"Pollyanna Problems" published at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

I'm thrilled to announce that Vol. 1 Brooklyn has published my essay "Pollyanna Problems: On Katharine Butler Hathaway's The Little Locksmith and the Pitfalls of Excessive Optimism."

My mother gave me The Little Locksmith for Christmas, 2016. She had heard of it through an essay that her book group had read and thought I might like it. I did, very much. Once I started writing about Hathaway's memoir, I decided I needed to read from her letters and journals, too. Goodness, it's amazing how many of her thoughts make me think "yes! Kindred spirit! That's just what it's like. How amazing that you knew in the 40s what I just noticed last year!" Mom made a good match.

I wrote the essay without limits of any kind, and the first draft, from this past July, was very long--like 10,000 words. My mother loved it and couldn't put it down. But editors were less interested. It took four different literary websites, at least three significantly revised drafts, and approximately seven months--starting the clock after I had written the piece--before "Pollyanna Problems" found its home. All this goes to show that writing and publishing essays is difficult! But once I had cut the piece to 4,000 words, I wasn't going back. I would keep trying until that essay got published. 

Every once in a while, revising, I would find a typo or that I had spelled "Katharine" as "Katherine" or gotten a date wrong. This humbled, consoled, and frustrated me. "Thank goodness the essay wasn't published right away, since if it had been, the world would have seen my mistakes!" That's a Pollyanna-ism right there, but it's also a warning against feelings of entitlement, a reminder to spend more time polishing one's work and less time complaining, silently or aloud, that people don't see its brilliance.

"Silence Turned to Music" published at Joyland

Joyland magazine has published my story, "Silence Turned to Music"!

This is a piece I began writing in the summer of 2012, inspired by Bach's Chaconne from the Partita in D minor for solo violin. I had begun writing about the Chaconne as nonfiction long before that, however. I'd written an essay about the Chaconne for my blog, The Bach Season, which even my mom--my number one fan--found difficult to read.

This fictional take two was more successful, and it incorporated a lot of ideas I had wanted to express in writing. On my birthday (August 10), I learned that Joyland co-founder Emily Schultz wanted to publish the piece, and on October 26, it happened. I have received many nice comments about the story, especially from musicians.

When you read the story, I recommend listening to the Chaconne at the same time. Below is a recording of it by violinist Hilary Hahn.

Fun facts: After my last violin recital in Maine, before moving to Kentucky, my teacher, Arnold Liver, gave me a Hilary Hahn recording of solo Bach.

During what I think was a subsequent summer, when I was at chamber-music camp in Vermont, we campers saw and heard Hilary Hahn perform a concert, including the Chaconne, at Middlebury College, where Hahn was participating in a French-immersion program. One of the younger campers went up to her and said hello in French. We had been warned that she couldn't speak English to us because of her program's rules. I did not say bonjour, but I did think it was awesome to see Hilary Hahn. Was one of the pieces called "Le Crépuscule"? I remember being proud to know what that word meant.

So many great words for that time of day, dusk. But that's another story.

"Temporary Steps" published at Vol. 1 Brooklyn

I've had a short story, "Temporary Steps," published by a bona fide literary outlet, Vol. 1 Brooklyn! This is a first! (Technically I have previously published another fiction piece, but not in an outlet that counts, in my opinion.) Many rejections, though not of this story, have preceded this acceptance!

It's not necessarily the best story I've written so far, but I succeeded in biting off a piece the right size for the intended publication. I have a second story about the same family in the same house, so when it is published, they will be a pair. Thanks, John Updike (and biographer Adam Begley), for inspiring me to write by thinking about my life and memories and for teaching me that you don't have to put everything about a place or character into one story.

"A Life Story" published at Entropy

On March 29th, Entropy published my essay, "A Life Story," which looks at a recent health scare of mine through the lens of the idea so well expressed by Joan Didion that, as she wrote, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." My new essay relates the frustrations of medical uncertainty to the idea that we expect life to proceed as a story and feel disappointed when our lives fail to provide climaxes and resolutions.

"Für Bess" published at Catapult

Seely Road as seen from above, via Google Earth.

On March 6th, 2017, Catapult published my essay, "Für Bess: On Neighbors, Music Parties, and Growing Up," a reflection on the street where I grew up and on how one of my neighbors there, an amateur pianist named Bess Kaliss, brought the neighborhood together through her "music parties."

Best of 2016

Hi everyone,

Once again, I'm posting a few links to essays I've published this year in order to keep "Crenshaw Seeds" going. I wish you all a safe and happy 2016.

1) Entropy Magazine: "After the Essay"

2) Entropy Magazine: "Looking For America with Simon & Garfunkel"

3) Catapult (community site): "The Unknowable: Writers On Death" This essay includes my thoughts on Jenny Diski's column in the London Review of Books about dying of lung cancer (and about her relationship with novelist Doris Lessing). Since the essay was published, two relevant things happened. First, Jenny Diski died. Second, her LRB essays on dying were collected and published as In Gratitude, one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books this year. Despite having thought much about death, I still don't know what to say about it. I admired Jenny Diski's writing. I'm glad that her book was well received. I'm sorry she had to die, and that we all do.

If it seems that I wrote few essays this year, that's in part because I was working on finishing my first novel, which I am now sending out to agents and publishers.

As for reading: I read Katie Roiphe's The Violet Hour which, given my own thoughts and writing on death, was exactly what I wanted to read. Then, inspired by Roiphe's book, which described John Updike's death and the way he treated death in his writing--the book also did the same for several other writers--I read Updike's Rabbit novels, right up through the novella, "Rabbit Remembered," which continues the story beyond Rabbit's death. That novella particularly interested me because in writing my "death essay," I had imagined that one of the ways a work of fiction could treat a mortal protagonist's inevitable death was to continue the story beyond it. And that, as I learned in The Violet Hour, was exactly what "Rabbit Remembered" did. I have enjoyed both the experience of reading the Rabbit books and, now, the feeling of having them in my head. I am also glad to have read books that I know my dad likes and to be able to share that appreciation with him.

Take care in 2017, everyone!

Yours,
"Katie Crenshaw"/Ashley P. Taylor

Best of 2015

Hello, everyone. Happy 2016! As evidenced by the fact that I have not posted on Crenshaw Seeds since January 2015, I have been ignoring this blog. The reason for this neglect is that is that I have been focusing on having my work published by other outlets, preferably those that pay and have helpful editors. I worked with many such editors last year and am grateful to all of them. Here are links to the 2015 stories of which I am most proud along with some notes on each.

1. "Peter Pan: the Ultimate Alt-Bro," The Brooklyn Rail, April
This essay, comparing forever-young Peter Pan to "alt-bros" (young men who live in the imagined future and, in the present, refuse to commit), may have seemed out-of-the-blue when it was published in April; however, the idea came to mind soon after Allison Williams starred in Peter Pan Live! on NBC, in December, 2014. The characters in Lena Dunham's Girls, in which Williams played the neurotic-yet-floundering Marnie, are also like "alt-bros" in their struggle and sometimes refusal to grow up, and so I thought it ironic that Williams went straight from Girls to Peter Pan, the boy who never grows up.
2. "Public Art," LUMINA Online Journal, May
I started writing this essay, about how others see us in ways that we can't see ourselves, in the summer of 2012, and it was a long, rejection- and doubt-filled haul to publication almost three years later. Through "Public Art," I received to my first letter of acceptance from Submittable, the software that literary journals use to process submissions, so it was a milestone in my writing career. It was also a personal milestone, since in writing it, I did some very important reflection about how being born with a medical condition has affected my life. In publishing it, I made the decision to no longer hide, or leave unacknowledged, my health issues.
3. "Middles," Vol. 1 Brooklyn, August
I workshopped this piece about how my attitude toward mortality has changed throughout my life in a Sackett Street Writers' Workshop in fall of 2013. Like "Public Art," it faced many rejections, despite my conviction that it was as good if not better than other pieces I'd written. Persistence paid off in this case.
4. "Crying: An Exploration," Brain Decoder, December
In which I gave myself an assignment to write a longform essay on a topic of interest, vague unease, and curiosity. I am grateful to Brain Decoder for accepting my pitch for this essay so that I could focus on it as a bona fide assignment, rather than writing it on the side.
5. "Down the Rabbit Hole," Catapult, December
I decided to write this piece, in which I reflect on my various and notably unliterary associations with Alice in Wonderland, during what was called "Alice in Wonderland week" in NYC (one filled with Alice-themed events in honor of the book's 150th anniversary) hoping that the news hook might lead to publication. I ended up self-publishing it with Catapult, which has both a self-publishing platform, Catapult Community, and a curated site that is professionally edited and produced. I had read that Catapult sometimes selected pieces from the community site to feature on the editorial one, but since this did not happen right away, I decided that my piece had not made the cut. Lo and behold, an editor contacted me some time later--the news hook long gone!--and asked to feature the piece on the editorial site, where it lives to this day. I had a great experience working with the Catapult editors and was thrilled that my whim to take time away from paid journalism to write a short personal essay turned into a publication.
6. "Seeking Grace," The Brooklyn Rail, December
Though I didn't think that Sarah L. Kaufman's The Art of Grace was a great book, I was not sorry that I read it. It was stimulating, and I enjoyed reviewing it.