The Novelist's Hubris

It Is Important to Go Quiet, Now

It has been an important day -- a momentous day -- and this is why I must go quiet for some time.

To stay off of social media, to pare down my blog reader to its skeleton, to read Truth and Beauty and wake up at 4 AM if I feel like it, which I did today.

Someone very important to me, an extraordinary writer, sold her debut short story collection today for an unheard-of sum, with unheard-of conditions from the publisher. A momentous day for the both of us, to be sure, but also a bone-rattling day and one that I found difficult on many levels. How can I feel secure on this most insecure of days?

Her email to me was what did it. I won't reprint it here, but she said:

Honor your book with your work. Honor your book with love. It is not done yet. It has so much more growing to do -- in so many no-doubt stunning ways. The greatest, greatest gift you can give yourself - and that, sadly, no one, not even me, can give you - is time.

I'll be seeing you, though I don't know when. Bon voyage to me.

xo,

Finding My Way In: More Thoughts on Blogging Post-LiveJournal & Grappling With Fiction Writing

Susannah Conway posted an intriguing piece about being tired of the Shiny Happy Factor of many blogs -- to which I'll add that I'm tired of not only the Shiny Happy Factor, but also the marketing, the Lessons Learned approach, and the blogging-as-science shenanigans that have been rolling around in my universe lately. (I touched upon this in my Remembering Livejournal post, to which I received many a comment from LJ veterans who felt similarly, as in, Where do we go from here?) What her post, which I partially related to -- but only partially, as we come from very different Internet backgrounds, and she has a much larger, and one could even say, "cult" following, than I do -- reminded me of is that this is my space. And you (yes, you) are a part of my audience, but I want to sound like myself and not like a performing monkey.

& it saddens me that I even have to remind myself to "Be Myself" and "Be Authentic" and all of that tripe, but it's true: the Internet has changed and is changing all of the time.

 

On the mental health front, things have been a mixed bag around here lately. The last two months have been a bit of a struggle and a slog, with a few high points here and there -- right now my body's old patterns of stress reactivity have been arising, to my dismay, and I keep thinking about my old therapist's maxim: "Accept it and do the work anyway." He was an ACT therapist; he believed in Acceptance and Commitment. I liked him, and I think that radical acceptance is an interesting idea, but ACT can be a brutal method of responding to traumatic forms of mental illness (i.e. psychosis). At present, I still don't regret quitting therapy, and not having that appointment weekly or semi-weekly is a weight off my shoulders. I'm stepping gently into working with a life coach at the moment, and though at least one friend has expressed nervousness about life coaches potentially being charlatans, I've had largely positive experiences so far with the coaches that I've worked with -- you can see the ones I love most in my Resources page -- and so I'd like to work with someone around the issues of decreasing phase blindness, actively working on healing from old trauma, and reducing escapism/increasing distress tolerance -- which are all things that I've tried with therapists, but never made much headway in.

 

It pleases me to see the development of The Long Work as I've been chronicling it here, so here's an update: it's 400 pages (double-spaced, 12 pt Times New Roman; much longer in Courier, of course) and 126,000 words. Structurally, I'm in the last leg of Part Two, which leaves Part Three as the final section of the book -- then I'll have a full, sprawling, disarmingly tidy draft, at which point I'll have to dismantle and rework for at least a year, maybe two.

The end of Part Two is giving me a headache, though -- TLW has been leading me around by the nose, and I've tossed in salient elements that are a bitch to research, including Liberation Theology, piano-making in the 1940s, Greenpoint in the first half of the 20th century, and charismatic Christianity in rural Northern California. I suspect that the hard part about writing the final chapter of Part Two is that so much of it is based outside of my so-called realm; the book is very un-autobiographical, but extrapolation helps, and living in a ministry-slash-commune is. Um. Way out of my depth. I decided to break the ice by "planting a bomb" in the chapter, i.e., deliberately inserting heated autobiographical content in a foreign scenario. I did a major Find/Replace and used Real Names for characters. We'll see if it works.

I'm also paring down an excerpt into a short story, which instinct tells me will have to go through many more drafts before I let it near this particular solicitation. I have a tendency to, in a jolt and flurry of anxiety, shove my babies out the door to school before they've got their pants on.

So, the Rapture, huh?

 

xo,

Am I Human: An Interview with Jessalyn Wakefield

Image of JW taken from Am I Human.

Spring is all I can think about. Weather. The light. How it feels in the nasal passages. Many books. Many thousands of words. Others. My own. Mostly quiet. Maybe too quiet. Humming to open my throat. -- journal, tumblr

NOTE: This post contains images which may be NSFW, depending on what kind of work you do.

 

Jessalyn Wakefield is magical -- fierce -- stunning -- a storm of a woman. I met her at an aquarium. All around us: otters, silver fish, black-eyed sharks. I find it perfectly fitting that we met amidst water (my element), because Jessalyn has wound her way into my life in a profound way; she inspires me regularly, and I'm thrilled to have her work here, as well as a Q&A. Thank you, Jessalyn, for being here.

As you will discover on her web space, Am I Human, Jessalyn is a writer, photographer, performer, bookmaker, printer, and great thinker. 

Q. Do you see links between mental illness and religion? How does this influence your prose, your style of writing and performing, what you choose to write about?

A. The position that the mentally ill are prophets, or conduits for divinity, or are inherently more spiritually attuned than other people is disturbing to me. Just because someone is speaking in ways you do not understand, it does not follow that what they are saying is profound.

The psychotic aspect of mental illness, of seeing the unreal, is the aspect that is often skewed as being “prophetic.” But to use the prophets of Judaism and Christianity as an example, these were functional people. Most of them lead very ordinary lives. These were not people in the throes of madness. These were people who received transmissions and instructions, followed through with them with clarity and power, and continued on with their ordinariness. The schizophrenias, in contrast, are more often than not debilitating. And what people unfamiliar with the disease fail to realize is that psychosis, while perhaps the most fantastic aspect of this sort of mental illness, is not necessarily the most striking to the person with schizophrenia. The majority of those suffering from schizophrenia don’t even perceive their psychosis as unreal. There are a host of other symptoms that severely compromise one’s ability to live one’s life in the manner in which one should like one’s life to be lived. Agency is crippled and concept of will becomes impotent.

One does not follow the other, but neither does one negate the other. A mental illness is not an extraordinary spiritual experience in of itself. But a person can have a mental illness and also have extraordinary spiritual experiences.

I am a woman with a mental illness (schizoaffective disorder) and I am a woman who claims to have divine visions. These are markedly different states. The psychotic experiences I associate with schizoaffective disorder are simultaneously terrorizing and route. During a psychotic episode I have a repertoire of audio, visual and olfactory hallucinations that, at this point, five years after diagnosis, do not deviate much from a predictable pattern of images and sensations. But to me, terror is the hallmark of psychosis: the feeling of my mind and body assaulting themselves, and my utter impotence to stop what is happening.

Transmissions I associate as being of the divine are intense but the aspect of terror is absent. I am less comfortable talking about these experiences than I am talking about living with a mental illness. Language falls short. I don’t even know if they are about language. But to say: these experiences do not disrupt my life. I have them and I examine them and I continue on.

My writing often includes images and references to the Christian mythology because Christianity is a significant part of my history. I do not address my direct interactions with divinity in my work. But my illness is my life. By this I mean my life must be lived to accommodate my illness. My writing is not especially creative; I write about my life and my experiences. In this sense, my work is perhaps a continuous catalogue of what it is like to perceive the world with a schizophrenia. Because of my illness, terror is a familiar feeling to me and one I am able to access and transmit readily in both writing and performance. There is a brutality to my work but it is a compassionate brutality. It is the brutality of direct experience. Over and over I am trying to convey: I have experienced and I understand. I know how terribly frightened people are of each other. I know how terribly frightened people are of themselves. I want to tell people that it is okay to be frightened, but they mustn’t let their fear stop them. That they must listen to their fear and yet learn how to honestly live the lives they desire despite it. Because of it.

Q. What are the tactile appeals to you with bookmaking and letterpress? What comes closest to it, for you, outside of the press?

A. Books have always held a blatant erotic appeal for me. I get aroused standing in libraries and bookstores, being enveloped by the presence of language made corporal. The scent of books, the turning of pages, the engagement that reading demands: this all speeds quickly beyond the tactile and into the sexual.

My first letterpress class was revelatory. Handling type, using my body to operate the press to create words was the piece I did not know I was missing from writing. It was one of the most fulfilling experiences of my life. Taking the creation of language away from the domain and privacy of the mind and making it a totality of the body and the public. I love the direct incorporation of my body into the reproduction of words (and even this language? The integration of the entire corpus. The biological act of reproduction.).

A single piece of lead type has many different parts. Many of these parts are named after the body. The feet. The face. The belly. The beard. The shoulder. You can literally cup the body of a letter in your palm. And the parts of books themselves: head spine joint tail. Words and the shape of words. I know language is deeply flawed and not especially suited for the task we've assigned it. But I love it so much, and it's like people in that way. Of all the things humans have created, language is closest to our selves. And to be able to give it a body, to experience the body of language directly with my body? It’s a mystical act. It’s exciting and it’s sexual.

The closest thing outside of the press is probably intimacy. Knowing a skin, knowing someone and learning how to get along with them. I think of writing and typography and printing as a relationship. As my primary relationship. Loving people and loving my work are inextricable tasks. One informs the other. Continually.

Q. What project are you working on presently that you're the most excited about?

A. I have two major projects in the works. CVLT CVNT is a one off literary magazine featuring the work of Elizabeth Hall and Marie Fury. I am a piss poor binder and wanted to give myself an assignment to practice binding. I am very excited about this object; the writing is excellent and I have not released a handmade book in two years. This is the most complicated construction for a book I have yet undertaken for an edition. Which is not saying much. But it’s saying something. It ought to be finished up in late spring.  

The second project is a new book of my own work, THE HONEYS TRINITY. I don’t know what to say about this piece. It’s an experiment in forms, primarily in typographic forms. It’s relatively lucid but the forms are weird but maybe not weird enough to be interesting. I don’t know. I only write books that please me, that’s all I’m ever trying to do. Pleasure myself. I have no qualms with calling my work masturbation. Masturbation is very pleasant and sometimes you find people who enjoy watching. I think this is currently a popular position to take about one’s writing but so it goes. Anyway. I expect to release it in late summer.

There are always more projects. Every experience presents the opportunity for a new book. One of the frustrating and beautiful things about book making is how much time and energy it requires to produce such an object. Every book is a commitment and a serious investment of hours and resources. There will never be enough time to create all the books that I envision. So many of them will persist for only as long as I am able to remember them. 

 

Thank you, again, to Jessalyn. Please visit her at her website, Am I Human, where you can find, among other things, a free recording and e-book of her work, The Void of Course Moon.

 

xo,

The Arrangement

I'm still on vacation at the moment, but I wanted to quickly announce that "The Arrangement," an excerpt from my long work, made its debut today in this week's issue (#28) of Storychord. Enjoy!

xo,

The Novelist Whinges, The Writer Whines

NOTE: Because I am a finely-attuned machine when it comes to my stats counter, I reckon that I've tripled my average hits in the last two days. I can attribute this to two sources. If you're new: thank you for coming, and I appreciate that you stopped by. I'm planning additional posts about mental illness and higher education, should you have come via the "Why I Left Yale" post; if you're here because of "Thirteen Times," there's plenty more where that came from. Try this welcome page, if you're new.

 

With the exception of a novel excerpt that's coming out in Storychord on Monday (yes, that's 4/25; mark it on your calendar and write it on your palm with a Sharpie), writing a novel feels like a long walk in the desert. There are mirages here and there, but they're just mirages. Once in a while: an oasis.

Walking in a desert is no fun. I'm thinking no-fun-like-the-protagonist-of-Mating-in-the-desert no fun. Your donkey runs off and you're left thinking you're going to die. Watch out for buzzards.

I put my draft into a Pages document to see how many pages I've racked up. So far, 360, which is around 114,000 words. When I left Michigan, I hadn't even hit 60,000 yet, so there's been some velocity there. A lot of that velocity was thanks to my residency at Gibraltar Point, a lot of it was due to my work with Dyana Valentine, and a lot of it was due to Hanna coming to visit for a month while I was recuperating from major surgery.

I decided to submit some excerpts to various hot-shot journals while I was recuperating. And the rejections just came/come rolling in. I received a nice letter from The Missouri Review, but then again, I've also received a nice letter from The New Yorker. (Yes, I'm bragging. I have the right because I've never been published. I am also infamously, terribly insecure.) The rejections! They kept coming! What a downer, right? It's so hard to keep up the morale when working on a novel, especially one that sprawls. In the meantime, I was accepted to another residency (September) and heard back from Storychord about "The Arrangement" (4/25, remember?).

"Hanna," I wrote in a chat, "I'm feeling really heartbroken over all of these rejections. I know my writing isn't ready. I know I'm not good enough. But I keep trying, because I want external validation. I want to know that I'm not just wasting my time. You know?"

"Tell me about it, honey," she said (or something like that).

I'm going to quote something she said, because she is wise.

"I think I understand what you mean about going so long, working so hard, and not having sort of midway senses of accomplishment that secure you in the feeling that you are going in the right direction, doing amazing work, etc. And I think maybe part of the cruelty of writing a novel is, well, a part might not be stellar until the whole is stellar."

So I'm trying to keep my whinging to a minimum, and remember to plug along. Because that's the joy and the sweat and the blood and everything else; it's in the work. And the acknowledgments and money and other things -- those are nice, but the thrill only lasts for so long. It's in the work. It's in the work.

xo,

Sorrowful and Joyous: The Pale King and Capgras

I'm reading The Pale King, and with the arrival (which happened controversially early, due to Amazon/Hachette/Little, Brown gaffes, and the fact that I was one of those jerks who pre-ordered the book months ago) of this posthumous publication of DFW's ambitious, unfinished book about boredom and how to live have also come a slew of new articles about DFW. I don't want to read all of them, and probably I won't be able to, but so far I've read the generally positive Michiko Kakutani review, the interesting 7,000-word GQ article, a few middling blog posts in various places. There's also the Pietsch introduction at the beginning of The Pale King, which ends with the lines, "But an unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn't here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to."

So yesterday I was feeling sorrowful. There were all kinds of stressors on my plate -- trailing physical problems, the slew of old and highly successful friends arriving from everywhere around the world for V's wedding, an everpresent concern for R, etc. But Hanna said, "I think a lot of what you're feeling today has to do with DFW and The Pale King." Strange how she hit that straight on, deadpan. She didn't say, Why are you feeling so much over the debut of a book, and is this the kind of behavior that would indicate you are part of the Cult of Wallace that sprang up, or was only noticed, after his death? She just said that I was feeling sorrowful over this book that had come out, which is not something that I've experienced before.

Completely related to this issue is the fact that yesterday at work I started to think about writing something about Capgras delusion. Capgras has been written about before, in plenty of places -- there's that Ramachadran pop neuroscience book (Phantoms in the Brain, which I read when I was much younger), and the National Book Award winner of 2006, The Echo Maker. But I haven't written about Capgras in any depth -- not here, and not in my novel.

So then -- what is Capgras delusion. Forgive me, haters-of-Wikipedia, but here: "The Capgras delusion theory (or Capgras syndrome) is a disorder in which a person holds a delusion that a friend, spouse, parent, or other close family member has been replaced by an identical-looking impostor." It's no wonder that Richard Powers chose to write an entire novel about the subject -- it reads like the juicy stuff of fiction, doesn't it? It's also the most prominent delusion that I experience when I'm moderately psychotic. Coming up in this blog is a fascinating interview and visual art series with a good friend of mine, Jessalyn Wakefield, a writer/artist/performer/bookmaker/etc. who has been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder; she describes, in the interview, psychosis as having the distinct marker of terror. Which I would agree with. The few times that I've had the Capgras delusion, I was always, always terrified beyond imagination.

And I want to write about it. So I've been thinking about that -- how I'm going to do it, and how I'm going to convey the feeling that everyone you look at has been replaced by a robot, or is in some other way a shell of him- or herself, having been replaced by something awful, something sickening, and something that leaves you utterly alone in the world.

xo,

Even This First Step

I was feeling lousy about my writing (a sort of general malaise, post-residency rejections, despite finally arriving at the halfway point of the first draft of my novel) -- when Hanna, whose birthday it is, and who was accepted into MacDowell's summer session this year (hurrah!), sent me this Cavafy poem:

The First Step                    

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”
Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.”

xo,

 

The Single Story

 

Our lives, our cultures, are composed of many overlapping stories. Novelist Chimamanda Adichie tells the story of how she found her authentic cultural voice -- and warns that if we hear only a single story about another person or country, we risk a critical misunderstanding. (from the TEDtalk website)

A short post today, because I'm tired and need to nap before I have some sickbed visitors. This TEDtalk is perhaps my favorite TEDtalk that I've seen -- more important, I think, than Elizabeth Gilbert's famous talk about "geniuses," more straight-to-my-heart than Dave Eggers' talk about education. This one gives me goosebumps every time I watch it, because it speaks about writing and stories (hence the title, "The Danger of a Single Story"), but also because it speaks about stories that we tell one another verbally. Here Chimamanda Adichie speaks directly about issues of national and racial stereotype, but the danger of the single story can be extended to so many more stories -- really, about anything that is more than one-dimensional. And that is, in fact, everything.

Big thanks to Jenny to sharing this with me, months ago. 

xo,

Writing Characters

I write a lot about the woods because the fictional family that I spend most of my days with lives in the woods. It's not all about the woods; writing a generational story means that I also write about Brooklyn neighborhoods in the 1940s and Taiwan in the 1950s.

Something that astonished me when I went camping a few years ago was the incredible variety of biting insects that descend upon you when you spend time in the forest, and how we had to spray ourselves like crazy with insect spray before going anywhere. Inevitably, we'd still get bitten.

I was talking to M. today about our books. She's working on a novel about teenagers who back themselves into terrible corners. Since graduate school, she's been the gal in the trenches with me, novel-wise. I like talking to her about my book because when she talks about my characters, she gets heated up the way you do when you talk about real people -- people that you care about. People that you walk around in the woods with, and feel heartbroken for.

She told me that she cried when she read my thesis, and that her favorite part of the 100+ paged thing was when one of my characters says, "Two kids. Two omelets," which doesn't sound like much, but apparently carries a lot of emotional weight in that section.

She told me that she sometimes feels lonely because she lives in her head a lot of the time, and spends a lot of her emotional energy with people who don't exist. I told her that I don't feel that way about her characters -- or mine, really. They seem like people that are just hard to get ahold of; maybe I don't have their phone number, but if I could just reach them, it would be easy to have lunch with them. Chat over a tuna sandwich.

It's good to feel this way. I like living with these folks and their idiosyncracies. Someday, they'll come complete into the world. That's what I like to think.

 

xo,

Hot Air Balloon, Crescent Moon / After the MFA

DLB brought this silver moon balloon to our apartment to writing group last week. He'd come directly from a three-year-old's birthday party.

I've been rereading some of Danielle LaPorte's old blog posts. One of her oft-cited suggestions: find a mentor who does what you do, and who does it well. Which got me to think about how much I missed having a mentor in my own life.

When it gets down to it, much of my writerly insecurity as of late has to not having a designated mentor in my life anymore. From being an undergrad at Stanford and having a semester-long mentorship with Malena, to having Doug read my thesis over and over during my second year at Michigan, I've had mentors in my life for years, and I tend to really rely on them. Because why would I know what I'm doing? I'm just some 27-year-old punk kid who has a big book in her heart and a willingness to sit at the computer for hours on end.

So last week, for one day, I kind of looked into the whole Writing Coach thing. There's a whole industry around this, apparently, because while other countries (notably Canada) have established writing mentorships sponsored by the government, the U.S. tends to have private Writing Coaches that charge $1500 for X hours and have very poorly designed web sites. After having some sense talked into me by my trusty friend Anna, I ended up nixing the idea of hiring a writing coach. No.

Something that the director at my writing program often said was that we weren't really at Michigan to make connections with faculty, but to make lifelong connections with our fellow students, who would then be readers for the rest of our lives. I've been trying to do that with my writerly soul sister, Hanna. Called her up and had a long chat. She's doing a third-year fellowship at Michigan. We tried to figure out how to best work out a partnership that serves us both -- two unpublished gals with a lot of opinions and a lot of fears/anxieties -- in the absence of Looming Literary Figures Who "Know What's Up." We're trying to be cheerleaders, but not Yes (Wo)men. Hard and soft. Opinionated, never crass.

I'll let you know how our program works out.

xo,