Marrying Rich...or why Katherine Mansfield had it so good

The title of this post may immediately start buzz. Is Cara marrying someone for his money, my copious fans will ask. At least, I sure hope that I'm capable of starting some buzz. Oh well. The quick answer is no. This post isn't even really about marriage at all. Gotcha.

Anyway, I've been thinking, as I often do in the fall, about writing and publication and how the two could (perhaps!!!) go together. Consequently, I've been doing research (depressing) and reading the work of other people (great). All day I've been trying to untangle the messes of submission guidelines (the easy part) and try to figure out who in the world might actually want to publish the kind of work that I do (the hard part). At the end of this process, I have one very strong thought.

I should marry the editor of a literary journal.

If I can accomplish this, I will always be able to count on a place of publication. Even if my work is passed over by all other comers, my husband will publish it.

This, in a nutshell, is what Katherine Mansfield, a writer from New Zealand and last century who wrote some of the most haunting short fiction I have ever read, did.

Her husband was, in fact, her only publisher for most of her life. After her death, he was the one who made sure that her work got into anthologies, collections and the like. I would like to extend personal thanks to him. Her work has inspired me and without him, I might never have read it.

As always, when embroiled in publication, I have to stop, take a deep breath and remember that I'm in the right place at the right time, right now, even if it doesn't feel that way. I keep coming back to a conversation I had with a fellow creative writing student about our work and publication. We realized then, as I do now, that the goal of our work wasn't publication, it was whatever God's goal for our work was. Katherine Mansfield had it good, that's true, but so do I, and I'm not even married to an editor.