Sometimes, poetry is not good, rejuvenating long-dead memories when one graded The Poetry Assignment as written by thirteen-year-olds. Sometimes, the poet shoots invisible needles of meaning, millions of them, ripping, zipping through me, nailing me to where I sit.
[once again grabbed by the poetry of James G. Piatt as featured on Ephemeral Elegies]
I have been ‘gestating’ a piece more than two months in the making. A friend of mine quoted an author to a small group of us in email, which prompted my reaction, “why do we like what we like?” a question which has tormented me for nearly 20 years. This writing has begun, and I am reasonably certain Part One will appear prior to the end of the year. Like the mother above in the photo, when the egg hatches is not a certain, well-timed thing.
Inadvertently, I have discovered I’ve always been meant to essay.
Today I pulled down a dozen issues of Granta, with the intent to pluck the issue I once received which had travel writing as a theme. This I would gift to my brother with whom I share a love of good travel writing: Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Bill Bryson, et al. Because these issues were from the 1980s, I reasoned, this would be a fun backwards look at writers we now respect, writers who were but beginning to be known at the time.
For those who remain unfamiliar with Granta, its existence since 1889 as an outlet for literary exploration has been a source of refreshment to us literati (of which I am only an acolyte). Founded by students at Cambridge University, the publication fell on hard times in the 1970s. It was acquired by postgrads and their friends and relaunched in 1979 as a quarterly publication. I subscribed somewhere around 1986 or 1987 and continued through 1990.
In an oddly fortunate turn, I couldn’t find the issue I remember, “In Trouble Again” which featured a panoply of then-current travel writers. Perhaps I gave it to him already? No matter. It caused me to look through all of the issues I have, those from Spring 1987 to Spring 1990 plus an issue I think was a bonus for subscribing, volume #8 from 1983. (I believe the issue I’m looking for was also a bonus issue.) In looking through all of my issues, which I have not since the early 1990s, I realized what fantastic writing it is. I want to read these pieces again, all of them. Here is Hanif Kureishi writing “With Your Tongue Down My Throat” back when he only was known for writing plays, and not many of those. Multiple issues feature Bruce Chatwin and Bill Bryson. Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Mario Vargas Llosa. Jay McInerney (Mr. “Bright Lights, Big City”). Ryszard Kapuscinski, wandering the world as a Polish communist. Salman Rushdie. And certainly I should but don’t recognize some of the other names out of the volumes I just pulled at random.
When I left off with Granta I instinctively turned to other sources of expository writing: Pushcart essay collections, books by Nicholson Baker (A Box Of Matches), Verlyn Klinkenborg (The Rural Life), Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem), Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek), and Making Waves, a collection of essays by Mario Vargas Llosa. I reveled in a large book purchased for $2 from a used bookstore in Hobart, New York, (population 400-something), The Art of the Personal Essay, an anthology of essays from the classical era to the present curated by Phillip Lopate.
From when I was 13 I fancied myself a writer. As I’ve detailed in other pieces, I beat my head against the wall of You Are A Writer Of Fiction. It has always appealed to me because you invent the stories out of your head. You don’t have to go research anything, you don’t have to be an expert, you don’t have to go interview people, you don’t have to do anything but be creative. I grew up, though, and learned that yes, you do need to do these things to be successful (i.e., make enough money to not starve).
Yet after I took this literary excursion I realized I have arrived where I always wanted to be. Essayists do not make special efforts to research so that they can write. They usually write out of experience, wisdom, and self-contained knowledge. They do not attempt to follow a structure to ‘hook’ the reader or create characters who will follow the inevitable crisis-obstacles-solution-redemption cycle which ‘guarantees’ success. They do not attempt to sway society through pithy and incisive novels commenting on the human condition. Essayists just write. They attempt to entertain themselves, yet write to a wider audience. They seek to illuminate an idea, a feeling, a place, a time, a memory, a person, and sometimes several of these at once. What they don’t do is attempt anything grand. In essence, they don’t “attempt” anything. They just write.
I’ve been bemused that after 15 months this site has yet to see one piece of fiction. I had thought to post short stories and micro-novellas here, but nothing has moved me to do so. I’ve just written, and what gets published has been poetry and essays. So be it. We write what we write.
Perhaps at an earlier age I would have attempted to force myself through other hoops. Practicing certain techniques, I might have become adept at it, enjoyed it, and then you would (maybe) be reading those works of fiction. It has not been thus. My entire writing life has been 99% expository writing: a journey of persuasion, reflection, explanation, instruction, and self-discovery. As Ursula Le Guinn wrote in A Wizard of Earthsea, “The truth is that as a man’s real power grows and his knowledge widens, ever the way he can follow grows narrower: until at last he chooses nothing but does only and wholly what he must do.”
My one-draft-and-done approach to college papers, my write-on-a-deadline life as a reporter makes it such that I must hold myself back from hitting the Publish button reflexively. What might be “good enough” isn’t usually good enough. I have an exhilarating freedom, however, in writing from my heart and my experience without worrying where the chips should fall. I guess I’m an essayist. There are worse things to be.
I read a book once. I checked it out of my high school library; I was a sophomore. It was arranged like this, one concept per line, and it explained infinity. A difficult concept, so only one idea per line. It taught me that one infinity can exist inside another, therefore the second infinity's bigger. And if you add "1" to the second infinity, it's bigger than it was before. I read this book while waiting for our wrestling team to compete. I co-managed the team, and I relished being the one to watch the locker room during matches meaning I could read uninterrupted for a long time. This book both increased, and decreased, my awe for The Infinite, and it did nothing to explain how more than fifty years later I see/feel/understand what went through my head as I read this book while young men in stretchy uniforms grabbed each other's crotch.
“After writing a poem, one should wipe carefully and wash one’s hands.”
"I am humblified beyond audaciousness,
Transquilified through personal capacity
To mentify I had talent."
First, last, and I guess always, I am a reporter. If given facts I can spin them, quickly, making gold where others see dross. As Will Sonnett said, “No brag. Just fact.” Combined with a natural inquisitiveness, a need to understand what I was looking at/hearing, a need to make sense of things, it all served me well. I used these skills to write important documents for drug manufacturers when I knew only a little science and even less engineering. Asking questions make you seem intelligent, it seems, at least if they’re intelligent questions. (Yes, Virginia, there are stupid questions.)
For that reason, I’m redirecting this blog. The poems and essays won’t disappear, but I will write more frequently if I indulge my many ideas playing across my mind, ideas which don’t fit neatly into the holes for “essay” or “poem”.
I spent my teenaged years with a significant amount of time at the kitchen table just talking with my mother. She liked to talk. I like to talk. When the conversation turned to “what are you thinking for your future?”, my response was, “Ideally, I would have a job where I could just talk like this and make money from it.”
I partially achieved that when I graduated from college (finally–it took an “extra’ 18 months) and started working as a news editor/reporter on a weekly newspaper. I listened, I wrote, I published, I basked in the glory…or rather, I got paid a paltry wage that seemed a gift from heaven. After moving to another paper, though, I realized, “hey, I don’t really like going out to find things that people are saying or worse, aren’t saying but we really would like to know. I want to just say things from the heart of me, from inside. I don’t want to have to go find it.” Truthfully, going out there and trying to drum up stories seemed like work.
So I went into teaching. That was great. Except that I realized after nine years…I don’t really love kids, not like my fellow teachers said they did. It was a great run, taught me a lot about being assertive and ‘out there’, gave me a great background in labor issues when I negotiated the collective bargaining agreement with the school district’s administrators (or later, lawyers), but in the end I just accepted that as much as I liked TALKING for six or seven hours a day, this wasn’t my gig.
I decided to realize my dream of being a freelance writer, i.e., a writer who writes what he wants and somehow makes a living at it. I had no idea how to do that, and basically learned over 15 months that I had absolutely no discipline to do this for a living. I entered the business world, used my skills at writing, analyzing, and computing to make a very successful career. But…..
Writing manufacturing process assessments and standard operating procedures (SOP’s) didn’t permit the craziness to get out. I found minor ways to let it out, but they were limited. Some semi-anonymous vice-president isn’t interested in my poem about the reality deep in my hidden soul. After more than a decade of this, Facebook seemed okay for this sort of thing, at least a little….
Pissing away my writing skills on Facebook festered like a chancre. I harbored the desire to write. After this, after that, I started this blog in September 2021. Now, a year later, I realize the need to write WEIGHTY STUFF just isn’t there, not in the sense that it’s going to happen here on a regular basis. Maybe it’s the lack of discipline thing again. Accordingly, ….
I’m repurposing this blog. It will be the lengthy post I could never do on Facebook, the chattiness that drives my wife crazy, the off-the-cuff observations that might not have any substantial exposition. What is written may fuel the more substantial things which will appear also.
One piece of writing has been sitting for twenty days at this point, waiting to be born. If I worked solidly at others, that wouldn’t be an issue, but that’s not what is happening. The piece of writing I reference had a timeliness which said “publish me quickly”. That hasn’t happened, and now it needs to rewritten. I need to keep priming the pump with whatever is on my mind, even if it’s not sufficiently weighty or well-written. I need to be chatty again.
Here we go.
I’ve waited more than three months, I’ve written it in prose, then verse, then a different verse, then rewritten the prose. This may be as close as I get, and it’s not to my liking, yet I’m publishing it to get it off the e-desk and out of my mind.
Two Voices Debate
“There are rules,” she said. “Rules rule.” Pitiably, I Know what she means. ============================= Put the colored pencils in Sequence according to height, Says my ten-year-old inner voice. Nice. Now rearrange by color, Rainbow-like. (Look up the spectrum If you must, Kenny.) Now, Place the colors violet through green, Left to right, into your rack with space between, because… Double back the ‘light’ colors from Right to left, ending with red between Violet and blue. Good! But now, Arrange them alphabetically By color name. Now put them Away. We’ve no time to actually Do anything with them. Besides, You’re no artist anyway. ============================= When you walk to school, step Precisely between the expansion Seams of the concrete sidewalk. If there’s a crack, step in the bigger Piece still between the seams. For extra points, step equidistantly From each seam. No care for Mother’s back in all this—just Walking how you color… ============================= Oh, beautiful algebra! Lovely Geometry! Your rules so pristine, Your road to explainability, to All’s-right-with-the-worldness. And Diagramming sentences! Who cares If it’s useless? It’s beauty cannot Be denied! Science, though, Its physics, its chemistry, its Squishy biology stuff, no, Not abstract enough, not In-your-head enough. Too Practical, too mundane. ============================= You have to call her, man. But…today? Is three days a Proper amount of lead time? Would twenty-four hours be Too little? Would it be better if I called in the afternoon or Evening? Oh, why did I ever ask Her out in the first place? “You know, I think I’m not going To go to the prom this year after all.” ============================= ”No, I’m not going to wait twenty Minutes to eat, especially if I have To wait outside. It’s cold.” He drives Off spending forty minutes to Save twenty minutes. ============================= “We could gas up there.” Wrong side Of the road. “There’s one.” Nope. “Too seedy. There’s one!” but, Crap, every pump’s occupied. Ding! Your car says, "feed me". ============================= “Isn’t life too difficult this way?” Asks Creative-Emotive Voice. “Can’t We take it easy? Just roll with it?” Try that. Good too. Shut Obsessive- Controlling Voice into its compartment Deep within one’s gray cells. Overrule Edicts for living, for walking, for performing Every. Single. Act. Of. Human. Existence. “If you’re going to be A Writer, how Do you expect to do it listening to That Guy? Feel your heart surging? Sure you do. How can you ignore it By following these silly rules?” Drink too much. Eat too much. Drug Too much. Watch movies while Neglecting one’s bills, one’s friends, One’s social reason for being… One’s stated creative urges. But: Give Rulemaker his short leash. Gentle grid of rules on fields of Creative abandonment. Create. Create. And create. Short Circuit all words with singing, With photography, with poetry (yes), With—of all things—computer Programming. (“How can I fail At explaining what I do When I program?” Sorry, Dude, no words involved then, No words available now.) ============================= Uneasily, after many misstarts to One’s Life Direction, Let them both talk. Let one Over-rule the other, let one Overrule the other. Blend, Mend, learn Selective Voice Attention Mode. Leaving one Question, one conundrum: who selects which Voice? Who are you? Who are “You”?
During my adult years I developed a letter-writing habit. Perhaps it was always there, instilled by people who could count on nothing so much as a letter. Phones were problematic. Nothing else existed for communication except telegrams–“someone better be dying or sending us money”–or an in-person visit. Obviously one didn’t jump in the car and drive 285 miles across the state just to discuss the weekly news, find out the latest on your cousin’s marriage, or to shoot the breeze. (I’ll admit that in college on several occasions I more or less did the latter: I would pick up and travel a couple hundred miles or so just to say “hi” to the family, and as a young man I would routinely drive dozens of miles on a whim late in the afternoon to catch a dinner in a nearby city or visit a girlfriend or somesuch.)
Ultimately no other communications medium served the role of the letter–certainly not telephones. During the first ten years of my life (into the early-1960s), my family paid only for party-line phone service. When you picked up the phone, if someone was talking, you just put the receiver back on the cradle of the desktop-model black telephone. In addition to scrimping on telephone charges by having a party line, my parents learned from their parents that one didn’t make long distance calls on whims, one didn’t linger on long distance calls when they were made, and one didn’t call collect except in the most dire of emergencies. Today’s ubiquitous carrying of a smartphone makes one instantly available. Today our calling plans include the costs of everything–long distance, calls between carrier systems, voice mail, the addition of extra lines, and the ability to download data to our handheld computers. It makes the concept of the desk-bound black telephone seem a relic from further back in the past than just 50 or 60 years.
Habitually writing a letter, though, became ingrained into me even as others my age leaned into the idea that long distance phone calls could be made more often. I’m sure the phone company (there was but one no matter where you lived) made it easier somehow, with a calling plan or discounts or something. My family wrote. It hadn’t been a long time since letters were the only form of communication other than telegrams (see above). My grandparents were born just as telephones were being introduced to the world. It took many years for telephone lines to be strung to all the corners of rural America. One wrote, and one wrote often. Young men with reputations to uphold stayed at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) where they were encouraged to “write your mother”. My parents undoubtedly had access to telephones in their homes–especially my mother since her father worked for the telephone company. Beyond the house, in the dormitories and fraternities/sororities of college, and perhaps even as new graduates, they didn’t have their own telephones. Letters sufficed.
I remember the letters from my father’s parents (mostly his mother) which arrived weekly. Grandma would type them on thin onion-skin paper so that she could put carbon paper between two pieces of paper and thereby make a copy as she typed. One would be sent to my father, her elder son, and one to my uncle, the younger son. To be fair, grandma would alternate pages of the carbon with originals because the carbon copy was fuzzier. A three or four page letter would alternate between black (original) and blue (copy) pages. That was a lot of news! Grandma believed in not wasting the paper. Margins were about 1/4 to 3/8 of an inch all the way around; the letters were single-spaced.
My mother’s parents were less frugal. My grandfather’s employment entitled them to lower-cost telephone service, and my grandmother was more likely to pick up the telephone to communicate, usually on a Saturday morning. I know this seems to negate what I wrote earlier, but this was an exception due to Grandpa’s privileged employment status. These calls were not frequent: no more than two per month. I believe my grandfather wrote his only daughter occasionally, putting pen to paper longhand like many people did, writing cursively.
My parents thus inculcated letter-writing into me, a habit which has not been broken these 50 years since I left home. Our communications became much more frequent and regular with the advent of email. For the last 15-20 years of their lives, my parents would email a letter to my brother and me, usually on a Saturday. My brother and I would each respond to that letter with our own, and the weekly news would be transmitted. In the two years since my mother died and left us to our own devices, my brother and I continue to send the weekly weekend emails, although we also use texting for shorter notes. It pains me to see this skill die out as younger people today disdain email entirely and communicate in other, more terse formats. After thousands of years the letter appears to be dying out as a common form of communication between friends and family members. This rewiring of our brain and of society does not bode well. Humans, never great at believing the best about strangers, have retreated into communication silos out of which we had only recently been attempting to break.
I doubt I will see the next evolution in communications between friends and family members unless someone comes up with a method to visit one another in person easily and on a whim, a la the transporter we see in our sci-fi stories. The face-to-face video calls (FaceTime, et al) would seem to bridge the gap between letters and that instantaneous travel. It will have to do. I don’t see the point: an emailed letter is more convenient because it doesn’t demand that I drop everything to answer it. The video call won’t permit me to derisively laugh at the foibles of others (without their knowledge), encourages me to make sure my bladder is empty, doesn’t let me study the words to make sure I understand what the sender wants me to understand, and gives me nothing to refer back to an hour later. On the other hand they permit the sharing of laughter, of music, of certain sights which might be within the range of the device. Ultimately, though, the video call remains a “call” and not a literary device–and for that reason I mourn its seeming demise.
As I do near daily, I’ve been perusing the sale books on Kindle (thoughtfully curated for me by two purveyors who I presume must get a cut). Ivan Doig, an author of the Pacific Northwest and the northern tier through Montana, has a book there today, Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America. Unlike most of his books, this one is nonfiction, described as a long-distance dialog between the author and a 19th century American named James Gilchrist Swan. Swan wrote, in Doig’s estimation, about 2.5 million words in his daily diary entries spanning four decades. Doig caught my parents’ eye several decades back, and they bought several of his works. They also made time to go to his readings at Auntie’s bookstore in Spokane, WA, where they lived. The more frequently I see Doig’s works highlighted in this e-book missives, the more I regret not taking the books with me when my brother and I settled up their estate after our mother died in 2019.
But this book evoked other feelings and led to these sentences. Intrigued by the book’s premise, I read the sample of it provided by Amazon. The simple manner in which Doig details how he came to write the book brought a pause. Doig describes first how his encounter with Swan and his diaries led Doig to think he would need to write about it. He found later that the man’s couple dozen careers and other numerous interests couldn’t be contained to the short format of a magazine article, Doig’s then stock in trade. He eventually spent three winter months along the coasts of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound, stomping around Swan’s environs as he read the diaries. Doig carried on a diarist-to-diarist conversation with Swan and thus the book was born and published in 1980. (I am taking some license here since I’ve only read the sample online.)
Doig’s ease and compulsion to write fascinates, irritates, motivates, and ultimately frustrates me. At 68 I still pursue the dream that One Day I Will Be A Writer. I have spent half my lifetime failing at that, another half ignoring it, and this past year I’ve attempted to resuscitate this dream which will not die. All of this is despite the evidence that I lack the one thing that would define me as A Writer in my own eyes: writing, on a regular basis; writing, because I had to; writing because there were sentences and paragraphs and chapters which must be written down to get them out of my head. I simply have shown myself time and again that I much prefer other things to writing. I lack the self-discipline to do it, despite having the discipline to do such things as track my daily alcohol consumption for the past ten years, to sing in choirs, to act in plays, to watch hours of television every day, to cook, oh my god, to cook.
This seeming lack of will to consummate a stated dream came to a head in 1992 when, needing a fresh start after a divorce–“if you’re a writer, why aren’t you writing,” she said–I quit teaching English to 13-year-olds (a near-pointless occupation in my opinion) and headed across the continent to Philadelphia. There, I told myself and dozens of others, “I will be a writer!” I rented an apartment that was not cheap, my first mistake. It was around the corner from a woman I was dating, my second mistake. When the checks from my former school district ran out, I cashed out my teacher’s pension. This may or may not have been mistake from the Life Dream perspective, but it definitely was a mistake from the financial perspective: it cost me 10% in penalties but it was enough to live on for a year. (Nine years of teaching for one year’s income. Seems inherently wrong.)
I took a part-time job as a proofreader for business correspondence in an attempt to stretch the pension withdrawal further. This proved to be a mistake because I had to do it from 4 a.m. to 7 a.m. which in turn caused me to invert my daily cycle. I had a beer and ate dinner around 8 a.m., then went to bed. I woke at 2 to 3 in the afternoon, ate breakfast, took care of personal business, and attempted to write for a few hours while waiting for my love interest to get back from giving dance lessons to the bored. This usually occurred around 9 to 10 p.m., so I would then find myself drifting off to sleep again around midnight, only to wake at 3:30 a.m. and repeat the whole thing. It left me in a mental daze, partly because the job devolved into only three days a week (Monday-Wednesday-Friday), and I would attempt to return to a normal cycle the rest of the time. I also joined a choral group at the local community college and began classes to join the Roman Catholic Church. These activities impacted the odd schedule too. Looking back, I see that I developed a lingering depression of sorts, not deep, but enough to kill any initiative to do anything. Throughout my life I’ve repeatedly quit activities that required one to hustle a job. Why I thought it would be different this time, I do not know.
I have pictured myself as a writer since I was 13 years old. My language arts teacher one day barked out, “Pilcher! Where’d you learn to write?” When I told him it mostly came from my parents and their love of language, he said, “You should consider writing for a career.” Boom. I was screwed from that point forward. Despite a continual set of data from my schools regarding suitable careers for my talents and preferences (as indicated by now-dubious tests), I persisted in thinking I would be a writer. Not just any writer, but a writer of fiction. High school brought a two-year sojourn into journalism and caused me to apply to the University of Montana for its then-renowned School of Journalism. I began having second thoughts after I was accepted but while still in high school. I had returned to “creative writing” as we called it then. For reasons that will be detailed elsewhere, I spent my entire freshman year of college without ever entering the School of Journalism either academically or physically (to the best of my recollection). With no idea what I really wanted to do–where was my drive to be a writer then?–I dropped out of college to build up cash for another stab at it. And no, I didn’t write in the 15 months I spent working before re-entering college. This time I wasn’t going to be a writer, but a recording engineer…until I switched majors to radio-television news. Not liking the idea of doing that for a living, I attempted to build my own major out of R-TV news and Economics, which would’ve caught the eye of any college advisor of the past 30 years, but back then did not. I dropped out of college again and attempted to write short stories. I did not write many, finished fewer, and none were good.
After five months of this I said to myself, “If you don’t get your ass back in college for real, you’re never going to get a degree. Just get a journalism degree. If you’re on deadline, you have to write.” I enrolled in yet a third institution (the University of Washington), got the degree, and went to work for a weekly newspaper in the Puget Sound area. There I took photographs, sold a little advertising, wrote enough news to fill five or six pages every week, pasted it all together, and drove it to the printer’s shop every Tuesday morning. After three years I moved across the state and did more or less the same thing except in a more professional setting. Within nine months I had gained an editorial position (pretty much doing the same thing except with more pages to fill), had met the woman who became my first wife, and quit to get a teaching degree. I disliked that reporting required you to go out and find the news. I disliked much more that I had to sell ads on the side. Too much hustling. My fiancée taught. “We can have summers off together.” Sounded good to me.
Which brings me full circle. How can one regard oneself as a writer but not write? I’ve known speed junkies who dashed out drivel and thought they had written the beginnings of the next Great American Novel. I’ve known persons who write anecdotal stuff similar to a bad holiday newsletter, publish it on Facebook, and get a few hundred responses all saying, “you should publish this! It’s so good!” I know a person right now who labors mightily to write about his encounters in Christian spirituality. He has about three or four readers who actually leave comments, and he acknowledges my writing skills compared to his. But in my eyes, he is A Writer, and I am not.
Doig’s simple explanation of knowing he needed to write something represents exactly what has been missing for my past 50 years: a compelling, primal need to write, an urge or urgency which drives one to write. I’ve had this need only when teachers assigned papers or when a new week’s blank pages of newsprint caused my stomach to clench up all those years ago. In my later years I wrote business reports and standard operating procedures. It was in the business world of all places where I recognized a need to write. Now that I have retired, so too have my incentives.
I envy the Doigs of the world. Perhaps, just perhaps, I can find the elusive desire to capture words my soul commands must be captured. Until then I will continue to wait for the occasional spark, such as the one which prompted this.
all the voices in my head 