Tag: purpose

Revision, process, and practice

Okay, I don’t know if this scene will stay or not, but while drafting (and until someone snatches it out of my hands, it is all drafting), I wrote this:

We walked into the sunlight outside. The sidewalk was empty; Willi and Benjamin had already turned at the corner and another corner. Cars crept slowly down the one-way street, pausing at the stop sign and squeezing into city traffic. The waft of a pizza oven turned my nose in another direction, away from lunch with these men.

“Are you ever not paying attention?” Carlo asked. “It’s like you are everywhere else before you realize exactly where you are.”

“Isn’t that how everyone is? You pay attention—”

“Not like you,” he answered. He strode forward quickly. “If we don’t hurry, Benjamin will clean them out.”

Aletheia and the Thieves

My hero, Aletheia, has just managed a draw in a chess match with her mentor, Carlo. They are walking to lunch at the Reading Terminal Market, where they will join their friends. I had just finished writing the scene of the match and was getting them out the door and onto what was next, but I had an appointment to keep and didn’t want to leave the project on a closed note (the match was finished). I like to stop, when I stop, midair. Sometimes I stop mid-scene. Sometimes I stop mid-sentence. 

When I want to move on with intent (write this tomorrow), I will end a writing session with a “tell” (as opposed to a “show”). I know the “tell” is not doing the work, and telling invites immediate revision. I set it down even if I have a glimmer of what the “show” will be. Tomorrow calls. Of course, as we know all too well, tomorrow is never guaranteed, but this novel writer must wrap himself in a heavy blanket of hope. More words will come.

This was not always the way.

In his column “The Greatest Life Hacks (For Now),” David Brooks included “The biggest lie we tell ourselves is, “I don’t need to write this down because I will remember it.” As much as we value multi-tasking, our brains don’t hold onto the gems. We think they will, but they don’t. We are eminently distractible. Something bright and shiny (or dark and jagged) will capture our attention, and flashes of brilliance dull quickly as we fall back into the morass of the already known and easily predictable. Surprise is the enemy of the homeostatic mind.

I carried a journal (hard cover, unlined) with me for years, taking notes about everything: movies, meals, architectural details, people. I accrued notes on pages of yellow, narrow-lined legal pads. Years of art history classes taught me to write quickly and legibly in the dark. I could (years of typing has muddled my handwriting) watch and listen and take notes simultaneously. I wrote everything down.

Yet, for all my writing, I did not have a daily specific writing practice. Even in graduate school, working toward a Ph.D. in Creative Writing (yes, that’s a thing), I wrote to meet deadlines. One short (1500-2000 word) and one long (6000 word) essay in each Literature class. Weekly seminar essays. Scrambling toward workshop slots (sure, I’ll have a story next week). I did not have a body of work to mine for revision. No particular point of view, no overarching theoretical approach, no “story of my life” that I wanted to unfold, refracted in fiction and poetry. I had come from a restaurant job where I worked 60-80 hours a week and had squeezed out enough chapters of a novel to get me into school, but once there, I was on terra incognito.

So I wrote everything down. Most of my work came about because I discovered new ways of writing each time I read something new. And everything was new. I wrote in response to—response through,really—the fiction, poetry, and philosophy I encountered in classes and on my own. I read constantly. My program’s joy (and hazard) was that the writing program was ensconced within an academic department. The creative writers met the exact requirements of our academic classmates: area distribution, exams, translation, and dissertation. In the course of my study, I didn’t just write. I learned about writers and writing, about processes and the vast array of forces that influence process. I took volumes of notes, repeatedly surprised by ideas and approaches, by the workings of minds so different and similar to my own.

Except.

Even though a biography of Dickens, Woolf, or Joyce will point out the peccadillos and triumphs, one thing rarely mentioned is the hours at work. Dickens could write in the company of friends as they gathered before a night out. Later, his study was off-limits to his family; he was not to be disturbed. Woolf wrote fiction in the morning, then focused on essays (or the other way around) after lunch. Yes, there were interruptions. Of course, there were interruptions, but writing became a habit. Are there writers for whom habit is anathema, who wait in a field with their pen held high, waiting for the jagged lightning of inspiration? Sure.

When you establish the habit of writing every day—and putting yourself to work for several hours every day—you never actually stop writing. You may not be typing. You may not be scribbling in your favorite notebook. However, your mind simmers. If you commit to 1500 words a day and stop after two or three or five or six hours, your mind will continue to work. You will not passively wait for pearls (or bakelite beads), so you will not be surprised when they come.

And you will not need to scurry to the pad when lightning strikes. You will be the blaze. Back to work.

We walked into the sunlight outside. The sidewalk was empty; Willi and Benjamin had already turned at the corner and then another corner. Cars drove slowly down the one-way street, pausing at the stop sign and squeezing into city traffic. The waft of a pizza oven turned my nose in another direction, away from lunch with my friends. My head turned toward the smell.

“Who’s driving the green sedan?” Carlo asked.

“A woman,” I shot back. “Was she wearing jewelry?”

“Wait. What?”

“Jewelry. Was she wearing jewelry?”

“Earrings. Something dangling. Not hoops. I think.”

“No, you don’t ‘think.’ You know. What were they?”

“Fish,” I answered, recalling the glint beneath the voluminous red hair pulled back in an unkempt ponytail. “Gold fish hanging head to tail. Probably real gold. The sedan was a Mercedes 300.”

“Good.” Carlo hadn’t stopped walking. He hadn’t even turned toward me while he questioned me.

“Did you see her?” I asked. “No,” he answered. “Why would I? We’re walking to the Market, and I was thinking about the crowds.” He turned his head and glanced at me. “Besides, I knew you would.”

“Is that good?” I slowed down, and Carlo stayed on pace. I caught up to him at the corner. “Should I not pay attention?” The light for the cross traffic turned from green to yellow. I shifted my weight, ready for the walk sign. Carlo raised his arm to stop me when the white “WALK” sign lit up.

“Why are you stopping me?” He nudged me back from the curb and tilted his head to a space beneath a shop awning that was out of the flow of foot traffic.

“Do you want to pay attention?” he asked in front of a store that promised fast copies, faxes, and passport photos.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you look up and down the street and think about what you notice? Do you want to pay attention, or is it just what you do?”

“It just happens.”

“All the time,” he stated without a hint of a question.

“All the time.” A car horn barked at a man who had stepped into the intersection too late. A woman with red fingernails smoothed the back of her dress as she walked past. The man at the fax machine looked up at Carlo and me, and when I met his gaze, he looked away.

“Let’s walk.” Carlo reached out and guided me by the elbow. I felt adrift, like I would collide with everyone else on the sidewalk as he pushed me forward.

“Stop,” I insisted when we were less than halfway down the block. The city—all of it—seemed foreign, as if I had ever been here before. I felt out of breath.

Aletheia and the Thieves

Discovering the Power of Reserve

I have spent hours in Gallery 69 at the National Gallery of Art over the past three years. The conversation between the Sargents, the Whistlers, and the Eakins inspires me. The seminal Whistler Painting Symphony in White, a portrait of Joanna Hiffernan, is currently in London, along with other paintings Whistler made with Hiffernan as a model. It will return along with those other paintings in July 2022. However, I have always been drawn to Sargent’s portrait of Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White. My first impression was that she was a bit imperious, and this was highlighted by the painting hanging across the gallery from the wistful, uncertain, and expectant Joanna Hiffernan. Over time, “Daisy’s” exquisite assertiveness won me over.

Ellen Peabody Endicott, 1901, John Singer Sargent

While I noticed that Eakins’ somber men held one wall, that Whistler’s presentation was more idiosyncratic, and that, one way or another, the curators selected Sargents that displayed women as they aged from childhood to sagacity, my attention was drawn to the two women in white.

Or, to put it another way, I missed something. Sargent’s 1901 painting of Ellen Peabody Endicott (Mrs. William Crowninshield Endicott) portrays a prominent “society hostess” from Massachusetts and later Washington DC; her husband served as Secretary of War for President Cleveland. The curator notes the sitter’s “melancholy expression,” which seems to mistake control for sadness. We have a more challenging time recognizing the depth of reserve—that chillier Spartan virtue. We live in warmer times.

We perform emotions with operatic range—if it’s felt, it must be loud. Compliments must be modified with “fucking” as in “fucking excellent!” as if excellent wasn’t already, well, excellent. Sadness unaccompanied by an ugly cry isn’t sad enough. In part, I believe that we have inured ourselves to parsing the ordinary everyday emotional life, and also because we have conflated reserved with sterile, or worse, sad. If we aren’t in the full bursting bloom of performative positivity, we must be bereft.

I was playing Max Richter’s The Blue Notebooks, which, besides being blue, is contemplative and revelatory. You may recognize “On the Nature of Daylight,” featured in Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film Arrival. Frankly, I don’t trust constant revelation and proclamation. The drift from light to dark (and dark to light) puts revelation on a steady simmer. It’s a fleeting experience but perpetual. I think we prefer the experience of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” and running from the bath to proclaim that he had discerned that the king’s crown was not pure gold (and that he had discovered displacement). At any rate, Richter eschews “Eureka” for a more diaphanous experience of revelation. One of my colleagues passed by and said, “Could you play something happy? That sounds like a funeral.” So much for the slow boil.

Ellen Peabody Endicott may have been melancholy—her husband died in May of 1900, months before she sat for Sargent. She is dressed in black (but that white lace!). Or she may be contained and self-controlled. We don’t have much good to say about control. We celebrate the romantic impulse of the barbaric yawp. YOLO! All in! We seek peak experiences. Maybe I’m overselling. Maybe I’m not taking Mrs. Endicott’s privilege into account; she lived life on the social mountaintop. Peak experience, indeed. She could afford—actually afford—self-control.

As an educator, I engage in discussions about students who lack self-control, but even at the level of “Friedrich lacks self-control,” we acknowledge his authenticity. Chaotic and unrestrained is how and who he is. We also recognize the authenticity of our more controlled students—in their own ways, not in some made to fit a prescribed mold. But we wouldn’t recommend our students forgo individual expression for something more staid. That would seem too controlled as if we were fitting them for muzzles.

Ellen Peabody Endicott’s self-possession would not fit. Perhaps the Southern affect that permeates my school makes monied New England restraint that masks stern and savage conviction seem so foreign. Terse condescending retort contrasts with the snide deference of charm. When some older member of my community says, “Bless your heart,” we all know by the tone exactly which epithetic calumny was meant. And we all know that it was meant. The young play at the clumsier “Let’s go, Brandon!” It’s not that offense was not given by those of Endicott’s ilk, but it was not coded. They played by the dictum that “a gentleman [or lady] never gives offense unintentionally.”

Perhaps I should not call Ellen Peabody Endicott “reserved” as much as “intentional.”

So, what did I miss? What does she teach me? For one, there is a value in being intentional. I tend to get distracted by the beautiful and magnificent. Who doesn’t? Daisy and Joanna would eclipse roomfuls of women. As a writer, I chase the beautiful—the elegant run-on sentence describing the transformation of a Jinn into a pillar of basalt, the frenetic conversation between a group of friends at dinner. But I must also be attentive to intent. I must get the words on the page in as straightforwardly (and, please, as often) as possible.

Are there hazards to chasing beauty? Yes. Are there perils in control? Yes, again. I learn to balance, to somehow manage the dual impulses of wild beauty and patient, controlled effort—what Adrienne Rich called “a wild patience.”

But the real hazard is failing to see what was right there all the time. I recognized the name earlier–Crowninshield is an old New England name that Washington Irving uses as one of the names that the devil harvests in “The Devil and Tom Walker.” I borrowed it for a minor character, even modeling her on the portrait. I hadn’t realized that she was more. She is, and that realization surprised and delighted me.

Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler, 1893, John Singer Sargent

This is the second time I missed a Sargent painting, falling back on the too generic label “mannered society portraiture” that dogs Sargent. Whether the women he painted had the kind of intensity that his portraits reveal, or whether he imbued them with some kind of mannered focus, I cannot tell. I know that not all his portraits share the focused intensity of Ellen Peabody Endicott, Margaret Stuyvesant Rutherfurd White, or Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler. The painting of Marie Buloz Pailleron (Madame Édouard Pailleron)) catches a woman mid-scowl. There is more emotional distance between her, the painter, and the audience. The paintings in Gallery 70 also show an artist who will show other markedly less intense attitudes.

Street in Venice, 1882 John Singer Sargent

So, I sharpen my eye and sharpen my pencil (figuratively). There are characters to uncover, and surprises to come. Onward.mm

The Urgency of “I don’t know”

The centerpiece of the Once Upon a Roof: Vanished Korean Architecture are three chimi—roof ornaments. They look similar enough that one might, at first glance, assume they come from the same site. After all, they are displayed together. However, they come from three sites across Korea: Iksan, Buyeo, and Gyeongju. Two are from Buddhist temples, the other from a palace complex.

It’s not the museum’s fault I leaped to an erroneous conclusion. Even a cursory examination reveals differences in the three chimi: articulation of the “feathers,” ratio of height to width, and depth of the curl. Clearly, they are not from the same site. Could a map display have helped me not make that mistake? Maybe. Fortunately, I was able to sort out my error and enjoyed getting past my mistake to something more truthful.

On the other side of the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art is the exhibit: Falcons: The Art of the Hunt. Two statues of falcons preside over the exhibit, and walking up to them, I thought, “What wonderful Horuses.” Both of the falcons have notched flat spaces atop their heads. Crowns would have rested on each, like this example of a Horus found in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Except they aren’t representations of Horus. The display card reveals that they “bear the names of two gods, Herakles and Aphrodite, who were worshipped during the Ptolemaic (305-30 BCE) period.” This startled my mind into the thoughts: “How did the Ptolemaic Egyptians graft Greek and Egyptian religion (myth)?” and “Could falcons represent any god in ancient Egypt?”

Lesson one: read the display cards at the museum.

Lesson two: the story already in your mind may not be correct (even if you are wicked smaht). And while I recognize this on my Sunday wander, it happens everywhere else.

In recent memory, these things happened. The timeline of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, changed, which led to accusations of incompetence and malfeasance. COVID masking guidelines changed and changed again, which led to allegations of incompetence and malfeasance. History textbooks changed, which… well, you get the picture. I recall an early story that came out after the Benghazi attack that pointed to an anti-Muslim video as a cause, which was later discredited—the story of the Benghazi attack became, at once, more complicated and more straightforward. The fact that the story changed caused outrage.

Why does the first draft (or first glimpse) of a story impress itself so firmly in our minds? I know that it does. To begin with, our minds are incredibly attuned to how we feel when we take in new information. For instance, the sudden “Aha!” when I realized that the roof ornaments came from three distinct and distant sites or the Greek connection to those stone falcons is a feeling I cherish. I seek that rush of discovery, and experiences that trigger that particular joy stick with me.

The innate fight or flight response does not lend itself to a careful mulling over facts. We jump to conclusions because of a deep-seated survival mechanism. Our minds are attuned to getting a story set as quickly as possible. Add to that the way our brains anticipate or predict every event that occurs in the world, and second thoughts become improbable, if not impossible.

So, it is not a surprise that we punish those who change their stories. “These people cannot keep their stories straight” is a refrain used to denigrate those trying to tell the truth. The minute the story changes, an error message is triggered in our mind, and out of that error, we envision obfuscations that reveal possibly darker machinations. And yes, sometimes that happens. The lesson of Watergate was that the crime of the cover-up can outstrip the original crime. However, even when there are no ulterior motives, we fight against the changes because the initial story carries such weight, even when it is inaccurate.

But how often do facts change because we learn more along the way? How often is the first report ever as accurate as a final thorough reckoning? In Think Again, Adam Grant suggests the power of thinking like a scientist (as opposed to a prosecutor, priest, or politician) can help us embrace “I don’t know”–not just as a starting point, but a possible if provisional endpoint. Did I know that Aphrodite and Herakles could be represented as falcons? No, but I can learn.

It would be too easy to ascribe the rush to judgment to a particular ideological camp; it is a universal proclivity. I have friends on the left whose anger at the changing approaches to the pandemic matches the rage on the right. However, it also points out the rationale behind people trying to manage the first blush of any story. Whether they know by inclination or research, those who manage stories in the public sphere know that once the bone of truth is set, it is hard to break again. And they also know that when the truth breaks, we want it set quickly.

What does allow us to change our minds? Well, let’s go back to feeling. Our feelings create a steady background noise in our minds. Suppose we are driven by a homeostatic impulse (maintaining not just a narrow physical temperature but a steady emotional disposition). In that case, things that interrupt that constant state will be rejected. We will seek out truths that align with our overall frame of mind. For example, if you own guns because you feel the need to protect yourself and your family, you probably feel that a threat already exists in the world. After a mass shooting event, someone may suggest that you (and everyone else) need to give up your guns. But after a shooting, do you feel more or less threatened? And does the request to disarm enhance or alleviate your fear? No matter what facts are bandied about, our feelings take precedence. In a similar vein, do teachers feel more or less threatened after a shooting? And does the thought of more guns in the classroom heighten or lessen their perception of threat? Our thoughts change to fit our feelings. And the same feeling can lead to entirely different thoughts.

The recent season of Michael Lewis’s podcast Against the Rules focused on experts and how, when confronted with a problem, we fail to find the right expert to help solve that problem. One stumbling block (and Lewis documents several) is that real experts will say, “I don’t know,” and “I don’t know” is never satisfying. We gravitate towards people who speak with authority, even when they are wrong. When experts do not clothe themselves in the trappings of authority, when they work in the basement as opposed to the corner office, or when they offer probabilities as opposed to certainties, we reject them and complain. Anyone who cannot provide a single understandable narrative (and the narrative we first decided on) must be wrong. And that wrong must be due to an intellectual and moral failing.

It’s a commonplace to acknowledge that “there are no wrong feelings.” But I wonder whether fear is still as helpful an emotion as when we wandered on the savannah or across the landbridge to the American continent? That’s a false wonder. I believe that fear—manifested in its instinctual form—is, as Roosevelt proclaimed, all we have to fear. As daunting as it may be, the unknown is fertile ground. I don’t know how fear keeps us from discovery, but I know there are discoveries to be made. Some are easy, like revelations I make on my Sunday museum walks. Others will prove challenging, almost intractable, like bridging the gap between equally frightened political camps. A commitment to the unknown, which is a commitment to the future, must be our North Star.

Moving to Write: A writer’s journey

When I was in grad school, one of my teachers told me that swimming (I was doing 3000-4000 yards, 3 times a week) benefited my writing. I understood why. Putting one’s head down and churning away for an hour compares well with writing. You pile up the painful laps the same way you pile up the words, and there is no immediate end. You just have to do it every (other) day.

Pool at the University of Iowa

Sometime in my thirties, I decided that I had worked out enough for the rest of my life, that all those miles had inoculated me against the exigencies of time. After all, I was averaging 24,000 meters a day at my peak. You might wonder, “What is 24,000 meters, really?” The fastest runner ran a mile in a bit under four minutes, and the fastest swimmer swam four hundred meters in just under four minutes, so 24,000 meters in the pool is a rough equivalent of sixty miles. 6-0. Six days a week. Even the piddling 3000-4000 yard workouts I managed later in life amounted to five to eight mile runs. All those miles earned me something besides shoulder and knee injuries. Whether this is what I learned from swimming or if something already inside me made all those laps possible, I cannot be sure. All I know was that afterward, I knuckled down to a world of tasks, whether unpacking a truckload of books, driving all night to a funeral in Maine, or doing the daily work of marriage.

But no matter how hard I worked, no matter how much thinking or interacting I did, eventually, my body let me know that the actual workouts had to start again. By my middle forties, I was back in the pool, gobbling down yards. After one knee surgery, another looming on the horizon, and rotator cuffs that kept me up at night, I decided to stick to dry land training (weights, elliptical). I’m still at it.

Maybe it’s no surprise that I struggled with writing when I stopped working out. There were a dozen other reasons for my hiatus, but the lack of steady physical movement played a part. When I furiously wrote and read in grad school, I swam, then ran, and always took long walks in the middle of the night. I never taught sitting at a desk but prowled in the classroom, even, at one point, doing the backstroke across the length of several tables to demonstrate the power of metaphor.

Writing requires resilience. You have to be able to face down the blank page and the open ended-ness of your project. Most of us do not write with a guarantee of publication (or adoration). We write, compelled to add word to word, stringing together sentences, scenes, and scraps of dialogue, until something like a novel accrues. Some writers don’t need the physical analog to bear them forward in their pursuit of words on the page. Their minds take flight and find their ways through the canyons of words without having to ride the rapids through them.

We think of the imagination as free of physical constraint, even when we write scenes replete with physical—sensed—detail. It’s pretty to think that this works. I can write a depiction of flight even if I can’t fly because I can imagine it. My mind is not bound by what I cannot do.

Yoda pinches the “crude matter”

I am reminded of a movie I saw ages ago. In The Empire Strikes Back, Yoda castigates Luke about the force. He grabs Luke’s arm with his claw-like hand and insists, “Luminous beings are we, not this crude matter.” And that’s the whole point: what’s inside you matters. Of course, this appealed to me when I was a sophomore in college. What does imagination—the expression of the soul—have to do with “crude matter”?

My belief in an inner self separate from bodily suffering—or ecstasy—was fundamental to my worldview. I wasn’t alone. Whether in theology or philosophy, the notion of something like a soul runs deep. Descartes’ cogito ergo sum (the first principle of his philosophy) locates being in the process of thinking—rigorous and effortful thinking, but thinking and certainly not feeling, and definitely not tasting, seeing, smelling, hearing, or touching. There is a longstanding division between the spiritual (the imagination included) and the physical. The mind is that “luminous being” within or around us. I learned to ignore the crude matter while I swam—playing songs in my mind while lactic acid built up in my muscles and my body cried out for oxygen. I was happy to engage in the separation of body and mind.

 Except they are not separated.

While neurobiologists distinguish between the brain—a profoundly physical, almost mechanical thing—and the mind, which arises (or descends) from the machinery, they see the connections between the brain/body and the mind. Caroline Williams’ recent book Move tracks current science about movement—whether dancing or walking or crawling about—and how it impacts our mind. Reading her book alongside Anil Seth’s Being You, Mark Solms’ The Hidden Spring, and Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and his Emissary, I find it hard not to see our minds as a product of evolution—much in the same way that our brains and bodies evolved. We got opposable thumbs, eyes, and consciousness. Our thoughts—even the most abstract thoughts—are grounded in the dynamic range of physical existence. This thing we imagine as a brain-based entity is formed in concert with sensory signals from our bodies. We are made up of our smell, sight, taste, touch, and hearing. Our minds did not blossom while we sat at a desk and contemplated, but as we moved through and sensed the world.

Whatever else we are, we are sensory data collectors. Maybe the dog does a better job of sniffing or the bat of hearing. Our brains are tuned to the sensual world—it seeks and expects constant sensory stimuli. Mark Solms argues that our consciousness results from the perpetual influx of information coming into the brain. Our consciousness checks that flood of information against our brains’ equally endless sets of predictions. Whether we are regulating the temperature of our bodies or the emotional tenor of our workplaces, our brains and minds (I am using “mind” almost interchangeably with “consciousness”) govern unconscious and unspoken expectations. Stimuli that occur outside the narrow predictions trigger error messages, and our minds leap into action—defending the status quo with alacrity.

However, what happens when our minds expect smells, sounds, and sights (and the occasional taste and touch), and there are none? What happens when we remove the wealth of stimulation? I hypothesize that the lack of signals about the world creates an error message in our brains akin to the kinds of error messages about our temperature. Our body-brain-mind system adjusts for too much heat or too much cold, but it adjusts because it constantly surveying for information; the system expects information. Without that information, it must (I surmise) recalibrate the sensory array and how the information is processed. Our brains don’t atrophy—that’s what you would guess, yes?—but reach out in new overexaggerated ways.

However, I do not suggest stimulating children in expanded versions of Skinner boxes. Our body-brain-mind systems develop through self-directed use. We are designed to move through a world of sensation—to process on the fly and on foot. We learn to think, read, and imagine—we write—by moving through the world. Williams cites the work of Kyung Hee Kim on the value of movement. Kim states that “[c]reative thinking is stimulated by physical activity, whether walking, running or active playing”—all of which run counter to the dictum of “writing=ass in chair.”

And creative thinking does not contribute to just writing or sculpting; it’s a matter of finding solutions that don’t plop themselves down in front of your nose. Or just behind your nose in your prefrontal cortex—although this too is vital. Creative thinking must veer from the straight-ahead planning that our prefrontal cortices make so fabulously possible. Planning in a straight line—our preferred method—bound by the powerful predicting mechanisms in our minds does not always lead to the best outcomes. We discover solutions by getting lost, encountering (and embracing) the unexpected, then adapting. We have to trigger error messages in our brains and become comfortable with the inevitable mistakes. I think of my students who more and more routinely fight against reading because they “do not relate” to a particular text. What is “do not relate” other than a self-reflective (“It’s not me”; “It’s not something I already know”; “It’s not something I can easily predict”) error message?

Every Sunday, I rely on long walks through museums to help reset and reinvigorate my mind. I walk through space (about five miles) and time. I proceed on a well-worn route: garden to museum to garden to museum to lunch to museum, and within the museums, I travel from Neolithic China to Philadelphia in 1984. In one display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Asian Art, objects displaying nearly identical winged protectors encompass fifteen hundred years. It’s a visual echo that resonates over millennia.

More than that—if that wasn’t enough—the walk takes me gradations of the unknown. We don’t know why the jade bi were sliced from jade. I return every week to them to revel in not-knowing—not ignorance per se, but engaged wonder. The bi remind me that some wonderful human-made things have no explanation. We can guess—we should guess—but our guesses should always be acknowledged as such. Precise and well-informed whenever possible. However, we must never let our desire to know ONE answer outstrip our willingness to learn as we go. Remember that you don’t know. I sit in front of a row of paintings by Monet, and I listen as someone explains how he had cataracts, which was why he painted like that. I do my best not to correct or alter the assumption, but it’s hard. Borofsky put the number “3277542 ” on his Man with Briefcase, and I may know how he numbered his work and why he said that he counted into the millions (these are documented facts), but as far as what motivated the artist, well, that’s an educated guess.

I constantly compile lists of things I know. People congregate in doorways. The left lane holds an uncanny attraction for slower drivers. Most people have not noticed that in Gallery 81 of the National Gallery of Art, the figures in the three paintings on the westward wall mirror those in the painting on the eastern wall. Children sometimes fall asleep in their parent’s laps. A man will ask, “Are you writing the great American novel?” (Answer, yes.) Elizabeth Winthrop Chanler sometimes looks strident, sometimes annoyed, but rarely befuddled. People take photographs of themselves that feature Mercury’s bottom, and I am sure that often this is an oversight. The people who work at the Courtyard Cafe will put aside the last napoleon for you. After that, mystery is certain. And necessary.

The writer and the fountain

To return to movement: swimming was always a venture into the known—the well-loved, effortful known. I swam with my head down and eyes focused on the line on the bottom of the lane, chasing yards and time, sure that neither would fundamentally change. Fifty yards is always fifty yards, and a minute is always a minute. Yes, I filled those minutes with more yards (or spent fewer minutes swimming more yards), And, most of all, pain is always pain. Variations in the depth and texture of pain were a cause for concern (the knees, the shoulders), but pain was always a given.

While writing requires sustained effort, one must also embrace the unknown. Moving helps.

I became a better reader (which helped me become a better writer) by moving between tables in various restaurant jobs. I wasn’t a bad reader in college, but that was because I could do the determined slog of three hundred pages between a Tuesday and Thursday class. I read with my committed swimmer’s mind. Whatever brilliance I glimpsed only came into full view after turning my head in seventeen directions and delivering service, hot food, and cold drinks, all in the proper order. And because I moved in a dozen other, unexpected ways. Words on the page became easier and more ecstatic. And no, I don’t think one needs to wait on tables to be a better reader (or thinker). However, learning to think on my feet and realizing that the persistent thrum of “I, me, mine” became more powerful when it moved through the music of “him, her, them,” helped me become a better reader and writer.

“I, me, mine” are necessary, especially when writing. You cannot hope to enchant some unknown “them” until you find a way to please yourself as you slog away hour after hour. And then you may fall into a rut. That’s not always the worst thing. There are plenty of creative and successful people who hew to the ditch they dig. Their neural pathways run straight and certain down deep gulleys. Helpful habits will keep you returning, chairbound, to the work.

And yet, stuck happens, and sometimes banging our heads in the mud only makes it worse. Seat of pants dully applied to seat of chair risks stagnation. And no amount of instruction (this is the structure of plot; this is the value of metaphor) and mental exercise (write a paragraph in another character’s voice; write a story about an animal) will return you to the light. Go for a walk, breathing through your nose so you can smell the world. Take out your headphones and listen to the world as you pass through it. Dance in a crowd. Break a sweat, and forget your brilliant, luminous mind. You don’t have to go to the woods, the mountains, or the ocean. You are a wild animal wherever you are if you just remember to be one.

There is a wildness to writing, and not just a wildness of mind, although, please, a wildness of mind. But our minds, we forget, are grounded in the crude animal matter of our bodies. The glorious, perfectly imperfect body will help us move the words, ounce by ounce, page by page, and pound by pound into the world. What happens next is a mystery, but by moving my body and mind, I have learned the value of mystery. It’s what comes next.

The “Hypos”–on the writer venturing into the dark

I began the day in a foul mood. That’s not true. I shook the snooze on my phone enough times to drift back in and out of a dream I was having, gathered the cats’ feeding mice (they retrieve their food from a set of “mice” that I secret throughout my apartment twice a day), and poured a small cup of coffee. Traffic was inordinately painless. Then there was a line outside my first Sunday stop, a French bakery off Logan Circle in DC. People bundled in the late March chill. Flurries on the 27th? So be it.

Then the first blow, no almond croissants. Routine is terrible; I accept the necessity and know that I must make adjustments—perpetually. I arrive by ten to ensure my weekly extravagance of three almond croissants, which I portion out across the awful early days of the workweek. So be it. The friendly counter assistant offered almond croissants with chocolate, but I prefer not to mix my pleasures. “I’ll have three pistachio croissants.” There were, fortunately, plenty. “I’ll suffer,” I told her as the owner of the bakery looked on, noting my disappointment and smiling nonetheless.

And then the descent. As I left the shop, a young man burst through the open door and into the crowded shop. A wiry blonde fellow carrying a blue paperback textbook. Physics or economics—it hardly matters. He charged in without acknowledging his rudeness—one other person was waiting to exit. Unlike Ishmael, my first impulse was not to knock his hat off; he wore no hat. I wanted to deck him. “There’s more room out there,” slipped from my mouth, and then, “Dumb ass.”

In his 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, David Foster Wallace warned against such flares of anger. He suggests “that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.” I get it. That young man might have had some life-saving advice to give to the people he was meeting at the bakery. Or he may have been on the spectrum and not in control of his social cues. I have many more moments when I can find the deeper solidarity of human experience, but I am keenly aware of my disdain for what? the failure of something like social grace.

The next twenty minutes of my morning descended in a spiral of disgust and disdain. Bad drivers multiplied like fleas and ticks on a lost dog. The sensor in my car alerted me that the air pressure in a reasonably new tire was low. The news and Joe Biden’s slip of passion—too much like my own. The world.

Except there are always bad drivers and people who back up without looking on crowded sidewalks or couples who stand conversing in entryways as if no one else wants to enter or exit. There are also kind shop owners, docents who recognize you and wave at you over the heads of a crowd, women who pet dogs, and dog owners who say, “Yes, she loves people.” Part of my Sunday ritual casts me pointedly and intentionally into the sea of museum-goers. The way people gaze at art—their comments and commiserations—delight me. We are at a concert, dancing and singing along with the masters of the world.

No wonder I write surrounded by all this—and all of them.

So, why such hypos today?

I just killed one of the characters in my novel. Yes, of course, someone else in the book killed him; I didn’t do it. But I did it. I knew I would do it and try as I may—and did—to distract myself from this inevitable passing, it had to happen. And today’s writing would carry me into the aftermath of that realization. I would have to begin the slow work of grief with the characters who remain. Writing has consequences, and no number of almond, or pistachio, croissants will salve the emotions that the work stirs. Yes, other characters have died in other works, but this was the first time a central character died because of another character’s cruelty. He will haunt the rest of the novel and haunt the characters who loved him.

I used to tell students in my college classes that they could miss a week of classes and needed to provide no excuses. “You’re adults,” I told them, “Life happens.” I also said, “Do not invent excuses. Do not claim sickness or death that did not happen—no, ‘I had to attend my great aunt’s funeral.’ Words have consequences. They are magic and can change the world.” I still believe this.

So today, on a perfectly ordinary day in a perfectly ordinary world, my brain hunkered down in advance of the pages that waited. Huzzah for belated self-awareness. I haven’t broken anything yet. Lesson: writing will shape your world, even if you aren’t aware of the shaping, even if it doesn’t change the rest of the world. Get to work at your own risk. Risk it all.

As a coda, there is a painting by Gilbert Stuart—he of the famous portrait of Washington—of a skater (called, The Skater). The man is utterly self-possessed. Unflappable. And yet, he is inscribing perfect circles on the ice. He has a nice hat. I don’t want to knock it off. I see him and think, “abstemious” (Either that or he just came from a long ocean voyage). Just as Prospero advised Miranda and Ferdinand, “Be more abstemious.” Advice well given. Back to work.

[Typecast]

“You were born to play that part!”

“I saw Ms. X___, and she said, ‘That’s what it must be like to be in one of his classes!’”

“That part was written for you!”

Yes, there were compliments, for which I am grateful, and all of which I could better hear after setting aside my natural predilection for self deprecation—why is it that I will always be more aware of my mistakes than my successes? I found some easy connections with Fagin: “What happens when I’m seventy?”; my current novel is about a gang of thieves; like Fagin, I am a teacher. However, I am not the outsider he has no choice to be; if I am, I choose that route. After the play, I washed off the make up, hung up the pants with gaping holes at the knees, and when Monday came, I put my pressed blue shirt with metal stays in the collar when I returned to classes. A costume is a costume

Still, some of the compliments rankled. That’s hard to admit, because it feels as ungracious to write as it must sound. I was delighted by the kindnesses that came my way. But no dear reader, I am not Fagin. Neither was Clive Revill, Ron Moody, Jonathan Pryce, or Rowan Atkinson, though all did excellent work in the role. Hear me out.

Once upon a time, a friend assessed another friend’s new book without reading it. The new book centered on a novice (an aspiring nun) who had stigmata (wounds that mirrored those suffered by Jesus on the cross). Previous efforts by this same writer included westerns and a book of short stories that had been described as “hardware store prose”—so, maybe a novel about a nun was unexpected. The pre-baked critique was along the lines of “What does he know about women?” As it turns out, the book fully understood the struggles of its protagonist and included passages of luminous, protean prose. It was just plain—and absolutely not plain—good.

Writers wander into new territory warily. Those who have long and successful careers tend to work the same plot of land—even if that plot covers ten thousand acres. Dickens stands out as the exemplar—popular beyond imagination and perpetually revisiting themes and character types—all those damned orphans, all those criminal step-fathers. But think of Austen, James, King, Grisham, Tyler, Hoffman, Rice. A writer like Virginia Woolf whose vision may be singular, but whose books vary in structure and approach, is rare. Joyce? Calvino? “Calvin-who?” you ask. Exactly.

And it isn’t just writers. I had a minister who sermonized that “The one thing was figuring out the One Thing.” Most of us spend years figuring out who we are and then hew tightly to that semi-self-defined course. In the public sphere, politicians who change their minds are lambasted by their critics. Over the course of the recent pandemic changing guidelines and responses drew salvos from all quarters. People want One Thing; anything more draws complaint and criticism.

Fuck it. We change. Life changes. Only an idiot sails into a hurricane (I’m thinking of you, dad) because that was the course he set months in advance. Granted, change is not easy, except when we are young and change is a daily and inevitable event—the voice, the hair, the height, the hormones. What’s the line from “Bittersweet Symphony”—“I’m a million different people from one day to the next?” A million may be too much, but just when you think, “Finally, the One Thing!” along comes life. Maybe we should take a lesson from all those years of change. Maybe.

At the end of the play, Fagin sings, “Can somebody change? It’s possible. Maybe it’s strange, but it’s possible.” Okay, I’ll own that connection. But really, possible? I can’t help but think that it would be horrible to be one person all one’s life. I clamor for the fourth and fifth act—or the 1001 Nights. I splash in Heraclitus’s river, changed and changed and changed again.

Why else write? Even these pieces are meant to dip into the river. Even when I visit and revisit a work of art, my parents, love, teaching, or writing—they are all stops at some bend, newly dug by the course of time. The writing barely binds them together.

“But they’re all about you.” As if. They’re just stories, ramblings and meditations on this strange journey. And really, they are all for you—the same as when I sang as Fagin. I’m singing to you, kid. Always.

Writer at play

I was in my classroom one morning in April of 2021, but later in the month, so no fooling. and Mike Hughes, the director of my school’s theater program, stopped by. “I have an idea,” he said and asked whether I had been on the stage or sang. “We’re putting on Oliver! next spring, and I think you would be a good fit for Fagin.”

Here’s the skinny: I had a small part in a school play in the 6th grade and again in the 8th grade (King Ferdinand in a historical pageant). My mother made my costume—a cape—by ironing brown stripes onto a cheap yellow beach towel. In high school, I sang in the choir—we sang four days a week, and I could read the music for about a year. There was a play in Philadelphia—an avant-garde piece about the French Revolution; I was recruited by regular customers at my restaurant in Manayunk for this strange one-night venture. The congregation I served might remember me singing “Jingle Bells” during a holiday service and when a minister asked me to mime a juggler while she read Robert Fulghum’s “The Juggler.” Another holiday performance. That’s my resume.

Maybe you’ll argue that teachers are always on stage, and up to a point, that’s true. But one of the reasons we teach is to have our own meager fiefdom to direct what we will. Whether you do it, either as a sage on the stage or facilitator par excellence, your class is your own. Every class reflects its teacher, and even Bibliographic Methods could have been a lively and engaging experience (it wasn’t). Putting yourself in the hands of a director and in service to someone else’s vision—all those words, all that music—requires an entirely different discipline.

The closest I ever came was reading my work in front of a live audience. I recall the first time at a Friday night graduate school event. I was anxious, and the poet Ruth Stone told me that anxiety was an appropriate emotion any time you do something meaningful. Later, when I read for a panel of judges, I admitted my nerves—I am always too honest about such things—and was counseled by them to treat them like my students. I was a young teacher at the time but already a classroom performer. I once swam across a run of tables to demonstrate the difference between simile and metaphor. Either one does, or one does not do—there is no “like.”

The short of it—I have virtually no experience on the stage. Did I tell Mike Hughes that? Yes. I visited him in his office to confirm that the only time I sang in front of people and actually made an effort was when I sang “Angel from Montgomery” with two students at an open mic event. His colleague, who had heard me, commented that I could good relative pitch. As if I knew what that was.

However, a teacher’s job is to get out of the way and let our students succeed or fail on their own terms. When I mentioned that I had been “recruited” to take part in the school musical, someone I had just met suggested that I should let a student take the part. Even if I had been invited, even if I knew that my school was currently short on depth, was I extinguishing a nascent flame? Nonetheless, I asked my colleagues, and they trusted that the request came from a place of need and respect.

But, what was I thinking? How much I can possibly suck crosses my mind at every rehearsal. If I haven’t performed, I have watched my share of excellent and delightful performances. And star turns that should have been eclipsed. We all have. This is not simply “imposter syndrome” run wild. I have done nothing like this before.

Daring and humility are uncommon psychic partners, and I am often genuinely ambivalent. People who almost know me make the mistake of either seeing my geysers of chutzpah or my lakes of self-doubt. In “The Waking,” Roethke writes, “This shaking keeps me steady”; my two minds do that dance. If only there were just two. In the second of his thirteen ways, Wallace Stevens offers this:

I was of three minds

Like a tree

In which there are three blackbirds.

A writer must learn to inhabit at least two minds—the writer’s mind and the reader’s mind. A fiction writer is even more fractured. We are, as often as possible, out of our minds. I was going to write, “Perhaps I embraced this too late in life, but better late than, well, you know.” I spent years in the maelstrom of one, then the other, then the other. And then, and then, and then. I have learned how to push the storm forward or in some direction. I won’t get stuck swirling on one spot, a dervish without purpose.

What does this have to do with playing Fagin? Taking a risk and facing doubt expands the mind. And learning to do something new—working at it and, possibly, finding success—opens the world. I could claim that I took on the part of Fagin—leader of a band of thieves—because he has something to do with the characters I am writing about (thieves). While this is true, doing something I had never done before—committing to a process and seeing it through to its end—drove my choice.

A writer must explore possibilities—this is the heart of Socrates’s dictum about the unexamined life. Too often, people quote “the unexamined life is not worth living” to justify the attitude that life is like a buffet and every morsel must be piled onto one’s plate. “I tried it” is not the same as “I examined it.”

And so, I played. I will continue to play. As should you, dear reader—and dear writer. There are worlds to examine and lives to live.

Art and Intention

My friends ask what I have planned for the weekend; it’s part of the Friday small talk. “Oh, you know,” I answer, and they do. Every Sunday, I go to museums in Washington DC. They comment, “How nice,” or “How peaceful,” or “How beautiful.” I think they believe that I am some kind of sybarite, grabbing my croissant, then luxuriating in the presence of beautiful things. Maybe there’s a bit of that. Maybe.

Calder, Animals

It’s not just the company of beautiful things; I could just as easily take a walk in the woods—on occasion I do—or on the beach. With all its complexity and contradiction, nature puts me back in my place in the world; these britches won’t get too big. I’m only one part of the play. As far as it goes, I’m reminded of the Bible passages about the birds of the air that neither reap nor sow—nature strikes me that way. Yes, of course, great energies are expended—the gazelle dashing away from the lion’s maw; the salmon casting itself against the rapids; the seedling bursting through fire-charred earth—but reaping and sowing implies a plan. Nature happens without a plan, gods aside. It just does, even if it finds a way.

Jackson Pollock, Number 1, 1950 (Lavender Mist), 1950

Yes, there are accidents in museums—unplanned gestures captured in stone or on canvas. Pollock surely didn’t know where those drips would land, and when they landed, I suspect that he did not know precisely what shape they would take. But he knew they would land. Art is an intention, even when the artist trusts the random and accidental events surrounding their art. Some artists play with that idea.

An active line on a walk, moving freely, without goal. A walk for a walk’s sake. The mobility agent is a point, shifting its position forward.

Paul Klee

The line may not have a goal—the curve of the jib, the abrupt stop at the end of a nose, a bare limb of a tree in winter—but the artist does. Draw. Write. Make something.

Roxy Paine, Graft, 2008-2009

We keep making things. Their history is the history of intention.

A friend once commented that I never listened to the news, that I always had music playing in the car. I wish. I think I have paid inordinate attention to the news. In the morning, the first thing I do is rummage through the New York Times, as attentive as the man Thoreau criticizes for waking up after a half hour nap to exclaim, “What’s the news?” My rest is longer; my curiosity is commensurate with my rest. “History’s first draft” is a bleak reminder of how rarely intentions meet their desired ends in the world. It is a record of the misguided and misconstrued: proving how poorly we make decisions, how willing we are to follow some unexamined narrative. Music is another made-thing—Bach or Joni Mitchell, Radiohead or Michael Nyman—and stands in counterpoint to the news.

You may argue that some art is misguided and driven by poor decisions. I have friends who railed against Laurie Anderson, Morris Louis, and the Pixies on those grounds. Answers directed by personal preference (But I wanted Donald Trump to win re-election; But the CDC changed its guidelines; But I don’t like how beets look) can lead to all sorts of misguided conclusions. The repercussions vary from the grave (insurrection) to the frivolous (missing out on Chez Panisse’s borscht). Once you get over those prejudices, you see the pattern, and if you are of the mind to, you see your place in that pattern.

Basin (jian) with dragon interlace, Middle Eastern Zhou Dynasty, 500-450 BCE

My weekly wanders are not just a journey through a forest of intentions—I walk through orchards of fulfilled intentions. Oh, you did it this way. Butterfield, Monet, or some unnamed ironworker in China. Thousands of made things—intricately intended things made by human hands—each blaze like a beacon: “Here, find me here.” I learn by going where I have to go.

Playing Fagin

In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing his attention between the frying-pan and the clothes-horse, over which a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging.

Oliver Twist, Chapter 8

When Dickens introduces Fagin, he is called “a very old shrivelled Jew.” Dickens names him as “the Jew” over 100 times in the text of Oliver Twist, calling him “Fagin” nearly 300 times. It is an antisemitic portrayal. George Cruikshank’s illustrations make this characterization resoundingly clear. Yes, Dickens savages the officious Beadle, Mr. Bumble, the weedling undertaker, Mr. Sowerberry, and almost everyone else. Only Mr. Brownlow and the almost angelic Oliver avoid the jaundiced teeth with which Dickens bites into the world of workhouses, thieves, prostitutes, official disdain, privileged arrogance and ignorance, and moral corruption. Nonetheless, the portrayal of Fagin stands out.

Plate 23 from Oliver Twist by George Cruikshank

Of course, Fagin is a criminal. He corrupts the orphans he gathers from the streets and turns them into a gang of thieves, prostitutes, and murderers. He takes as much as he can and relinquishes as little as possible to keep the gang assembled. But compare how Oliver is fed at the workhouse (“three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and half a roll of Sundays”) and how Fagin greets him: sausages. While his love for his “dears” may be tainted with ill-intentions, it is genuine and genuinely creepy. How can he not love the boys and girls who bring him loot?

You may scoff at the idea of Fagin as benefactor and provider, but that is precisely what Dickens is after. If privileged Londoners don’t take generous responsibility, Fagin will father the youth. Dickens does not confuse right and wrong; Fagin is streaked with evil, and the London Constabulary captures and executes him. Dickens may have been a reform-minded writer, but he was no anarchist. But the reformer looms when on the morning of his death, Dickens shows: “A great multitude had already assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking. Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects in the centre of all—the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and all the hideous apparatus of death.” There is no love for this crowd. No golden justice is meted out by a “hideous apparatus.” This is the bad punishing the bad.

I am thinking about Fagin because I am playing him in the musical, Oliver!. Lionel Bart reframes Fagin almost as comic relief, making him far less dark than in the novel. Fagin is still a thief, still a corrupter, but absolute villainy resides in Bill Sikes alone. One unrepentant, irredeemable “bad ‘un” is enough for a musical. Indeed, Fagin escapes at the end, leaving behind “friends and treasures” and contemplating change. It’s possible.

Alec Guinness as Fagin in Oliver Twist, 1948

Portrayals of Fagin have emphasized his Jewish-ness, and not for the better. A hundred years after George Cruikshank’s illustrations, the Anti-Defamation League protested Alec Guinness’s portrayal in David Lean’s 1948 adaptation of the novel. The film did not open in the United States until over ten minutes of Guinness’s scenes as Fagin was cut. Ron Moody was nominated for an Oscar for his performance in Carol Reed’s 1967 film version, and the portrayal has not aged well. While faithful to the source, the source is problematic. Rowan Atkinson took part in the 2009 London revival, and he plays Rowan Atkinson playing Fagin, which considerably softened the antisemitic aspect of the role.

Ron Moody in Oliver! 1967

Dickens is not flawless, but he grew as a writer. His later characterization of villains focused more firmly on the actual villains of this novel—those who failed to honor their official responsibility. While Dickens always relied on quickly recognizable characters, he expanded beyond stereotypes and countermanded readers’ expectations. In Our Mutual Friend, Riah is Jewish and saintly—in James Mardock’s words an “anti-Shylock” and not just an anti-Fagin.

Rowan Atkinson as Fagin in Oliver! 2009

So, I will approach Fagin as a man who has carved out a niche in a broken society. While he advises Nancy that gin is dangerous to a “pure young girl,” he also knows that life is dangerous for everyone who lives outside the warm glow of privilege. Whether by choice, inclination, calling, or nature, if you live outside expected societal norms, you live at risk. I suspect that Dickens knew that Fagin’s Jewishness marked him as an outsider, and even though the portrayal is antisemitic, there is also sympathy. Dickens almost always stood on the side of the outsider. I will stand with that and see where it takes me.

Audience (part two)

So, I posted my workout on Facebook, and one of my friends replied, “sounds like a good swimming workout to me!” Another responded, “Or something rather naughty.” A few weeks later, the woman I was married to threw a log onto whatever fire we were in the middle of and said she was ashamed by what I had posted. Her response did not rise to the level of high dudgeon: “How could you!” Instead, “You’re an embarrassing idiot.” Later in life, one of my blog posts earned a chilly, “Why are you sharing your emotions? It’s just like Taylor Swift.” I should be so lucky to have Taylor Swift’s “readership.” I lay myself bare here—joys and struggles—to let my tiny audience know that they are not alone. I have been in the hole, and I found a way out.

Some of this I learned from other writers. Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle wrote that effective speakers (and writers should think of themselves as speakers) needed to be aware of their own character, the demands of the audience, and, finally, the logic or quality of their arguments. I will not investigate or interrogate your character, and, honestly, character seems less and less an issue these days. Or, just as troublesome, the only issue. I have read excellent work by writers of execrable demeanor, and awful work written by saints. I don’t need my favorite writers to join me for dinner or win my vote in the next election. One hopes for excellence on the page, in public, and in private, but it doesn’t always work that way. Writers, like readers, are human.

As far as the quality of your work, if you have read any of what I have written before, you know that I believe the more you write, the more likely you are to improve. Grit out an hour, two, or six a day and fill the buckets. Murky water will become clear, and with a bit of luck and a ton of persistence, it will transform into decent ale, wine, or smoky whiskey. Are there savants who miraculously produce exceptional work as if their quills were wetted in holy ink? Maybe. While I am sure that lightning strikes, most writers have written gobs before their first miraculous effort arrives on the page. Dickens, Twain, and Marquez wrote for newspapers under deadlines. Virginia Woolf kept dense journals.

But audience…

And here’s the second (the first was process) thing: when you write, you don’t write for yourself. Of course, you write for yourself, to answer some deep-seated god-only-knows-why-I’m-doing-this compunction, but the whole point is to tell. Your words seek another’s ear. Yes, yes, delight yourself and unburden yourself (or profoundly burden yourself) by what you do, but never forget that your words seek an audience. The reclusive Emily Dickinson wrote for God—at once the most daunting and forgiving audience. Joyce wrote the nearly impossible Finnegan’s Wake for a tiny audience—one that was brazen enough, curious enough, playful enough, and willing enough—but the effort was not solipsistic. His claim that if it took seventeen years to write, it should take seventeen years to read is as ponderous a gauntlet to throw down to the reader as any writer should manage. Easy messages (those that surprise but stay within narrower, almost expected bounds) get bigger audiences, but even Dubliners’ original print run was for only 1250 copies. It did better, but he fought hard for that initial print run. You will fight too.

So, write with an audience in mind, and know your audience. Your audience is not everyone (even if it could be anyone), and it is certainly not someone who willfully (and vindictively) misconstrues your meaning. Some people are beyond convincing It could be because of something their parent said, or where they were born, or the weather in Tasmania. If you chase that rabid white rabbit, you will get bitten. You have no control over how the reader feels when they read. With any luck, you will cheer those in need and charm those ready to be diverted and enchanted. Every reader carries baggage to your work, and not all of it will get in the way. Some readers are packed for whatever journey you take them on. Be ready for them. Seriously, they will expect your best work—meet their expectations.

Besides, writers come with our own freightload of luggage; it’s okay. The best you can do is enter into an unspoken contract with your readers to provide something clear and engaging (and in the broadest and most profound sense, entertaining) to read; they will enter into a similar contract to read as generously as they are able.

Not all readers will. Not all readers can. Some are just curmudgeons. Some will comment and criticize for their own delight. I once had a classmate add an illustration of eyes in flight to the margins of one of my fledgling efforts. He said he wanted to remind me that “eyes cannot fly around a room.” The eyes were artfully crafted but perhaps beside the point. Maybe you like that kind of attention. There is something enthralling about gobs of feedback, even down to the level of “Use curly, not straight quotation marks.” Or the other way around. A writer can become mesmerized by confirmation that readers have given their fullest attention even if the attention is toxic.

Let me remind you that some readers refuse to read anything out of their comfort zones, refusing to read a book about football, or only wanting to read books about football. They remind me of my daughter, who always wanted mac n’ cheese no matter where we ate. Some people don’t want a salad with goat cheese, a veggie burger, pasta primavera, or grilled fish. Some people turn their noses up at pecan pie. They aren’t wrong; they just aren’t right for you.

And there is a side to people we must admit. Let me share stories that will put this in sharper relief. On a zoom meeting with fellow faculty (weather kept us home), a number of us displayed our pets. One faculty member chimed in, “I can feel my allergies getting ready to kick in.” Delight, delight, delight, and fuck you. Or, while I sang the praises of hot and sour soup with duck from a Chinese restaurant, one person volunteers, “I don’t like spicy food.” It could have been “I don’t like duck.” Leaving a movie with friends, I shared that I was going home to enjoy a small glass of Lagavulin 16 year old Scotch. “If you like drinking a campfire,” one acquaintance replied. Witty, but really? Humans have a predilection for negativity, and on the other side, we drag negative comments behind us like a chain of money boxes. Oh, the humanity. This negative penchant can be fatal for writers struggling to break the shell between themselves and the world made of words—the world they can and should make.

You are going to need a thick skin. More importantly, you will need a clear vision of the star you hitched your wagon to (some readers will complain about what I just did).

In Salinger’s Seymour: An Introduction, Seymour advises his brother Buddy about writing: “[Y]ou’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer… ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world [you] would most want to read… The next step is terrible, but so simple… You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself.” Remember what delighted you, what amazed you, what made you turn page after page, or read and reread over and over again. What book do you thrust at friends and strangers, exclaiming, “You’ve got to read this!”? Of course, some will complain that they cannot keep all the Aurelianos straight in One Hundred Years of Solitude—you don’t have to be friends with them anymore; it’s okay to make that judgment. I jest. No, I don’t. Yes, I do.

No, I don’t.

Yes, you are the writer, but you are also your first audience. Have you written something that delights, amazes, frightens, shocks, excites, encourages, and engages you? If you have, it stands a chance to do the same for someone else. You might wonder if anyone will publish—or buy—what you write? Keep this in mind: shelves (actual and virtual) are full of product (yes, product) with a range of quality. Write well and let the market settle its own problems.

Be ready. Your audience will want you to guide them, to tickle them, and torment (for the right reasons) them. They will adjust their schedules and expectations when you surprise them. Surprise them!Write for that audience, delight and amaze them. And disregard all others. I think I may have drifted too far into a warning about that other audience, so let me insist that some people will cheer you on—as you work and for your finished work. One of my teachers would always comment “Keep writing!” on my stories whether he liked what I wrote or not. He wouldn’t invite me into the weeds of precisely what he thought I should fix or revise, even if his overall comment was “No,” he still cheered, “Keep writing!”

And so, keep writing. Find your audience. Be more patient with yourself and them. They will come around. So will you.