Saturday, December 22, 2012
Ray Bradbury is a Heap of Trash
I found these self-deprecating quotes by famous authors pretty funny. It's refreshing to see that even the most successful writers struggle with their identity. The last one, Gary Shteyngart's book promo video, is especially good.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Holiday Messages in Surprising Places
I found this poem written on the bathroom wall of the coffe shop near my house:
Grapple
with the false self
Until
it falls waywardly,
Like
a sack mask of flesh.
Am I
more myself
Than
this tangle of limbs
And
fur and oddly shaped teeth?
Who
goes there
Beyond
the lamp
Of
perception?
How
to accept the gift
Without
the wanting.
Toodles
to you
I'd
like to say.
I
imagine that place
Beyond
preferences,
A
train running out
From
the real thing.
Arise
mighty heart.
I
pound my chest to wake you,
To
stand there galvanized
With
the gold in the field.
Words,
Failed
metaphors.
I
stitch shut my lips
With
the sacred thread,
The
only thread
Of
my making.
--S.P.
Could it be that Swami Prajnaparamita is leaving me messages on bathroom walls these days? His transcendental subtlety grows even as type this. Either that, or I'm getting a little more receptive to the signs that everywhere point to our true nature. One can only hope.
This week we took advantage of the cyber Monday holiday and got ourselves a Christmas tree. I looks nice. It's shedding needles like a mutha, but it's still very full and so perfectly shaped it almost looks fake.
That's what you get when you buy a tree from a store, I guess. At home, we used to go up in the hills and drag one down through the snow. They never looked like this tree, but it was still better that way.
We hung up some the ornaments that belonged to my family. Anyone else out there have a parent who was a Christmas junkie? The day after Christmas my mom would hit the hallmark store right when it opened to get the best deals on wreaths and ornaments and holiday jujubes and gegaws.
My mom always got a good deal. She knew how to do it. Me? Not so much. I wouldn't say I'm a spendthrift or anything but I'm not afraid to pay full price for something. I guess my fantasies revolve around never needing to buy anything at all rather than getting a bargain. I imagine myself some kind of Spartan hero (by which I do not mean a hero of Sparta).
Happy Holidays everyone. I don't know when I'll find time to post this, but I'm sure I'll get it up there soon. It's funny trying to make peace with the holidays. I always get so depressed around this time of year. How much Christmas meant to my mom and the fact that they died on New Year's Eve. It's exhausting, the entire month of December. Actually it starts around Thanksgiving. I realize I'm angry, and a lot of the time I can't figure out why.
For years I didn't even know I was angry. Then I went to psychoanalysis. Turns out I have feelings and they're happening all the time. Don't laugh. You might be surprised by the things of which you're unconscious.
It's dark now. Zoop is in bed and we're hoping it will stay that way for a few hours. We tried to get her down earlier but she was not in on the plan. Here's a picture of her from her one month birthday, which was Saturday.
Who needs Christmas gifts?
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Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Fatherhood
Writer Friends, Parent Writers, Friend Parents!
The Buy Buy Baby on Kingsbury in Chicago is finally open! I know you're overjoyed. I know you're flipping your basic wigs! I know you can't believe you've finally got the opportunity to enter this veritable warehouse of baby buying bonanza, this consumerist temple of all things for humans of the tiniest stripe.
Baby Bjorns, Ergos, hundreds of strollers, thousands of car seats, millions of cribs, wipes of every degree of biodegradability.
For a week now I've been wanting to let you know that this place is open and waiting for you to shop from floor to vaulted ceiling but I haven't been able to. I haven't hardly done any writing at all, and why?
This very small person is my daughter. She's two weeks old tomorrow. Isn't she cute? For my wife and I, she is perfect, and her perfection makes it very hard for me to go in my office and close the door. It's fine. It's all as it should be, in fact, but still there is that feeling I've work to do. I mean, who after all will entertain the millions of readers who rely on this blog to brighten up their day, to gain a little literary insight into the mysteries of the human heart?
The Buy Buy Baby on Kingsbury in Chicago is finally open! I know you're overjoyed. I know you're flipping your basic wigs! I know you can't believe you've finally got the opportunity to enter this veritable warehouse of baby buying bonanza, this consumerist temple of all things for humans of the tiniest stripe.
Baby Bjorns, Ergos, hundreds of strollers, thousands of car seats, millions of cribs, wipes of every degree of biodegradability.
For a week now I've been wanting to let you know that this place is open and waiting for you to shop from floor to vaulted ceiling but I haven't been able to. I haven't hardly done any writing at all, and why?
Gwendolyn Eleni Bernice Driscoll |
I know it's not that. I know really it's about my own quest, my own karma, my own strange need to sit down and sink into the penman's trance. So deep is this in me that I'm sure I won't be gone for long. Integrating and balancing this new aspect of family life is the new challenge, and I expect the complexity will offer new opportunities for growth in all aspects of my life (once things settle down, that is).
Wednesday, October 3, 2012
Poems From Under the Bed
Some of you may remember that Eek the Freak, L&L's resident poet, was scheduled to judge this year's lyric writing contest but backed out due to what I described as a crisis of nerves. Turns out he was hiding under my bed, writing poems and crying. I never did find him, but I found the tissues on which he'd been writing (and crying).
It was tricky--and sticky!--business trying to pick them apart, and I've barely made a dent, but I liked a lot of what I read, and I plan to transcribe as much as I can make out. Someday it may turn out there is a whole chapbook there for Eek to publish. Maybe it will be remembered as his under-the-bed period.
Anyway, here's one, but I'll warn you, you have to loosen up the bolts on your brain. You have to let yourself sink down in there where its slippery and dark. That's usually the way with poetry, though, isn't it? I guess I just don't get enough of it. I imagine most of us do not, even though that slippery-brain feeling is one of the finest around. It's where we surprise ourselves, where we let go of the incessant struggle to marshal our lives into stories that make sense. That process begins with the way we direct our thoughts, and what a strange thing to do, really. I mean, it is what we do, but seriously--try to make sense of life? C'mon, Jackson. You know better than that.
It was tricky--and sticky!--business trying to pick them apart, and I've barely made a dent, but I liked a lot of what I read, and I plan to transcribe as much as I can make out. Someday it may turn out there is a whole chapbook there for Eek to publish. Maybe it will be remembered as his under-the-bed period.
Anyway, here's one, but I'll warn you, you have to loosen up the bolts on your brain. You have to let yourself sink down in there where its slippery and dark. That's usually the way with poetry, though, isn't it? I guess I just don't get enough of it. I imagine most of us do not, even though that slippery-brain feeling is one of the finest around. It's where we surprise ourselves, where we let go of the incessant struggle to marshal our lives into stories that make sense. That process begins with the way we direct our thoughts, and what a strange thing to do, really. I mean, it is what we do, but seriously--try to make sense of life? C'mon, Jackson. You know better than that.
Somnolent Smackers
I found a toothpaste tube you can use. . . If you want. Never really told anyone about the time the castle made a room out of me. Bob was there, and it wasn't pretty. Never mind. I never should have told you all these things. Your design was too intense and then the way you took that corner. That was really too much. I never wanted to tell you the difference between us was a quater turn to the right.
I make muffins. I put them in the oven to bake. What do you do, friend? Do you call upon the nation? Do you up wreak and toil? Do you maximize potentialities and turn them over in your mind? How high is this plane of existence? Is it tabled low and wrapped round the head of Caesar’s bed sheet? Truthfully, I'm trying to get through truthfully, but I can't seem to find my way.
Teleportation would seem to be the easiest. But you never know. The thing about that is we so often lose the day. To and from the difficult places. I never met a rock with so many teeth.
A simple design would hold more elegance than this. But what is a design? Who wards away the VIP? A tumbler platters down onto all floors. I taste and recede.
It's a lucky day, the day I have you to hold upright and shake until the coins work their way out your pockets. Drained of the Terrible Fill, you and I will be left still holding these melted words. And the truth is we may never know the difference between an antelope and all that came before, but what exactly does that tell us about the rain that falls inside?
You who are truthful: be beside yourselves for a minute. Lay down your bodies and see the brutal insistence is not something you need to even countenance, let alone fear. Words float around, and it can be fine that they fall in such long, loose patterns.
Stick with me and you'll never go wrong. You'll never go wrong and yet one day you'll see all the differences have faded into a meaningless need that will issue forthily from you as strongly as the ropy snakes you saw shooting out of your chest. Exercised and fed, you stand with your brother ready to tell your lies and finally not suffer for it. I have found my way across the sea. Over millions of legions, I've found my way onto a space drawn up by the outer bounds of what either of us thought possible, and the result is surrender.
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Thursday, September 27, 2012
A Great Perspective on the Artistic Life
There's an excellent post over at The Millions about Michael Bourne's experience at the prestigious Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. He gave me a lot to think about regarding writing, workshops, agents, and publishing. I found this courtesy of the New England Review's newsletter.
Here's a snippet:
Here's a snippet:
Let’s say that you hold some passionate, but obscure belief. Maybe you believe God will fling a meteor at the earth and all the good people will be sucked up into heaven. Maybe you favor a return to the gold standard. Or perhaps you think Roseanne Barr should be elected president this fall on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. Whatever it is, this belief animates your life, gives your daily existence shape and meaning, but no one you know really understands why you care so much about it. Then one day you drive to a mountaintop in the Vermont woods and spend 10 days in splendid isolation with several hundred other people who fervently believe the same things you do.Read the rest of Keeping the Faith: Ten Days at Bread Loaf
Thursday, September 20, 2012
A Progression of Author Biographies
I finally got the proofs for the delayed--but still forthcoming!--anthology, New Stories from the Midwest 2011, in which my story, "Circling in the Air," will appear. After rereading my story and making some changes, I sent it back to the editor, and I found myself trying to remember what I'd put in the author bio when I sent it to them over a year ago.
Fifty words or fewer. That's what they usually give you. Tell us a little about yourself. Where do you live? Where did you go to school? Where else have you been published? What do you do besides write? These are the things people usually include, as if some reader might flip to the back of the publication and see some truth about the author, something that will enhance the story, poem, or essay, something that might even reveal the strange secret of its becoming.
I know, I know . . . Bios are a great way to direct people to your other work, but still, it's strange--trying to say things about ourselves, as if we have some sort of fixed identity, as if we could describe anything other than habitual tendencies and patterns that change over time. Get something meaningful down, in fifty words or fewer.
Here then is a progression:
David Driscoll lives in Chicago with his wife, dog, and three cats. His stories have appeared in a number of publications including TriQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology, New Stories from the Midwest 2011.
David Driscoll applied to all the top MFA programs but was not accepted. He is happy to have fooled this publication.
David Driscoll can't imagine why someone might try and battle him. His freestyle is the bomb. He is cold as Antartica and flows like the Amazon.
David Driscoll writes war stories because he was in wars, two of them. His record is 2-0, even though the wars really effed him up. He doesn't swear anymore because of his religious conversion.
David Driscoll's
poems
are short.
David Driscoll was once an extra in a Billy Graham movie. He walks by in the background with two adults who are supposed to be his parents. In no other way is David Driscoll affiliated with Billy Graham.
David Driscoll's real parents died in a car crash. He inherited some money which makes it easier for him to persist in this literary folly.
David Driscoll misses his parents very much. His stories are often about them.
David Driscoll tries to make people laugh in his stories so people will like him. He is trying to get love. His other publications have also been an attempt to get love.
David Driscoll's other stories are actually better than this one.
David Driscoll has written enough to fill a library but is still learning his trade. Someday he hopes to write a book that will raise the dead but not in a Pet Cemetery way where the dead return as evil, murderous zombies. He is hoping instead for laughter and jig dancing, like we wanted them to do when they were alive.
David Driscoll only writes stories about his parents.
There is only one thing to write about.
There is only one.
Here's a Rumi poem:
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
(Coleman Barks, transl.)
Fifty words or fewer. That's what they usually give you. Tell us a little about yourself. Where do you live? Where did you go to school? Where else have you been published? What do you do besides write? These are the things people usually include, as if some reader might flip to the back of the publication and see some truth about the author, something that will enhance the story, poem, or essay, something that might even reveal the strange secret of its becoming.
I know, I know . . . Bios are a great way to direct people to your other work, but still, it's strange--trying to say things about ourselves, as if we have some sort of fixed identity, as if we could describe anything other than habitual tendencies and patterns that change over time. Get something meaningful down, in fifty words or fewer.
Here then is a progression:
David Driscoll lives in Chicago with his wife, dog, and three cats. His stories have appeared in a number of publications including TriQuarterly, Mississippi Review, and will be featured in the forthcoming anthology, New Stories from the Midwest 2011.
David Driscoll can't imagine why someone might try and battle him. His freestyle is the bomb. He is cold as Antartica and flows like the Amazon.
David Driscoll writes war stories because he was in wars, two of them. His record is 2-0, even though the wars really effed him up. He doesn't swear anymore because of his religious conversion.
David Driscoll's
poems
are short.
David Driscoll was once an extra in a Billy Graham movie. He walks by in the background with two adults who are supposed to be his parents. In no other way is David Driscoll affiliated with Billy Graham.
David Driscoll's real parents died in a car crash. He inherited some money which makes it easier for him to persist in this literary folly.
David Driscoll misses his parents very much. His stories are often about them.
David Driscoll tries to make people laugh in his stories so people will like him. He is trying to get love. His other publications have also been an attempt to get love.
David Driscoll's other stories are actually better than this one.
David Driscoll has written enough to fill a library but is still learning his trade. Someday he hopes to write a book that will raise the dead but not in a Pet Cemetery way where the dead return as evil, murderous zombies. He is hoping instead for laughter and jig dancing, like we wanted them to do when they were alive.
David Driscoll only writes stories about his parents.
There is only one thing to write about.
There is only one.
I AM THAT I AM - Acrylic on Canvas |
Here's a Rumi poem:
Your grief for what you've lost lifts a mirror
up to where you're bravely working.
Expecting the worst, you look, and instead,
here's the joyful face you've been wanting to see.
Your hand opens and closes and opens and closes.
If it were always a fist or always stretched open,
you would be paralyzed.
Your deepest presence is in every small contracting
and expanding,
the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated
as birdwings.
(Coleman Barks, transl.)
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Thursday, September 6, 2012
A Conversation with Jeremy T. Wilson: Part II
Welcome everyone to Part II of my conversation with 2012 Nelson Algren Award winning author Jeremy T. Wilson. Word from the Wrigley Tower is that his winning story is going to be released in THIS Sunday's edition of Printers Row, the Chicago Tribune's literary supplement. Can you believe it? Can you wait? You'll have to wait. Until Sunday. Make sure to get your digital and/or print subscription here so you don't miss out.
For those dedicated readers of Logomancers & Logodaedalists, you'll surely recall that we ended Part I of the conversation with Jeremy suggesting that our half-finished stories end up informing our later work. If you need a refresher--or you somehow, against all odds, missed out on Part I--click here to see what Katy Perry's been making such a fuss about on her social media sites for the past two months.
Sorry to keep you waiting, Katy.
Part II
Logomancers: Yes! Love it.
All the writing we do is interrelated in more ways than we could ever
possibly understand, so in the long view, even when we don't think we're going
to write another draft of a given story, we somehow can't avoid it. I
guess my question was more concerned with the development of your process, and
I was wondering if you've come to feel, like me, that a lot of the resistances
you hit while writing aren't really problems with the story so much as
emotional or psychological resistances inside you, and if through your writing
practice you've gained more tolerance for those resistances and more skill at
working with them so you can avoid either holding on too fiercely to some
particular instance of form and content on the one hand or walking away from a
line of inquiry in the face of some discomfort on the other? I sometimes
feel development along these lines is the key to getting more power into my
work, and I want to say something like: finishing a project is less about
imposing my will and more about allowing myself to be captured by a particular
(though protean) combination of form and content until I feel release, and that
is most likely to happen when the form and content provides a suitable
challenge to my current level of emotional complexity. In more plain
terms, I guess I'm trying to suggest that I don't know what's going to engage
me in the process, but when it does, it pushes me to grow, and along the way a
few pieces manage to get finished. Does that harmonize with your experience,
or do you think about this stuff in some other way?
JTW: Now we're talking! I
think about this stuff in a similar way, although I wouldn't be able to
articulate it like you do. But this is entirely due to the fact that we've been
writing together and talking about these types of issues for several years, and
I've stolen most of my process from listening to you talk about yours. I
totally agree: "I don't know what's going to engage me in the
process." I think this is crucial, the not knowing, and this is a complete
reversal from the way I first approached writing stories. I planned everything
out, or at least thought of something I wanted to write about, then wrote.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Maybe that works for some people but not for me. (This also
may be linked to my fear of writing a novel because I expect some planning has
to be involved with that project.) And when I say "works for" I don't
mean results in publishable stories. I mean results in a writing process that
keeps me curious and alive and engaged emotionally and intellectually, which is
the most I can hope for. What I don't feel nearly enough of is the
"release" you're talking about, or even the "growth," but
I'm not sure that necessarily results in unfinished or unsatisfying stories.
From the minute I sit down to write I feel like I'm in a constant battle with
those voices that try to analyze a story too quickly or tell me that it's going
in the wrong direction, those workshop voices, old English teacher voices,
Statler and Waldorf. When I feel best about a piece of writing, these voices
usually shut up and I feel what you're talking about. But this is tough to hit
and sometimes untrustworthy. I don't know that I'm really answering the
question or even staying on topic. Are we talking about endings to stories or
finishing stories? They're related, I think. Sometimes I feel a strong release
(and this may not even be the best word here, but I'm using it because it's
been established) early in the process, an early draft for instance. What then?
Is that story "finished" because the necessary emotional weight has
been lifted or I believe I've found a satisfying ending to my inquiry? For me,
most often the answer to that question is "no." No matter how I've
connected to it, the story is not conveying my experience. Being able to
recognize this gap is progress. But it's impossible for me to sit down and
rewrite that story and expect the same thing to happen, the same thing being a
replica of that emotional resonance. So then what? How do we ever feel
something is finished? I don't know. Do you?
By the way, Richard Ford
weighed in on our discussion recently in the NYT Book
Review. He was asked: "Do you remember the last book you put down without
finishing?" He answered: "Most book aren't very good, and
there's no reason they should be. Whatever 'talent' may be, it isn't
apportioned democratically. Happily, I don't remember the last not-very-good
book I didn't finish. Although (which is why I don't review books) sometimes I
return to a book I've left unfinished and discover--pleasurably--that it was I,
not the book, that was unsatisfactory." Is it just me or is he getting
more dickish the older he gets?
Logomancers: Ha. Ha. I don't have enough
data points on Richard Ford to know if he's changing in one way or another.
I remember hearing him on NPR a few years ago and he sounded crotchety
and bitter. Full points for your use of the word, "dickish,"
however. That made me laugh.
I think you've teased out
several of the loose threads in my formulation. I think I was being too
cavalier with my use of the words "released" and
"finished." I guess I intended that something is
"finished" when I decide to seek publication with it, but the truth
is I continue to fiddle with it until the galleys are in, and as I ready my
collections of short stories for submission, I find that I've started working
again on some of the stories that have already been published. I guess
the "release" I was talking about really comes in many bursts across
many phases of the process. There is the release you mentioned when
you're working on a draft and the story takes a turn near the end that gives it
that shape, that surprise, that sort of lift in your chest. But you're
right, odds are you shouldn't stop there. It may be you need to throw
that entire draft out and totally rewrite it because on page six you changed
your protagonist from a WWII switchboard operator named Lancelot to a mystic,
long-haul trucker named Benfungali. You can rewrite the story with
Benfungali in from the start, and you can make the same turn with the ending,
but I agree: you're never going to get that lift or "release" from
writing the same thing again without opening yourself up to additional
impositions of novelty. The "release" may still be there for
someone reading it for the first time, but to you it will feel familiar unless
you put it away for a good LONG while. Maybe nothing ever gets finished.
Maybe when you're old and winding down you become exceedingly haunted by
the things you feel you never got right in your stories and books. Maybe
this is why Richard Ford is getting dickish (assuming he is).
As for the growth, well, I
guess I was suggesting that really working with the emotionally hot stuff that
bubbles up in the process can make you more tolerant of the emotionally hot
stuff in the rest of your life and that watching your mind in a regular
disciplined way can help you keep from getting swallowed completely by your thoughts
and feelings in your day-to-day life because so much crazy shit comes up when
you really open up to it inside the writing process. I'm not trying to
say writing makes you a better person because I think that has got to be a
stupid claim, but I think if you approach the work as a way to learn what's in
your heart and accept it with decreasing amounts of judgment over time then you
can become easier with yourself which will naturally cause you to be more
peaceful and understanding with others. For a long time now I've thought
of my writing process as spiritual practice not wholly dissimilar from my
meditation or yoga practices, so maybe this "growth" thing is a
personal thing for me though I suspect a lot of writers look at it the same
way. We may be kidding ourselves, though. I dunno. It's especially
hard to assign any sort of causality in this case. It's something I'd
like to believe anyway. What do you think?
JTW: The more I think about this the more I
feel like I don't know. On the one hand I want to say yes, of course, writing
is a spiritual practice that helps me feel better about myself and my place in
the world (a clumsy paraphrase, I know). I think about all the journal writing
I've done, and the project I started after my dad died using the rituals of
writing and baseball as a path to healing, and the initial approach I take with
young students when I encourage them to write what's on their minds or what
pisses them off, and all this makes me think that writing can definitely
provide an avenue for personal growth. But then I think about writing stories
and I'm not sure I would say the same thing. Forgive me if I'm being all MFA-y,
but I want to make a distinction between the act of writing and the craft of
writing (not that they're mutually exclusive all the time, but bear with me).
What "bubbles" up in an initial draft may not be equal to the time it
takes to work that psycho-emotional purge into something resembling a story.
There's a point in the process where I allow myself to be conscious of the
creation, to examine the connections created in the writing process, to shape
the shit. This can't come too early, but whenever it happens it doesn't ever
strike me as very spiritual. It's much more fun. Should I be
ashamed? By the way, I'm all in for your story on the mystic trucker
Benfungali.
Logomancers: What we’re
talking about puts me in mind of something I recently read in a Paris Review interview
with Truman Capote. He said:
I seem to remember reading that Dickens, as he wrote, choked with laughter over his own humor and dripped tears all over the page when one of his characters died. My own theory is that the writer should have considered his wit and dried his tears long, long before setting out to evoke similar reactions in a reader. In other words, I believe the greatest intensity in art in all its shapes is achieved with a deliberate, hard, and cool head.
I wonder if Capote maybe
failed to realize the possibility that Dickens was both experiencing the
emotions AND regarding them with a deliberate, hard, and cool
head. This may sound hopelessly paradoxical to a lot of people, but
I don’t think it is. In fact, it’s just the sort of capacity I’m
suggesting writing might help a person develop, and I’m wondering if it can
carry over to the rest of your life so that you can learn to both experience
your thoughts and feel your emotions without getting mesmerized into believing
you ARE them. This is at least one of the functions of meditation
and development along these lines is the very specific sense in which I was
thinking of writing as a spiritual practice, which can be fun or painful or
blissful or banal or just about anything else you can imagine. In
that way, what I’m talking about doesn’t exist along a continuum from the heat
of a first draft to the cold crafting of a later revision but rather transcends
and enfolds all parts of the process by helping us build a place to stand from
which we can witness the products of our mind like images projected onto a
screen while still enjoying the movie.
But perhaps this is getting a
bit esoteric so you can comment on it if you want or we can move on to what I
really want to ask which is: what do you hope to get out of your writing? What
are your goals? How would your writing ideally develop along
personal and professional lines? I know this sounds like many
questions, but I kind of feel like it’s only one.
JTW: That's what I was
getting at when I said the two aren't mutually exclusive. I don't know that I'd
characterize crafting as "cold" either, but I get it. I'm going back
to baseball here, but the comparison works for most sports. So many elements go
into a good baseball swing, but when you're in the batter's box, you can't
think about every single one of them or else you're doomed. The way you stop
thinking about them is through practice so that all the parts of your swing
become automatic. However, every now and then you're going to be called upon to
hit the ball to the right side (I'm speaking as a right handed hitter here) and
in order to do that you will have to be conscious of the changes in your
approach that help you reach your intended goal of driving the ball to the
right side. This is the same with writing.
What I hope to get out of my
writing is a career doing something I love doing. I want to continue to
write and continue to teach so that I don't have to sell peaches, even though
selling peaches was one of the best jobs I've ever had. But maybe this isn't
what you meant. Maybe you meant, what are my goals with the writing itself?
Well, I hope to stop using the word "thing" so much. Beyond that, I'm
not really sure. You?
Logomancers: My answer is
similar. The main thing for me is to be able to continue writing.
After that, there are these various parts of me that want
different and sometimes contradictory things. There is the part of me
that wants to be "established," the part that would like to
be publicly recognized as a writer and feel I've got the
credentials to back that up. Then there's the part of me concerned about
connection. This is the part of me that wants to find readers in
that place where we feel things strongly and unapologetically, where we become
more curious about who we really are and what's going on in our hearts and
minds. Then there is another part of me that wants to get so deep into the
writing, the world drops away entirely and I forget about the mundane
concerns of publishing and success and even other people like a literary
monk. I suppose this has to do with notions of truth and freedom.
I’m thinking of truth here as the experience of a sincere, ongoing, and
single-minded pursuit rather than a destination, and freedom as the ability to
give expression without feeling hobbled or boxed in by the fear of what people
might say.
Fortunately as I go
along I pay less and less attention to these idealized versions of what kind of
writer I'd like to be—as if there were some objective standpoint from which I
could define myself—and more willing to accept the ever-changing terrain as I
move across it. That is to say, I’ll take things the way they are because
I don’t really believe the fundamentals are going to change.
This reminds me of a story
Grace Paley tells in another Paris Review interview:
I said to Auden, Well, do you think I should keep writing? He laughed and then became very solemn. If you’re a writer, he said, you’ll keep writing no matter what. That’s not a question a writer should ask.
Do you ever feel tempted to
ask that question?
JTW: Unfortunately, I ask myself that question
all the time. But I do agree with Auden's answer, and I believe I'm finally in
a place with my writing where I can honestly say that it's true—that I'll write
no matter what. For a long time I wanted that to be the case. I wanted to be
able to claim that I would write no matter what, because I'm a writer, dammit,
I must write!, but it just wasn't true. I thought of myself as a writer but
didn't write enough to be one (I think many people who have the desire to write
end up here). Now I think I've started a practice that will sustain itself
regardless the answer. So ultimately when this question pops up I try to ignore
it. I might ask myself on a given night out when I know I've had too much to
drink if I should have another drink because I'm having fun and I feel great
and I want that feeling to continue because it's fleeting and now I have hold
of it and don't want to let it go. The answer is no, I shouldn't have another
drink, because one more isn't necessary to sustain the bliss and I'll feel like
crap the next day and I'll probably piss my wife off or say something stupid or
forget how I got home, but I have one more drink (maybe two) anyway. This
strained metaphor is an attempt to articulate how I feel about the question.
Should I keep writing? Economics, self-doubt, the publishing industry,
countless lit mags, obligations, odds of success, Richard Ford, the cost of
daycare, all indicate no. Am I going to write anyway? As sure as I'll have one
more drink.
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Thanks, Jeremy. That was awesome. Thanks to you, too, Dear Reader. We wouldn't be where we are today without you.
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