“seek the path that will demand your whole being” ~ Rumi

Still Sundays.

October 27, 2013.

 

I never imagined any kind of “writing life” because I never saw myself as a writer. When stories came to me as a kid, I didn’t think they were any different than dreams: you don’t grow up wanting to be a “dreamer.” You brush the dreams, the good alongside the not so good ones, in the mornings with your teeth and then you do it again and again. You don’t think about your teeth needing extractions, dentures, or fighting cavities; you just brush on. So it has always been with writing and me. But you do need time to brush. My current dentist tells me that we should brush our teeth for two minutes minimum after every meal, but especially before going to bed. “And what if you are too tired to stand that long at the end of the day?” He laughs and I answer for him, you change what needs to be changed so you are not that tired at the end of the day.

Every once in awhile I allow myself to be convinced a little too easily.  Just a little. And only occasionally. In those rare moments there is no devil’s advocate manufactured by the machine of reality, processed by hyper-self-awareness. In those moments I allow myself to think that maybe I don’t know myself well enough after all. This time I seriously entertained moving to a town like Paducah, Kentucky in my what’s-next-after-California-moments because someone had mentioned Paducah offered relocation money and subsidized housing for artists. I have always done something else in addition to writing, as have most writers before my time, and many continue to do so even in this digital age.  The only difference perhaps is that, unlike me, a lot of them work “in the field” of writing, as in teaching creative writing courses, lectures, workshops, etc. If such employment serves as a consistent source of employment to pay man-made rent to exist on earth and allows the time to actually create something new, even better. I am not those people. Since I didn’t want to “grow up to be a writer” I can’t now fit myself inside some box.  I did want to change the world, mostly for myself because it is too painful to witness the fragile humanity’s dissolution because of a selfish few. I also wrote. The longer I soak in this existence the more convinced I am that there are a myriad of ways to change the world and that constitutes as Art. We definitely need to bring forth more beauty in this world hence I admire murals but we also need to alternatives that make us think and hence murals alone aren’t enough to change the DNA of a city or her people.

Further research led me to learn how Paducah’s incentive program has inspired a few other communities elsewhere in America to implement similar programs. Detroit doesn’t have any yet because you can buy a house there for $100, never mind you may not make it to the next day to create something. Nothing pumps life back into a city like art that moves. Except. Except when such cities decide to discard the very people and projects that once revitalized the city and drew attention and capital from elsewhere. Santa Fe, New Mexico is a perfect example of such a city. Those elected as guardians of the city decide to create imposters for tourism and the charade can continue for a long time. But not forever. Even if I was not allergic to the concept of “creative communities” I wouldn’t consider moving to such places. Inspiration and Time don’t exist in some vacuum within the confines of a particular zip code. It is getting harder and harder for real creative people to find one another despite the barf bag known as “social media”. “Independent” has become a “genre” instead of actually something original. In the span of the last few months I have watched some “independent” films that I can’t even tell apart because they are following some idea of an “independent” film instead of telling a story worth telling.

I don’t need a creative community like some (and I respect others’ needs and desires to connect for whatever personal reasons) but I do need time. Right now I have none. I am immersed in an invisible war that continues on within the boundaries of this country, also known as “education reform.” I thought my experiences in “developing” and “third-world” countries had shown me quite a lot but California—specifically, rural communities in the United States—offer challenges on another level that can make the most experienced educator catch his or her breath. I am thinking about sharing a series of photographs titled: THIS IS NOT DETROIT. THIS IS THE REST OF AMERICA.

The jury is still out on whether the work I am doing in education will be a trailblazing model for other programs to follow once the current White House administration is out or another echo that will be ignored because too many think in terms of “profit” when they hear the word student.

Meanwhile, the highlights of my day consist of interactions with 10-year-olds who inspire me in ways that spin my head. I am persistently awed by how we are born so creative and then fear forces us to play a role. Perhaps later I can share some more on this topic, thoughts such as when this one 10-year-old replied to my query as if I had asked a trick question, “Of course I got the idea to write that from inside me. Where else can ideas come from?!” Or another student: “I figured out a way to remember how to spell significant: sign.if.i.cant!” And then another added, “Now don’t go on misspelling can’t!”

What makes me know with certainty that I am going to continue writing despite lack of time right now? Faith. Faith that the world needs real artists more than anything else who are willing to stand up for truth—there is no such thing as ‘whose truth?’ when it comes to certain universal laws that exist and can’t be denied—and rotate impossibility like a marble. Knuckle down. No Quitsies.

 

 

I close the curtain on this bemused Sunday by sharing words from Lionel Shriver’s latest essay in The New Republic which serves caution against the glamour of the so called creative life.  I am copying and pasting a huge chunk despite the hyperlink because The New Republic doesn’t allow access to the articles for free after some time passes, and I don’t want these precious words to get lost through the Internet’s ozone layer.

Here is to the “reflective life that rightly constitutes the real thing”!  

I’m concerned that my delivery of this cascade of beaverishness might come across as boasting. On the contrary, it serves as both lament and confession. My scribbled diary is a disgrace. Taken as a whole, my upcoming schedule does not remotely represent the life I signed up for when I was seven years old. […]

These admittedly elective diversions are all on top of a host of ongoing botherations bound to confront any fiction writer foolish enough to have poked a head above the public parapet: beseechings to blurb other writers’ books (therefore read them). Requests to review other writers’ books (therefore read them—and because reviewers are only paid for their own wordage, these assignments pay about 25 cents an hour; for your trouble, the author will probably hate you). Essays like this one. Solicitations of quotes (free quotes) to fill out other journalists’ articles. Book launch invites. Charity appeals for signed, annotated first editions to be auctioned at tedious galas at which your attendance is expected and for which you have nothing to wear. Interview requests from foreign newspapers, asking you to discourse at length about a novel of which you are not only tired but, said book being two or three publications back and only now coming out in Greek, you don’t even remember. Website and book supplement demands for “your favorite book,” “your five favorite books,” “your ten favorite books,” “the book that changed your life,” “your book recommendations for Christmas,” and “your favorite summer beach reads.” Importunings to judge literary prizes, which means you can’t even win them. I may boycott social networking, but e-mail is bad enough, and for many of my colleagues, Facebook and Twitter must easily leech, as Kazuo Ishiguro would say, the remains of the day.

Meanwhile, any author is now expected to pull out all the stops for a book release. The more publishing in aggregate gets hysterical about the end of literature as we once knew it—I personally am not the only agent of insecurity here—the more their publicists are frantic for writers to accept any opportunity whatsoever to attract attention. This means setting weeks aside, or—in the case of writers who publish simultaneously in the English-speaking territories of Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United States, and the U.K., as I do—up to four months aside for e-mail, radio, and TV interviews; unrelenting photo shoots when you have already used up your small, tawdry wardrobe on the last book release; yet more festival and bookstore appearances; and scads of journalistic assignments: features and comment pieces riffing on the nonfiction subjects nominally related to your novel, filler slots like “My Favorite Thing,” or lazy, personal bare-alls to make yourself seem interesting. But considering how you spend most of your time—repeating yourself ad nauseam—you are not interesting.  So: When does a novelist write novels? Writing the books themselves gets fit in here and there, like making time for taking out the trash before bed. I have grown perversely nostalgic for my previous commercial failure—when my focus was pure, and the books were still fun to write, even if nobody read them. […]

The attraction of this occupation should not be its ancillary perks. Hence I not only worry about publishing’s entire economic infrastructure imploding, as single talented voices are drowned by a populist clamor of amateurs eager to be read on the Internet for the price of a double-click. I also worry about writers of the near future who make it—only to blog, tweet, e-mail, text, and Facebook their precious time away; only to be swept up in the confoundingly elaborate architecture of appearances, celebrity profiles, website questionnaires, and photo spreads built atop the fragile foundation of a lone imagination at a desk. For scrawls in an author’s diary readily become either excuses to procrastinate or objects of justifiable resentment as competition for the solitary, reflective life that rightly constitutes the real thing.