When it comes to writing and publishing essays, Sheree Greer has thoughts. There’s the craft side of it, of course, the writing and especially the revising, which is her favorite part of writing. “I love the practice of going back to see what can be found, and to see what could be left behind,” she says. “I feel like revision is this really indispensable part of clarifying the work for yourself—the artist—and for the reader.”

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But there’s also the act of putting that writing out into the world, of fully embodying the artist identity. On March 4, Sheree is teaching a one-day workshop on submitting to contests and journals, particularly the business side of it. Here, she talks about that process—the researching, the organizing, the developing of a personal submissions process—and, as her craft book suggests, how to “stop writing wack essays” that decrease your likelihood of getting published in the first place.

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What, exactly, makes for a wack essay?

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It’s not living and breathing. It’s stale. It doesn’t move a story forward; it doesn’t move the reader. Just real basic and flat.

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Can you have all of the imagery and emotion that would stir the reader up, but no story? Or do you have to have both parts?

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Well, I think they’re inextricably linked. You can have a lot of scene, a lot of characters, but that doesn’t mean there’s a story being told. There needs to be something that leads the reader through the questioning that the essay is trying to do, or through the experience that the essay is trying to invite the reader into. There need to be some stakes involved.

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At the end of the day, there has to be something that’s opening up—either for the writer or the reader, but mostly you want to strike a chord for both, where both the reader and the writer are opening up in what we hope is a new way.

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When you sit down to write an essay, is it a good idea to start with those stakes?

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Not necessarily, because I don’t think you always know what that is when you start writing. Sometimes you’re being led by a sound, a word, an image, an object, a character—and you don’t know exactly what’s at stake yet.

Most of the memoir and essay classes I teach for the Porch have to do with exploring memory. It’s not enough to just say, “Oh yeah, I remember this one birthday.” If this is a particular birthday you can’t seem to shake—you’re always going back to this experience—sometimes writing through it is how you discover what was at stake, or what is at stake. In a lot of ways, that process of uncovering, of becoming, is happening on the page.

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I think such a key part of revision is trusting yourself and your instincts, but how do you develop that trust, especially when you’re still new to writing?

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I remember this interview with Toni Morrison and she said she didn’t feel like a real writer until like her third book—and this is a writer whose debut novel is Bluest Eye. Can you imagine writing Bluest Eye and still feeling like you’re not a real writer? So hearing her say that kind of allowed me to give myself a little grace, and then also extend that grace to the writers I work with. Whereas so much of what we think we need is to have other people’s permission, other people’s validation, it’s really about: when do you feel it?

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I feel like you can have those struggles multiple times in your writing career. I know it is probably loudest when you’re first starting out. But I also feel like it whispers and echoes as you continue through the writing game. So figuring out, “How do I give myself permission to be who I am?” and “How do I give myself permission to do my work and feel confident in my work?” is one of the challenges of being an artist. I don’t know that that ever goes away fully.

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Figuring out, “How do I give myself permission to be who I am?” and “How do I give myself permission to do my work and feel confident in my work?” is one of the challenges of being an artist. I don’t know that that ever goes away fully.

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But to continue in the vein of self-validation, how does a writer even know when they’re ready, from a craft perspective, to submit their work?

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I think there’s something about thinking back to before writing programs were a thing, and remembering that, as writers in this capacity, we’re artists. You think about painters and dancers and sculptors and musicians—they do a lot of starting of their own engine, right? And I wonder if that’s not something that writers could actually learn to lean into a little bit. So in terms of when you’re ready to submit—I feel like you’re ready when you feel like you’re ready. If you have a strong story or book you want to pitch, send it out! You’ll get rejections; sometimes those rejections will be kind enough to offer you feedback, sometimes they won’t. But that, too, becomes part of a process. Clearly you need to continue to work on it, or maybe you can’t figure out what’s misfiring in it, and that’s an opportunity to take a class or work with a critique group.

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I’m not a fan of rejections. However, I had a mentor say to me once that if you’re not getting rejections as an artist, it means you’re not submitting enough, and you’re not submitting high enough. Just be ready to learn what you can from the rejection, and continue to hone your craft as you learn more about yourself and the business by engaging with it.

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I don’t think any writer is a fan of rejections. How can writers develop that thick skin, so to speak, that will help them to keep submitting even as the rejections roll in?

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I believe that we can create a ritual and a practice around anything. So in thinking about rejection, it’s like, “If I don’t get this thing, which is possible, what can I do to care for myself through this rejection?” It’s like thinking about life in general: How do you handle disappointment? How do you love yourself through disappointment?

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So I’ve begun to have a practice for loving myself through the disappointment of a rejection. I feel the feeling. It means being upset about it, verbally being upset about it to my wife, and talking through my disappointment in what feels like a safe space. Then I literally say, “Alright, we’re gonna go on to the next thing. Am I going to apply for this next year? Probably. What else is on my list of publications? Oh, this magazine passed on it? Alright, let me see if this next place wants it.” Or: “Let me step back from it. I’ve got something else I’ve been working on; let me see if that can catch hold somewhere.”

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Part of what I talk about in the workshop is, it’s more difficult for a rejection to really set you back on your heels if you are committed to moving forward through it. And I always just encourage writers to be kind to themselves, because we are sensitive about our shit. So love yourself through the process.