded diet. I wonder how frogs and squirrels feel about each other, in the broader ecosystem. The cat ignores him
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This is fun— let’s name all the women writers who are essential to YOU. I’m going Louise Erdrich, Toni Morrison, Gloria Naylor, Sandra Cisneros, Willa Cather, Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Ann Beattie, and to add some poets, Gwendolyn Brooks and Brigit Pegeen Kelly. Add on!
Loving all these top 10 favorite books by men lists floating around this weekend. I’ve seen some people get confused and add one or two women in the mix by mistake though.
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I am grateful I survived this process (so far— I have been through subs before, and know it can be equally but differently awful). But it’s SO much worse now than seven years ago, when most agents had bandwidth to at least reject, and fulls got read in 2 or 3 months—
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He gets fifty and sometimes even a hundred queries a day. A DAY. And though he believes in the fairness of open subs, most of his clients come referred, and most of his work is for his clients. That’s why so many agents just stop reading—
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@bettinamak
It’s a triumph of white feminism. It ignores the origins of the US in racial capitalism, ie native genocide/slavery. And despite the “critique” of Mattel, it serves Mattel. It’s not intersectional (who made it, who it’s for). The deployment of Latinx actors feels performative
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@MorganShamy
I feel this so hard. I once left an agent because she didn’t read the revision of the manuscript she’d signed me on for 16 months. There’s a point at which an agent is telling you whether they value your work and career. I think three or four months is a reasonable duration?
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TEACHER is an Oregon Book Award Finalist!
@upmiss
@magicbarrelread
@UOEnglishDept
@dzhyde
@cwilsongill1
@TFA_MS
@TFAwest
@literaryarts
@uocas
@UOregonNews
@UOEquity
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Just had a final (in-person) class session where, after I thanked the students and sent them on their way, the entire class stood and queued up to shake my hand. Huh.
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This is how Jabba the mutt sleeps, now that he feels safe in our home— all sixty pounds of his pittie/greyhound/collie self wrapped into a ball.
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Just finished this beautiful memoir…and am homesick, out here in the midwest, for Oregon backcountry, and the Rogue. A wonderful book,
@The_Big_Quiet
#writingcommunity
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So we drove 4 hours to Dearborn, MI, to protest Palestinian lives. And tonight, as I laid the parsley (homegrown basil is done) over these last tomatoes, parsley what I associate with seder and my revolutionary Jewishness (my clan are radicals), I wept.
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@msmegalodon
One, I feel your rage. I’m half-Asian and so my name erases my phenotype/background, so the idea of white writers yellowfacing is— yeah. Awful. BUT I do think Michael Derrick Hudson faced, at least in the poetry world, some serious consequences
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@postcardsfrmv
I loved this story so much, I wrote about it for my MFA exam, as an example of craft used by great writers. I was failed on the question, because in the opinion of the faculty, James Baldwin was not in the canon. My classmate wrote about an Alice Munro story and received honors.
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At AWP, I will mostly be at the bookfair, at meals or tea or hotel bar with the friends I have and those I hope to make. I’m on sub right now and all I want to do is stop thinking about writing as career. I want to be punchdrunk, exchanging lines from BPK’s Song, and laughing
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You know, being an emergent writer was way better than being an old, underachieving writer. Yes, this is tongue-in-cheek, but it’s also true: it’s great when you’re suddenly publishing in mags and journals, and you’re certain everything will be an easy upwards
#WritingCommunity
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One of my summer time favorites: yellow nectarines, buffalo mozzarella, chocolate mint, with balsamic glaze and olive oil.
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Metabolics is absolutely amazing— not a collection, but a unified BOOK, organic, complete in vision and ethos, and personal and lyric, not didactic. Wonderful and original work!
#poetry
#writerscommunity
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So I stopped publishing essays and stories for many years because I have been in maybe 60 lit mags and it never meant anything. I started submitting again, until my agent told me that publishers don’t want essays/cnf books with more than 25% of material published. Oooops…
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And so, before the killing frost, we take in what can be saved.
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Who wears buffalo mozzarella, basil and bourbon balsamic better— heirloom tomatoes or peaches?
#food
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@fklein907
Remember, if someone solicits you after the deadline, send a politely impersonal rejection. Deadlines are deadlines
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I have been
#amquerying
for my narrative nf/memoir hybrid since early November. 4 full manuscript requests; 2 still out. Yesterday I forced myself to send 10 more— and got 3 full requests and spoke to an enthusiastic agent on the phone. WTF
#WritingCommunity
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@sue12239
@SuzanneKiera
He sleeps in a potted plant just below the doorbell that has two containers and space on one side!
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You know what feels good? Getting full requests after you’ve signed with an excellent agent and telling them how sorry you are to not need them
#amquerying
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I would love for agents and other writers to weigh in here. I just saw a discussion wherein a
#amquerying
writer who received their first full request was told to notify all agents they had a query out with of the full. This is NOT my understanding of edicate
#writerscommunity
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Redesigned author website (thanks Ben Pfeiffer) as I prepare to (gulp) go on sub soon. Let me know what you think?
#writerscommunity
#writerslift
#writerslife
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@MaureenLangloss
I mean, on the one hand, yes, certainly, when writing, absolutely. Be intuitive, go “down where it gets true.” But also, a poet saying we should quit terms that people talk about in fiction craft is not exactly surprising…
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I have been querying since NOVEMBER on this hybrid literary memoir/narrative nonfiction project. A full request today makes 9, with 3 proposals out with agents also. I know I am supposed to stay positive, that the numbers are good. But these 9 months have drained me
#amquerying
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Our first Michigan-pepper homegrown hot sauce! We call it “El Diablo,” as it’s very, very, very hot. A couple months of aging will deepen all the flavors and mellow a little of the heat. Can’t wait to bottle and share with our loved ones!
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Michigan State University— brought tarps and power banks for them today.
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Placed a piece I just wrote about my neighbor, “Something,”
@PitheadChapel
. It’s been a good two weeks in submission news!
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As I’m boarding a plane for KC, I’m recalling the first rule of AWP: you and your friends/the people you know are brilliant, and the people you encounter are to be judged as amateurs until they become your friends and are elevated to transcendence
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Placed an essay with the Aussie mag Archer on race, sports, masculinity and identity today!
#writerscommunity
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My strategy to survive being on book sub is to write and publish as much as possible as distraction. So far in 2024, that's 7 creative nonfiction pieces published as well as 2 craft essays. If this book doesn't find a home soon, I'm going to completely spent.
#WritingCommunity
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@_katiewrites28
Thank you! If I see another set of writing tips on making your first pages “the best,” I will lose my mind. Of course they need to appeal, but if the best is first, what is a satisfying narrative?!!!
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I’ve been having a tough time, with a book on sub and another project finished that can’t be approached before the other, and a book of stories out in contests, and nothing there to write that is ready or calling. So instead of beating myself up about not writing, I’m reading
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Two quarts garlic-cumin-paprika-parsley baba ganoush from my own eggplant! It doesn’t look beautiful, but it’s silky and tangy on the tongue—
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A wonderful memoir of losing and reclaiming Taiwanese heritage and identity— hot off the presses from Mad Creek books!
@GraceLP
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Shaved for the first time in years, and donned a print; Monkey, my earliest childhood friend, approves on the verge of 44, though the skeleton is there to make sure inevitable mortality gets its nod.
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When I read
@richardsiken
, I feel stunned as a writer at all the life and urgency he achieves. I know I cannot match such genius, but I cannot help but give thanks that I write prose, and so do not need to despair as I would if I was a poet, and had to compare myself
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@heckaseuss
As some have already said: get a phd because you want a career in academia, ie, likely in an English department, and expect to do the scholarly work to get it. If you want to write, find, make and foster community and do the writing
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A bit of everything— including the last land salmon of the year!
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@poetjohncompton
But is Twitter community? There’s a reason that the studies all say that the more time one spends on social media, the lonelier and more disconnected one feels from others. I would just suggest that what you’re doing sounds super unhealthy
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This is the worst way to teach writing EVER, btw. Rules, most unreasonable and extensive, with punishments rather than principles.
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I loved this story so much, I wrote about it for my MFA exam, as an example of craft used by great writers. I was failed on the question, because in the opinion of the faculty, James Baldwin was not in the canon. My classmate wrote about an Alice Munro story and received honors.
Teaching this well-known short story tomorrow in Writing Fiction. Does anyone recognize this short paragraph?
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First summer squash, first peas, some laggardly radishes and a whole lot of basil!
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I didn’t get into Stanford due to affirmative action, though some of my hs peers thought so. I got in on athletic scholarship. But the only reason I pursued sport like THAT-do or die- was that the hostile whiteness of Oregon public schools left me little room for survival.
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As I wait for (more) news about
#MSU
, I can only say that I am a few miles away, I have two students in my class who survived the Oxford MI hs shooting and wrote about it…and it helped me tonight. And that is awful.
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@willmenaker
…or I’d encourage anyone disgusted by this to revisit Biden’s immigration and border policy, and remember the chaos, havoc and bloodshed caused by his utter mismanagement of withdrawal from Afghanistan.
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At Brevity, talking about intention, vision and craft.
"What is the purpose of a piece of nonfiction—are we merely telling what happened to us or to others? Are we striving for beauty, for mystery, for absolute accuracy of expression? What is the ideal we are striving for?" ~
@MikeCopperman
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I have found that when the well dries up, I don’t beat myself up. I rest, read, am kind to myself, look to find good, joyous, gentle people. And eventually I am ready to write again.
I don't know how to say this. I'm in the worst creative depression of my life. I've given 25 years to poetry in hopes of making a difference, but it seems I'm not. I know the impacts rarely reveal themselves, but I feel lost, failed, like giving up. I hate to ask, but: help?
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…publishers don’t want you to publish your shit in nonfiction. That in fact, you’re hurting yourself. They don’t want things that already available. Your laboring through rejection to place work in magazines and journals is actually counterproductive.
#WritingCommunity
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A friend told me she was up for an award she deserves, and I said, “I love that for you.” She said that is a millennial/Gen-Z nasty little backhand neg in contemporary speech. Have the young little punks been talking down to me and I missed it?!!
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@AmericanGwyn
I mean, he did go into the offices of the Times and throw a reviewer over his desk, and then tear open his shirt and ask the reviewer if it looked like he had hair on his chest…???😚
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@poetjohncompton
Yeah, 8-12 hours a day on social media is definitely not a good way to live. Poetry, and the {poetry}world, shouldn’t be conflated. That you’ve created such a mix doesn’t make it good, but I hope you survive doing that, one step being, stop sweating follows
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Full request yesterday. Two out now; two nos. But here’s my observation after three months: I think agents respond the next day or not at all.
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TEACHER tops Shelf Life in Stanford Magazine!
@uocas
@UOEnglishDept
@TFAsouth
@ORWriCollective
@upmiss
@Stanford
@literaryarts
@PatrickIber
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“Coach Scott,” is out in Aethlon:The Journal of Sport. I wanted it in print to share with him, and now I can’t since he passed. We all need someone to believe in us, and Coach Scott did that not just for me, but for many. Tim Walz reminds me of him— reminds me to keep my fight.
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Yes, we can speak with nuance; no, I do not celebrate civilian death (or anyone’s death, as if those who take up arms are not human). But settler colonialism is a structure, an ordering of the world that enacts violence, and revolutionary violence is resistance.
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So I have seen changes in students since Covid— absenteeism, anxiety, depression, skill-gaps, orientation to school. But “college” which assumed students could just do some absurd high-level task without scaffolding, modeling, and clear expectations is and was just bad teaching.
I try not to complain much about my job man, but this year one thing I’m feeling super acutely is how much like k-12 university teaching has become.
It’s increasingly so different from my undergraduate experience that I’m starting to feel old and somewhat frustrated.
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I like to think of myself as humble and generous. But Seuss’s response to the poet calling her work prose/not a sonnet makes me realize I’m petty af.
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