(At McCalls Run Coller Junction Vivian girl saves strangling children from phenomenon of frightful shape, illustration from The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion by Henry Darger)
When I was in college, and fell in with the grifter who would shape and detail my life for a period of about two years, I met one of my best friends, Wildrose, a fashion design major and visual artist. We would meet at a coffee shop off-campus between classes, and I would read, or not read, and she would draw. Sometimes it would be a garment design, but usually it was just a sketch of something she saw, or something to keep her hands busy.
I loved those times - I tell her this often - not because I’m nostalgic for those turbulent times (though I am) but because I had very rarely been in the presence of a creative spirit before, and it was a balm to watch her work. Taking the ephemeral image in one’s mind and making it real, on paper, it was as literal transmutation as I could imagine, turning nothing into something. Often Wildrose would draw my likeness as I sat across from her, and I have many such portraits. I cherish all of them.
I got my first glimpse of the particular quality of a creative life, the real experience of creation, and even now it’s difficult to convey the profundity of it. I imagine it must be quite common for most people, this awareness of creativity. I compare it to something like seeing the ocean for the first time, or experiencing snow, this unbelievable thing existing all around you, suffusing the moment. It is stepping over a threshold of experience, the antithesis to a stagnant (and thus unhappy) life. Sublimity is my watchword.
My previous letter, on Prozac and rumination and other things, saw me revisit the old strange chapbook I had made in New York in 2012. I did not expect it to shake me as deeply as it did, in a good way; it feels remarkable, to have considered myself outside the realm of creativity for my entire life to that point, the kind of “left-brained” autist schematic who is in so many ways a tenuous creature of the consumerist world, who exists and then does not exist, and to find this thing that bears my fingerprint, and to not even remember it.
I thought I would feel robbed by this revisiting - I’ve said before that it’s like someone else has used my name - but the effect has been quite the opposite. It is not a sense of loss that I feel, at not being able to recall the making of this thing, but a sense of discovery. The book is like a relic, or a shrine, or a painting on the wall of some primeval cave. Even if I am not that person anymore, it is proof not simply that I existed, but that things moved inside of me. Somehow this delineates the real from the unreal. It is one thing to know, cognitively, that I’m not an inert substance, but to have demonstrated the fact is something else entirely.*
I’ve been writing fiction for the last few years, slowly accruing advanced drafts of short stories. The rules of fiction, and its criteria for success, are different from non-fiction, as I’ve alluded to before. Time was, I could hammer out an essay and send it off to a friend-editor, and hear back within two weeks, sometimes with a yes, sometimes with a no, sometimes with “work on it and send it back direct” or better, “let’s work on this together”. I held a grudge against Roxane Gay for quite a long time because she gave me my first form rejection, and I somehow did not know that was a common, more or less meaningless thing. I suppose I’ve been blessed.
Workshopping fiction can feel frustrating because it is so unlike that heyday of essay-blogging. Your editors are remote, your readers even moreso, and it is not something that you can necessarily do toward some greater understanding, not something that bears fruit during the process of refining your work / aesthetic / focus. Rather, the greater understanding, the perfection of the aesthetic, is where the fruit of labor resides. It’s ready, it’s whole, or it isn’t.
That is all to say that to start out, you need to be good, and you can go for years or decades or a lifetime without that external validation of having completed something, if such is your goal. You have to make something that will catch and rise in the minds of the slush pile readers, and then to the associate editors, and then to the chief editors, among many hundreds of competitors at least. There is no conspiracy of exclusion at work, it is simply a matter of luck, getting before the right eyes at the right time. You will drive yourself mad trying to anticipate the vagaries of the process.
I was talking to a good friend of mine, Jamie, about a bevy of topics this past week, and I mentioned the chapbook-thing, the object that I had made and forgotten. We also talked a little bit about the outsider artist / Chicago janitor Henry Darger, he of the 15,000+ page surrealist-fantasy novels and the weird traced-trash phantasmal illustrations, many of which are inexplicable and ominous and perverse, all of which are bursting with life.
It was the tracings that had stuck in my mind - Darger, like me, could not handle drawing figures freehand, and like me, he resorted to tracing and collage. I would not, could not claim a kindred spirit in Darger, a true iconoclast accountable to no one, almost certainly a madman, with a preternatural sense of composition, the rawest and truest talent. But Jamie guided me toward the revelation (one among many) of what my chapbook-thing means for me now, in the present. She helped me to realize that the book, like Darger’s art, was not for anyone but its maker.
A 15,000 page book about magical, apparently gender-fluid princesses liberating other children from slave labor and torture is probably - almost certainly - unreadable by any standard. But that’s rather beside the point, isn’t it? It, and especially its illustrations, are magnificent for daring to exist. They are the most magnificent rack of antlers on the oldest, most regal buck in all the wilds of the world, sublime and chaotic and inexplicable, but there on display.
I realized - and this is what Jamie pointed out - that I want to make something. I don’t want to wait for approval from a journal, and then recognition from a press, and then a long process of which I am only a part, and a deceptively small one at that. Of course, I want recognition, and I want my work to be good, great even. But what I want more is for it to exist.
So this year - hopefully this year, though more likely next and the year after - I will move in earnest toward a collection of stories. Something that I will put together myself, fund and design (with the collaboration of other, greater talents, well-paid) and print myself. I will probably crowdfund at least part of it. But it will be an object of beauty and of meaning to me, and it will exist. I may sell it, I may well give it away. But I’m going to make it.
I have always loved and connected to eccentrics, have always wanted to be one of them. God knows I can’t be anything other than what I am. I will just have to be more of myself.
* I sometimes think about the western person’s conception of death as a true erasure from the world, and its resultant conception of passing time as an enemy, and of creativity, in whatever sense (biological, artistic) as brinkmanship with death. I’ve been reading Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler and there’s a surprising amount of it there. I may have to write about it more.