In which I am looping around to some kind of point about the holidays and being a writer

Production editor here.  I thought I’d take a minute to talk about what it means to me to be a writer while indulging in the melancholy that we’re all allowed a little bit of once the stores all start playing “Santa Baby” on a loop.

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Thanksgiving is a tough one for me.  I like to think this is true of most writers, but then, I also like to generalize about writers in order to make myself feel better about my own troubles.  I do think a kind of emotional homelessness (or is it exile?) is a common trait of people who write fiction, given that we have a tendency to live at least one remove from the world, to have a keening need to make our lives, our arguments, our mistakes worthy of whatever it is we’ve settled on as worth, either there in the moment or after the fact when we’re trying to make meaning out of whatever stuff we’ve got to work with.  Plus we’re all kind of dissatisfied with our lives and want them to be better in ways that don’t exist.  We all want to be Gurov by the sea.

(As an almost-related aside, I was recently accused of being someone who drives a knife in just for the grace of doing it well [and even now, I’m cleaning up the accusation, making it my own], which is true enough.  I do everything that way.  It’s all performance with me, it’s all the crafting of words on a page as I go, but it’s not dishonest performance.  It’s just that the performance can get in the way.  And that’s the trouble as I saw it on my long drive back from Las Cruces today—I put the performance first.  But then I got to thinking, and I started to think that maybe it’s more about asserting my own sense of free will and identity, both of which I view as very fragile things [I’ve read theory, after all].  Which just loops back around to performance.  So.  Whatever.)

For Thanksgiving this year I went to see two of my best friends at New Mexico State.  I know I’ll always have a home with them; the trouble is it’s not my home.  The same is true of my parents’ home, of my brother and sister’s homes, of the homes of friends, of my own apartment here in Denton.  I’ve racked up a surprising amount of people who want to make me welcome, and though I don’t think they’re doing anything wrong, I rarely feel truly, you know, welcome.  When I talk to my friends about this kind of thing, they’re all quick to say “Oh, everybody loves you.”  Which is true as far as I can tell, but here’s the awful part: it’s something inside of me that keeps me from feeling it.  Doesn’t that make it worse?  Doesn’t that mean it’s something that I may never escape?  The fact is that they’re just looking through the keyhole that I’ve crafted for them into the big brown room of my brain, and so there’s always the assumption that what they love is the performance, the voice, the keyhole, and not the room behind it.  I think too much is what, I read too much DF Wallace, I linger too long on what it is to be authentic, and, in a way, I am terrified of a world in which I’m not an incessantly chattering voice.

You know where I feel welcome?  In an idea.  In a perfect sentence.  In that liminal space between thought and instinct that is going on in this very sentence right here as I’m putting it down.  Whoosh it comes and there it is.   This is what my good friend and teacher Miro Penkov meant when he said that writing poisons your life.  It’s touching the ideal, and then you’ve had it for only a second, you’ve been Gurov by the sea, and then what?

What I’ve decided you must do to mitigate this if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live (and it is an abhorrent way to live) is to find the people who understand as best they can and dwell among them as best you can.  The PhD program here (plus my friends in New Mexico, who are both writers as well) has provided me with that in a way that no other community has.  I’ve had conversations here that no other place I’ve been would abide.  The people in those other places would just turn up the TV if they heard me and my friends talking.  They would scoff at the way we love each other, they would say we are always either too oblique or too direct, too much bullshit or too much earnesty.  As for me, I would be nowhere else, with no other people than my fellow writers.

It will mostly be hard.  You’ll spend most of your time in your head, trapped there, maybe, which will sometimes make the community I just talked about seem incidental or barely there.  You will stay up late and wonder if what you are doing is worthwhile, which is precisely the feeling that makes you realize that it probably is.  In truth, most of you (and I am including myself in these odds) will fail in a very real, concrete way.  But we’re all going to fail.  We’re all failing right now.  Language is the very essence of failure.  And so what you must do if you’ve chosen this abhorrent way to live is to make it count: fail beautifully.