Complicated Feelings: Writing About Writing

Good afternoon, everyone. I hope this raucous world affords some moments of respite for you in these early days of Spring. There is a tangible groundswell of terror and determined energy in D.C. lapping at the concrete walls like the windswept water in the tidal basin, reflecting muted pink from the cherry blossoms having just tipped their prime.

April makes me nervous. It’s that peculiar and gently discordant feeling that something, anything, might go horribly wrong, that the seasonal handover from winter into spring won’t come to pass as it always has; a feeling that, if I process it incorrectly, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it has, several times in fact. Spring is a fragile time. Beautiful. Anticipatory. A time of anniversaries, a time of rebirth, a time of global financial crises, of marathons, a time of paying taxes and not being able to decide how those funds are used. Last year I started contributing to a 401k for the first time, and I am trying not to think about it. I’m weary of writing about fascism and resentful that there is such a wealth of fascism about which to be written.

I went to a house party this past weekend for the first time in over a year to celebrate a friend’s hard work putting together an exciting and educational anatomy-based art project. I will put a link to her Kickstarter, where you can learn more and contribute to the project, at the bottom of this article. I arrived exactly on time as I always try to do, perhaps because it makes me feel in control or perhaps simply because I like the playful percussive nature of the word “punctuality”. In those joyful and anticipatory moments before the majority of partygoers arrived I chatted with strangers who would become acquaintances, and may even turn to friends. We talked about the state of the world, the state of the job market in D.C., about figuring out what we need and the dumbfounding realization that, much of the time, you can just ask for it. So much is beyond our control, but each of us can be clear about what would make things better, and it seems to me that people usually want to help how they can. With that being said, if you find reading this piece to be worthwhile, I would greatly appreciate it if you shared it with your network as I continue trying to build a readership. I am very close to hitting 100 subscribers, the first of what I hope will be many big milestones!

Every writer, at one point or another, must examine their relation with the act. It's the great gift and curse of being one. I was naturally resistant to the idea of doing it myself, of giving in to the meta self-exploration, of admitting that I take myself seriously enough. To read one's own writing feels masturbatory, to read one's own writing on writing seems autofellatious, and if I had another sex word to really solidify my point and satisfy the rule of threes… wouldn’t that be a treat.

I recently got the news that a publisher I had been looking into decided not to move forward with my manuscript. I wasn’t surprised at it, rather, a bit relieved. I did not expect they would be interested in the version I sent them and was pleasantly thrilled when they asked for more pages after reading the first ten. My mistake, the mistake I knew I was making all along, was sending a first draft when what a publisher needs is the fifth or sixth draft – something polished and ready and sure of itself. I knew it immediately upon submission, I suppose I just needed something to happen, and this manuscript I pulled together, while imperfect, had enough promise, to me, that I thought it might perhaps lead to something more.

And it has, a number of friends have read it, the publisher gave me some brief but helpful feedback, and the act of creating it helped give me the confidence to begin writing this newsletter which feels to me like it holds a glimmer of the creative fever I hope to one day stretch into a career. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks evaluating my next steps, how I will restructure what I have written and the avenues I will pursue when my next attempt yields something closer to what I know I have in me. Based on what little I know, what separates a successful writer from someone who can write, is the perseverance to keep on writing when it feels like no one is reading, when there is no money coming in for it, for the sole purpose of refining the craft itself. A friend and mentor who has found the success I dream of making for myself affirmed this on a Zoom call well before I had found what might motivate me to “keep going”, as he so succinctly put it. I am motivated by the pursuit of excellence. I want to become great, and I want to go past that and change what it means to be great, again and again. I am also motivated by fear; the fear of rejection, the fear of death, the fear of everything changing or of everything staying the same. I'm motivated by anger… anger at myself for wasted time, at anyone who has tried to dilute me… at the world for being so angry. Whether we abandon our passions or not, I do believe they have intrinsic value, because they change us just as frequently as we change them.

So my first attempt at finding a home for my first book was unsuccessful. If I’m honest, I don’t think that I was honest enough. The book borrowed heavily from my lived experiences but, in an effort to distance the work from myself, I watered it down. Pieces of it are luminous – passages that, on re-reading, I can hardly believe emerged from my own brain. This is all so deeply familiar and so brand new to me, this process of looking for shelter for the damaged parts of me… Fantasies of waking up to an email from someone who wants to take a chance on an unknown writer because they recognize in me some sort of hunger that I perhaps do not recognize in myself… The common bloodsick feeling of inching closer to 30 and wondering if dreams have expiration dates and the quick mental rebuttals for knowing that everyone has that thought, and if I'm going to worry myself sick I should at least be original.

What do people write for? For justice, for escape, to refine their own acuity? Is it just a never ending pursuit of elusive, ill-defined ends? I find that dwelling on these nebulous questions, about anything, is unhelpful. What do we live for? This is not a question but a trap, because every answer can be second-guessed, because logic is a helpful tool but not a universal law, not when it comes to life and love and death, and underneath everything, writing is all of those things. I write because I believe it is worthwhile. I live because I am not done yet.

I think that a lot of writers, intentionally or less so, write to confess; sprinkling little shards of difficult truths across paragraphs to build the camaraderie of a shared secret with their readers. And, at least for me, when those truths are too confronting, the language housing them might grow a bit more ornamental than it ought to be, because it is easier to confess in abstractions than to give one’s own ugliness a simple name.

I've alluded to an injury in these posts, and I plan to talk about it directly… I just haven't found the right words yet. During my time in the hospital almost one year ago I rediscovered a hunger for reading that has since persisted. I had been resistant to the idea that a writer must also be a voracious reader, because for much of my life I thought of reading as a luxury reflective of having too much extra time, when the act of reading actually creates time. I have kept at it. On my morning and evening commutes I pull a book from my backpack and step into a Universe where time moves differently. A Universe outside of it. I fold a dog ear down each time a passage wrests a piece from me. I always make a silent promise to revisit it when I’ve regenerated, each time knowing that I never will. It’s these same mental bookmarks I keep for those portions of my life I deem too painful or too intensely joyous to confront, as if looking back would be a condemnation. Every word I read, and naturally, every word I write, is a product of those bookmarks – those eternally annexed passages of time.

At inopportune times I often stumble across a phrase that latches onto me… A glimmer of profundity or profanity, the very distillation of literary elegance. There is a requisite panic in it, that if I do not find its proper place, and fast, someone else will utter that magic string of words before I get my chance. I think I felt that way about my manuscript. I worried that some other more self-assured writer might experience an upheaval in the exact way that I had and uncover the very same themes and allegories, all to the acclaim I had daydreamed would be mine. So I worked when I should have been resting, and when my body could no longer cooperate I dreamed of being beaten to the printing press. That, I feel, is the risk of inspiration: you cannot look directly at it for the risk of breaking it or inviting it to break you.

Take care of yourselves. As always, you can find me on Instagram and nowhere else on the Internet for now.

With Sincerity,

J.K.

Inflatable Clitoris Sculpture Kickstarter link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/inflatableclitoris/inflatable-clitoris-sculpture