A Conversation Shuly Xóchitl Cawood
Ever since I attended a couple of Shuly’s writing workshops, I’ve been curious about what makes this writer tick. She’s equally equipped to write poetry, memoir, and fiction which I admire greatly. But, when I discovered another Does It Have Pockets staff, Jody Goch also held her in high regard we all agreed we needed to find out more about this talented writer. —AA
~
Everyone on the Does It Have Pockets team worships their dogs, it’s definitely a bond which connects us. In a 2022 blog post, you wrote, “Sometimes dogs give you what you don’t yet know you need.” I wonder if you’d expand on that intriguing concept.
I have a belief that life brings us what we need—sometimes it is wonderful, and sometimes it is challenging, and sometimes it is both. It’s only as an adult I have come to really understand the complexity of all things that enter and exit our lives. When I think back on my most difficult times—or even as I am going through them—I try to discern what the lesson is. Often I resist the thing I need because I see how it will be hard, and I don’t give as much weight to the positive parts of what it brings.
What scares you? What would you do differently if you weren’t afraid?
Suffering scares me: other people’s suffering, especially, and also my own suffering, potential suffering. I feel like I spend a lot of time trying to avoid potential suffering. I am working on this currently, trying to live more in the moment and not be so focused on what might happen, although, to be fair, my thinking about that has also helped me avoid many negative consequences. If I weren’t afraid, I don’t know that I would do any one thing differently, but I think how I felt would be different. I would just be at peace.
You’ve written several posts about rejections and persevering in the face of rejection. Many of our readers are writers and they’d love to hear five things you do to keep yourself motivated when faced with rejection.
For the most part, I have moved past having much emotion when my writing gets rejected. What keeps me going is:
#1 Understanding that one person’s opinion is only that—one opinion, and not a reflection of my writing as a whole. I’ve edited for magazines before, and I passed up good pieces that just needed more work, or weren’t right for the issue, or or or… There are so many reasons an editor can reject work.
Which leads me to #2: If that publication or press rejects my work, it just means it wasn’t the right one for that piece of writing, and the right one is still out there. I learned this from dating, but it took me many years to really grasp that. Once I got it, breakups became a lot easier.
#3 Long ago, I recognized and got used to rejection being part of a writer’s life—assuming a writer wants to send their work out to publications and presses. Some writers write only for themselves, and I think that is perfectly fine.
#4 I like to aim high. I send my work out to very prestigious lit mags, and so what if I get rejected? If I never try, I will surely never get my work into that place.
#5 I just don’t give up on a piece I love. I’ve had pieces get rejected over and over, and if I love that piece, I trust my gut that it will find a good home—and that has always been true. Trusting one’s gut is essential to being a writer.
At the beginning of every year on my blog, I write a post on the number of rejections and acceptances I received in the prior year. I want for people who aren’t writers to understand what this writing world is like, and my hope is that new writers will see that rejection is just part of it all, and all of it is okay. Here is my post from this year.
What is your favorite sort of pocket?
I've always liked to have pockets in my running shorts, yet I seem to have mostly shorts with teeny tiny pockets or none at all! I have dogs, so I carry poop bags, and then also keys, and sometimes my phone if I am alone. So I have finally resorted to buying a fanny pack so I can haul everything around if I run. It's been the best kind of pocket.
One of DIHP’s published writers, Eric Roe, recently started posting Instagram stories of his early writing endeavors. Here’s a story he wrote at age 11. Did you write a child? At what age did you start? Did you keep any of your early works that you’d care to share?
I started writing at a very young age. My father is a writer, and he is my greatest influence. He encouraged me early on to write if I wanted to, and I did. He used to cut up blank paper and staple the pages into little “books” for me and my sister to write in. I can’t really remember a time I didn’t write in some way because I was drawing pictures of stories before I had a good grasp of sentence structure, etc. My sister was older and more sophisticated than I was, so she wrote about castles and kings and queens while I wrote about Kmart and characters with names like Joe.
In different blog post you write, “…and if a writer can make a person feel deeply, they have accomplished a big thing.” Are there specific strategies or techniques you use in your writing process to ensure the writing connects deeply with the reader?
I had a professor once say that every good piece of writing has some truth to it. She was a fiction writer, and she was not advocating that we write memoir. She was saying that she thought the best work started with some truth from your life. Almost all of my work has some truth—and I strongly emphasize “some” truth because sometimes it really is just a kernel—for example, some of my stories are set in a place I know, but the characters are all completely fiction, or sometimes a poem will have an emotion that is true, but the rest is all made up. (People always assume all my poems are true, and that just isn’t the case.) I think when you write from a place that has some essence of truth, the work shines brighter and connects more deeply with the reader. Also, I try to never tell the reader what to feel.
I’m a big fan of your doodles and wonder if you’ve always doodled. Is doodling a form of meditation for you? Or maybe, it’s a way to shift your writing brain to your artist brain and back again.
That is so very kind of you to say. For most of my life, I said I could not draw anything more than a stick figure. This goes to show how we can hold ourselves back because of what we think we are not capable of. In 2020 I took a class called “Drawing as Self-Discovery” with Mari Andrews, and for the most part, it was very simple and easy—for example, in one lesson we had to draw a pie chart. Let me assure you: if you can hold a pen, you can draw a pie chart. Her class opened me up to just trying to doodle, and this has opened up a whole new world of art and learning and fun. I LOVE painting and doodling. I make art to de-stress because when I am painting, the whole world falls away and it’s just me and this piece of paper and color. I love seeing what happens on the page (just as I do in writing!) and I also love—when the piece doesn’t turn out well—figuring out how to make it better. It’s tons of experimentation because I have no idea what I am doing. And that’s fine by me.
I also think art has helped loosen up my writing. The more I can let fall onto the page what wants to fall, the better the writing is.
Shuly Xóchitl Cawood teaches writing workshops, doodles with markers and metallic paint, and is raising two poodles and four orchids. She is the author of six books, including Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough (Press 53, 2023); the flash essay collection What the Fortune Teller Would Have Said, winner of the 2022 Iron Horse Literary Review Prose Chapbook Competition; and Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021), winner of the Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry. She has an MFA from Queens University, and her work has been published in The New York Times, The Sun, and Brevity. Learn more at shulycawood.com.
Poem in Which I Fail to Teach My Dog How to Fetch
after Laura Passin
I throw the tennis ball. She chases it, grabs it in her mouth, sprints as far from me as possible in our fenced-in yard. She plops down beneath a Leyland cypress. The day is filled with opposites: moist mulch and dry grass, broken branch and whole-hearted effort. Here, I call. I am using the sweet voice the vet psychiatrist told me to, not the hell no one I prefer. Here, I call again. I use the hand signal, my right palm facing me, beckoning from air to flat against my chest. In my left hand, a chicken-flavored treat. My dog holds the ball in her mouth, blinks at me. Uh-oh, I say. Uh-oh is our neutralizing word, the word the trainer said to use when the dog ignores your command. You’re not supposed to keep repeating the command or else the dog learns only to respond after the third or fourth of fifth time. Or in my case: never. Here, I say, do the hand signal, offer the treat. Who wants a treat? Already I have resorted to pleading. The day is long in light, short in reply. When my husband first brought her home, when she was fourteen weeks old, I was so overwhelmed by her wildness, whimpers, ignorance of rules that I had a meltdown on our corduroy couch. One day you’ll love her, he said. How do you know, I asked. I know, he said, because I know you. He settled onto the couch beside me, held me in his arms. That saying about love being patient, I suppose it’s true. Here, I say, and the day, like any other, fills with light and shadow, weed and flower. Uh-oh, I say. Here, I say. She stares at me. You don’t always get a choice about what life brings, what it does not. She spots a squirrel, darts after it, leaves behind the ball that now no one will retrieve. There are a hundred lessons she must be trying to teach me, and I have hardly mastered one.
First published in The Sun (August 2023) and then in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems (Press 53, 2023)
Soft-Boiled Eggs on Any Morning
They say a watched pot never boils
but I’ve stood over plenty and they always do
if I wait long enough, which I was raised to do.
To get an egg to turn soft-boiled—as opposed
to hard—so the yolk can still leak
out, not having toughened yet,
you must start with eggs in cold water
and heat them over flame in a pot
gifted to you by the aunt
who never liked you, maybe even
never loved you, yet she gave you this
pot which has endured your bad marriage,
your bout with cancer, the death of your friend
who took your hands in hers and said
it’s time to dye your hair
because she promised to tell you
when the strands were too peppered, and though
you no longer dye anything
now that she is dead, you ache for her hands
and for the smooth and scarless skin
on your chest and for the way you once
believed love was enough. Now you stand
beside the stove and watch the water boil—
it always does, it always will—
and once this bath splashes against
the sides of this silver, sturdy pot,
you set the timer, two and a half minutes long
and wait for it to be over. Anyone
can wait those minutes. The eggs clink
against each other. Steam rises
toward your face and finds it.
First published in Appalachian Places (Spring 2022) and then in Something So Good It Can Never Be Enough: poems (Press 53, 2023)
Savior
Your hands pop open the hood of the car,
drain the oil, twist the cap shut, stop the leak.
Your hands pump the colander and wash
shaking leaves clean.
Your hands cut the sunflowers, brown and yellow heads
already drooping from the long drive you must make
to see me through this terrible heat,
the kind that causes rashes, that beats
down on back doors. Your hands
used to know how to take off things
in the late afternoons, when we shoved
our books aside and slept on deadlines,
when I thought the world was made for straps
and sundresses without destinations.
Your hands used to know how to stop me from going.
They used to tell me a story. Now, they break up
a sentence into small pieces. They clear clutter.
They’re strong enough to pull someone from a burning car,
just not your car, just not me.
First published in Prime Number Magazine (Spring 2022) and then in Trouble Can Be So Beautiful at the Beginning (Mercer University Press, 2021)
Katy Perry Is Crooning and Won’t Stop Just Because I Did
Because this is a small village and people tell other people’s news, I already know when I walk past your mother’s house, and the garage door is flung open wide as if it got stopped mid-scream, and you are lining up the contents on the lawn (an artificial Christmas tree, boards that once belonged to shelves) that your brother died fifteen hours ago in the early hours of morning, that he had trouble breathing because of the flu or because of some other condition the coroner will discover—I will learn about that, too, surely, when the news comes, because this is how a village runs: on private information, on what really happened, on what maybe happened, and especially if it’s bad news, we pass it along like hot potatoes so it won’t burn our knowing hands, and in this way perhaps it might not happen to us, not in the same way, or not so badly.
I pause at the edge of your lawn and pull out my earbuds—Katy Perry is crooning and won’t stop just because I did—and tell you I heard about what happened and I’m sorry, and you are startled because we have never talked to one another but as happens in a small town, I know who you are and you know who I am, by name anyway, and you have forgotten for a moment the way a village runs: on recognition and proximity. We must look each other in the eye if we are to ever look at ourselves. You don’t know what crises I have lived through, for I moved away and am only back now, and it isn’t really fair that I know about your brother today, and it isn’t fair that we are both alive and that his silver Grand Marquis sits with a cold engine on the side of the street and it isn’t fair that after I have expressed my sorrow for your loss I can step back on the sidewalk and off your lawn. I can slip the earbuds back in, and there will be Katy Perry, still singing, and if I want her to start up again all I have to do is push rewind which I won’t—but I could—while you are left with the contents of the garage laid out on the lawn and you won’t be able to put any of it back but you can’t leave it out either in the rain that is coming down already.
This version first published in Brevity (September 2018)
