Learning

Hopefully

I’ve been trying to understand how I could be having the best few months I’ve had in decades, possibly ever, while at the same time watching the horrors of the world and the encroaching evil of Trumpian fascism at the same time.

But that’s what’s been happening.

To be sure, part of it is that I’ve been limiting how much of the horrors I’ll absorb. I can’t decide if it’s fatalism or wisdom that’s telling me that the calls and donations and votes that I contribute —spitting into the hurricane— are all I can do, and that either the Powers That Be will fuck up enough or interrupt enough to make things better, or they won’t. But at some point I gave up trying harder and harder and harder to do something.

I haven’t stopped doing what I was doing, but when people are still saying “But Kamala would have been worse,” you know that racism and stupidity have won out, at least for now.¹

So I’ll walk the beagle. I’ll read books. I’ll listen to books. Hell, I’ll write books. And I’ll still call and donate and vote, but the biggest lesson in this has not been how evil men are. It’s how entitled, lazy, avoidant, racist, and passive even our friends are.

We are not who I thought we were.

Which leads me to fiction.

My class with Kelli Jo Ford, as I mentioned last time, was quite great (as is her book), but among the interesting things that occurred there was when she looked me in the eye, after I’d read a piece I’d written, and said, “You’re going to keep writing this and turn it into a book, right?”

The Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, Massachusetts

Spoiler alert: It involved killing Jim, my building inspector. It’s kind of what I do. Through NYC Midnight competitions Jim has been smothered by a flapper ghost in a movie theater, poisoned with Ivermectin at a school reunion, doomed to be trapped in a diving bell for the rest of time off the Texas coast, and eaten by lions in a colosseum game in front of cheering crowds.

Not to brag, but I think I’m pretty good at killing Jim. So perhaps, indeed, I’ll try my hand at writing fiction next, as I keep chipping away at the memoir. The revising and revisiting could, and might, go on forever, so it’s time to think about other things to work on while that goes on.

The time off of Substack has indeed allowed me to focus more on the work I need to do to get the book out into the world, as dreary as much of that work is. I remind myself regularly that nobody asked me to do this, and so bitching and moaning about it is fine, but taking that bitching and moaning too seriously is not.

So more editing (I like that part), more querying (hate it), more worrying about “platform,” meaning thinking of articles to write that might get published somewhere (more querying), so that I can add them to my list of Things I’ve Published.

To that end, my second week of class at FAWC was with Nick Flynn, who is a massively talented poet, writer, visual artist, a nice guy and, for me, a difficult man to learn from. He talked a lot about gathering thoughts, and I spent much time wondering why it felt like we were spending so much energy scattering them. Yet he’s got more books and awards than you can shake a stick at, and his first book, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, is phenomenal. It was turned into a movie starting Robert DeNiro, called Being Flynn.

Nick has lived a thousand lives, none of them easy, and I have nothing but respect for him and his writing. He strews and gathers, and he does it with brilliance. He takes “resonant lines” from stuff he’s read or written, then writes from them, then riffs from those brief written pieces, from which he then creates more written pieces. At the end of each week he reviews what he’s done, and sees if he’s got a theme or thought process going, and eventually conglomerates those pieces into something bigger. In his case, that often leads to something great.

I’m going to try and do this practice for a while, because while I spent most of the week flailing, I did come up with a couple of things that might, maybe, could be turned into essays I could pitch. Not exactly sure to who.

The one thing I learned for sure was that I’m no Nick Flynn². But I also learned a new way of coming up with ideas that may be helpful to this neophyte trying to climb her way into the playpen with the big kids.

Meanwhile, I’ve got a friend who’s a brilliant writer and science-brainiac. She’s one of those people who acts, and is, nice to everyone. You can take her anywhere. She’s very weird that way. However, secretly she’s also fantastically impish, which makes her even funner³ to know. She sent me “The Prince’s Panties” video, and what better way to end my two weeks of learning?

Mason Williams wrote Classical Gas, which most of us above a certain age will remember.

But he’s also a comedian, a writer (including for Saturday Night Live), a photographer, an environmentalist, and a doer of good deeds and political satire.

And this.

Whatever this is, it’s the perfect reminder that the creative process is optional⁴, and should include fun.

I’ll continue my sporadic posting as I push my way through this part of the editing and querying process. May the rest of August be kind to you and your “panties.”

1. Willful blindness and “moral code” fit squarely into both of those categories, as does anything religious-slash- “homeland” based. If you’re one of those people and are thinking this doesn’t apply to you, I’m afraid it very much does. Let me know if you’d like help working through that.

2. Who, rightfully, could pitch to anyone and at least be considered. Plus he’s a better writer than me.

3. I’ll die on the hill that “funner” is a word that should be used often.

4. Yes, yes, I know creating isn’t optional for some of us, but nobody’s ever forced anyone to pitch a book.