August 03, 2008
The Writing of...Portrait of Artist in Early December
It was March 2000, and I was living in Athens with the Scotts. We had moved in with one another during the holidays of 1999. I really had no idea what I was going to do with myself, or how long our shared living situation would last. I think all of us were just trying to buy ourselves some time before something resembling what we thought of as real life began. I don't want to speak too much for their feelings at the time, but I will say that there was a constant sense that our living situation was temporary, meaning we knew we were on borrowed time from the beginning. That is representative of how volatile our collective friendship was, and probably also reflected how volatile we were as individuals. There was a sense that we were all there because we had nowhere else better to be and were hoping that we might stumble onto something that would give us some semblance of normalcy.
Part of the reason for the volatility of our living situation was that we were all stubborn writers, and wanted nothing more than to have time to write, and oftentimes this meant we were living off of thin air financially. So, at the time this story was written, the cracks were starting to show on the delicate nature of our living situation. To put it simply, there was an acknowledgment taking hold in the house that it was all about to fall apart, and I think the Scotts and I were starting to realize that our time together was growing short. And given our financial shortfalls, we were heading toward dangerous waters. There was something incredibly sad and sudden about this realization.
All of a sudden rent wasn't being paid. Bills were stacking up and being largely ignored. The worst part was that these financial woes were weighing heavily on our personal friendships. Tense silences were beginning to develop and envelop our normally rich, textured conversations. Also, we just weren't being very kind to one another, which really was a tragedy. We knew we understood each other in a way that is not easily duplicated. We stopped acknowledging the rarefied air that we breathed together, and so we started suffocating in that house.
From this, I began to search myself for what this time would ultimately mean to me in retrospect. It was obvious at this point that Sarah and I were going to be together in the long term. We had already decided to move to Cleveland, where Sarah was going to continue her education. So, this bachelor arrangement of mine with the Scotts, and even the old untethered freedom that I had experienced with other friends in general, would be forever altered. I was about to enter into a world of new responsibilities, and I had to address, in my own mind, how this would affect my friendships. There is a clear distinction that needs to be made between a youthful bachelor existence and the acceptance of a more domestic life. Things were simply not going to be the same.
This was a reflective time for me, and this reflection took me, eventually, to an image, an image of a young man standing at a large window. The man standing at the window was both me and not me. He was at the window, looking out at the snow, the reflection from Christmas lights blinking on his naked torso. This was an image that I wanted to explore through the prism of a future reunion of old friends. How would a group of friends react to this image after years have past, and the individual from the image--a once integral member of their circle--had been absent for years.
This is how I began Portrait of Artist in Early December. It was the third installment in my Weekend Stories series, and it is a story of nostalgia, a story that lives in the recognition that the world as I knew it was about to shift into a different gear. I was wondering how I would be seen by friends in the future, and how I might view my friends from the prism of the future. That being said, the artist in the story is not necessarily me. It is me, but it is also an amalgam of my friends at the time, and represents the feelings I had toward them.
It is difficult to pinpoint exactly when this story was written because my journals were so sporadic during this period, but I am guessing that it was written on March 17 and 18th of 2000. At the time, I remember being quite proud of the piece, even reading it aloud to the Scotts soon after it was completed. However, as I looked at it again recently, I didn't feel that it held up the way I hoped it might. This is the first of the weekend stories that I really believe shows that it was hurried by the time restriction. More than a few of the sentences are poorly constructed, sometimes to the point of losing the thread. And there are times that reading the paragraphs are like watching a tennis match, bouncing from one point to another with a clumsy casualness.
Overall, though, I am posting the story because I think that the story carries the point I tried to convey, that we romanticize our youth, and most of all we romanticize those that have stayed young as we age. In other words, we mythologize the characters from our youth whom were lucky enough to escape time through the decoration of our memories.
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July 27, 2007
The Writing of...Cathedral Lake
One week after completing Narcissus Reflects, I was still struggling to complete Painting Godless Children. I couldn't help but feel that there were other stories to write. It is frustrating to be working on a project, and marrying yourself to that project at the expense of any other idea that might pop into your head. You want to be focussed on what you are working on, and there exists the possibility that entertaining new creative impulses could interrupt whatever flow you have developed on your current project.
However, I was pleased with Narcissus Reflects and my weekend story experiment--where I tried to start and complete a story over the course of a single weekend. It seemed to me that if I was going to work on a side-project while working on Painting Godless Children, the weekend story format was ideal. After all, I was limiting myself to two days a story. So, I was still devoting the majority of my writing time to wrestling the unwieldy beast of Painting Godless Children.
When I was working on a time-consuming project, I would often stumble onto some thought or idea that didn't fit with my current project, and when this would happen I would mentally file it away for future reference. Up to this point, my stories were coming to life from dreams or still images that spoke to me in personally profound ways. I had one vague clip, not unlike a film loop, of an older woman looking out a window, staring at a lake outside, brushing her hair. A simple image, but it had stuck with me for a long time. I guess it was just one of those pieces of the imagination that pop up and speak to you in just the right note, but the song is still uncertain. So, you just tuck it away and wait for the music.
I knew the image carried meaning, but I just wasn't ready for that meaning. In these situations, you know that if the image is truly profound then it will never leave you. The hope is that these ideas will open up to you again in the future and fall effortlessly into their proper place.
This particular image--this woman brushing her hair--opened up again for me and fell effortlessly into Cathedral Lake.
Cathedral Lake was the second of my Weekend Stories, and it was written on March 11th and 12th of 2000. It starts with a dream, and never fully emerges from that gauzy, uncertain world of dreams. It is an unashamed expression of love, and the universality of romantic love in the deepest sense. My only trouble with such content is the artistic perception of love in modernity. I have often thought that post-modernism should be a welcoming environment for reproductions of romantic love. After all, the reproduction of love, if done right, can truly offer emotional stirrings that can mirror that of the real experience. However, there is a perception in the arts that anything with a romantic hue is, by default, sentimentalized. So, I feel I must, as best I can, defend the romance.
It seems to me that there is a prevailing meme that romantic love can not be reproduced with sincerity, and so should not be sincerely approached by the consumer. There seems to be a faulty perception that all love stories are artificially produced for the purpose of satiating some desire for a saccharine unreality. But what if the people that produce these works are sincere in their expressions? What if the creators of such loveliness bring authenticity with them into every piece? Who is to say what is or is not sincere? Are you comfortable making those distinctions? I certainly am not.
It seems to me that there can be two reasons why this meme has taken root. It could be that those that reject all romance are rejecting it because they have known real, heightened love and feel that there can be no analogous representation, and therefore any attempt is belittling to the spirit of love itself. Or, and this is where I believe the critical angst comes from, these critics have never experienced a truly great love, and therefore find all attempts to represent this greatness to be a purely idealized fiction. This is often where cynicism is born, in blind, arrogant ignorance.
I suppose there could a third category of people that are made so uncomfortable by love that they have developed a pure and utter disdain for anything lovely. I'd prefer to think that these people don't exist.
I have always been reluctant to label a work as sentimental. To me, it is one of the most flippant and lazy criticisms. It is a cheap way to relegate any effort to the sidelines of seriousness without any genuine effort to challenge the work on its merits. I believe the onus is on the critic to expose insincerity, to prove the inauthenticity of the creator's intent when they charge sentimentality.
How is it that love has been made to be seen so cynically? Are we really a culture that cannot appreciate, or accept, the euphoria of one of life's greatest gifts?
Cathedral Lake is an example of the creation of a love story, nakedly earnest in its attempt to reproduce a feeling of great love. This attempt is nothing but sincere. I was falling in love with my future wife, Sarah, at the time this was written. We hadn't known each other quite two months, and yet our love was so intense that only a few weeks after I finished this story, I proposed marriage.
My journal entries from this time are full of me stumbling over myself, trying desperately to articulate my heightened emotional state during this time. Cathedral Lake, it turns out, was the greatest articulation of my love for Sarah in those early days. This story is not sentimentalized. It is an authentic translation of my feelings, and my thoughts, during a period where my life was being forever changed by love.
I thoroughly enjoyed revisiting Cathedral Lake. It is not without its faults. As always, there were some some poor choices made. Some sentences run too long. Some sentences are poorly worded and don't seamlessly lead a reader down the narrative path. But the heart of the piece is strong, and I am as proud of this story as I am of anything I have done.
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July 20, 2007
The Writing of...Narcissus Reflects
It was the winter of 2000, and I was going through a great period of creative expression. I was standing in a perfect storm of inspiration, and even though I am not sure if I was cognizant of the unique nature of such a gift, I can't say that I wasted it.
I was now living in a house with my friends Scott and Scott, a couple of guys who always forced me to exist in the creative sphere. Their presence, their ideas, and their conversation pushed me to question how and why I made art. Through them, I found new ways to see an artistic dilemma as an opportunity to prove that the life of the mind could offer solutions to any troubled project.
I always felt the intensity of life's drama--in often narcissistic ways-- when the Scotts were in my life, and this period was no different. Our friendship was the very definition of a friendly competition. We were creative competitors, but what made this one-up-manship so good-natured was that I rooted for their personal successes because I knew that those successes would only drive me to be a better artist. They made me think and work more efficiently. They made me a better artist.
Also, I was spending a great deal of time with my friends John and Beth. Their small basement apartment seemed to be my second home. They were just starting their life together, and probably would have liked more private time, but it was wonderful for me to share that time of their life. In retrospect, it seems like we were constantly working on something, independent of one another, but not independent from one another. There was always a conversation about art flowing between us, a conversation about producing art, or, if the conversation wasn't made implicit in words then an exchange took place within the art itself. Our lives and our work was a subtext to our perpetually artful back-and-forth.
Then there was Sarah. I had met Sarah in January of 2000 and we had scarcely been apart since. We were spending every available moment with one another. Sarah was extremely supportive of my writing, reading every word I wrote with genuine interest, being a constant source of warmth during periods of doubt, and a great source of inspiration to break me free of such doubts. We were in love, and it was already pretty clear as the winter progressed that we were going to be together for the long term. So, of course, this new love acted as its own surge to my creative output.
I remember working constantly during this period. I was busy writing poetry, working in the visual arts, and trying to write an ambitious work of fiction, Painting Godless Children. But I needed to have my hands in another story. I was drowning in Painting Godless Children. It just wasn't moving forward fast enough for me, and I felt that the project would suffer if I forced it.
So, I decided to try something new and, for me at least, a bit radical. I decided that I would start and finish a story in the course of a single weekend. I ended up doing this over the course of several months. These stories would be known as, The Weekend Stories--not terribly clever, I know. I would start a piece on a Saturday night and complete it by the end of the night that Sunday.
At first, I'm not sure if I saw these stories as anything other than an intense writing exercise, or if I believed that I would share the stories as completed works, but as I completed the first one, I realized that these stories were more than private exercises. These were stories I wanted to share.
The first weekend story was Narcissus Reflects, which was written on March 4th and 5th of 2000. In the story, the character of the writer is consciously playing a game with the reader. I guess, by default, I was also playing a game with the reader. I often think that writers, and artists in general, are constantly placing their best chess move in front of the viewer, hoping to awe them into silence, causing them to surrender their will to the artist. It is through this surrendering of will that an artist is really given the gift of your imagination, where you give the creator permission to decorate your mind with his dreams.
The author in Narcissus Reflects is doing what every writer tries to do: he is trying to coax you in for the ride. He doesn't have a story. He doesn't have anything interesting left to say. All he has is himself and a few writerly tricks up his sleeve, and if he can keep an audience with those tricks then he has been able to perpetuate that sense of power that a creator craves. The idea is that there is power in making your own world, or in this case, creating your own story, but--and here is the artist's dilemma--if no one experiences the world of your creation, then what was the point.
What I tried to do in Narcissus Reflects was to take a supposedly washed-up writer and use his anxieties to pique the readers interest long enough to satiate his own ego, validate that he can still wield that power, coax you into surrendering your will to him, and, ultimately, to give his creative world some much needed meaning.
As I looked at the piece this week, I thought the story was executed with a fair amount of success. I think you can see that I had started to develop my own style, moving away from those early echoes of the
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July 12, 2007
The Writing of...Empty Marquee
After I had finished The Lonely Season, I was anxious to start a new project. It was the winter of 1999. I was immersed in the theories of the Nouveau Roman, and was reading Robbe-Grillet's In the Labyrinth. I knew that my new work would not escape the influence of their ideas on the objective narrator, and I embraced the influence.
So, it seemed like a perfectly natural step, when considering the spirit of the Nouveau Roman, that I would use an image from a dream to begin the story. The details of the dream are unimportant, and probably less significant to the story then I would like them to be. Regardless, a stranger visited me in a dream, a man who stood out for no other reason other than his brown hat. He was a silent character, almost more of a presence than a participant, and his presence seem to stay with me for days, creeping into my conversations, and eventually I felt compelled to surrender to his stubborn insistence. He seemed to me to be a messenger for the new story, and since I was certainly eager for a message, I embraced the character.
It was the winter of 1999, and I was still occupying space in a dorm room at Ohio University, though I was no longer a practicing student, having just abandoned my academic life for the writing life. I was lucky to be able to participate in the University's meal plan until the middle of March, but after the winter quarter was completed, I moved into a garage loft apartment with Scott, my constant compatriot during these years. From that point on, and through the duration of Empty Marquee, my life was painted by poverty.
It is true that this poverty was a choice. I was content working my part-time job washing dishes. I had decided that if I was going to be a writer then writing needed to be my sole focus.
Hunger was ever-present. I even periodically gave plasma for extra money, and I was still barely eating. Looking back at that period from a more comfortable position, it is easy to say that it was a valuable experience, but living off of baked potatoes and ramen noodles for weeks at a time, it is hard to see value in the arrangement.
Ironically, for someone who could barely afford to eat, I remember, and my journals back up this memory, that I had a dalliance with drink at the time. I say a dalliance because I was too poor to afford anything other than a brief interlude with drinking. I remember that this was particularly true while I was working on the second part of Empty Marquee at the time--the bar scene--and it was natural to ask myself if my life was being influenced by my writing, or was my writing influencing my life.
As I read through my journals from the time, I was surprised at the jumps in the entry dates. Clearly, one of the reasons Empty Marquee took me so long to write was because I was so weak, physically and spiritually, and my future was so uncertain. What was I going to do? I had no money. I had a part-time job with the university, but it was a student position. What were they going to do when they discovered I wasn't actually a student anymore? Not to mention that the garage loft where I lived would be rented to someone else in June and I would have nowhere to live.
Meanwhile, I was trying to escape the bleakness of the garage loft at the university's coffee shop, where you could be a patron without purchase. I was writing scenes by hand to Empty Marquee--I didn't have a computer, or a typewriter--and I dreaded it. My journals constantly speak to the fear of the unwritten page. Unlike The Lonely Season, where I felt like my next step was always assured, I felt that I was flying blind in the world of Empty Marquee. Still, I had to keep writing. There didn't seem to be a choice. What else did I have? Writing was what I had chosen to do. Writing was what I had to do.
In late June of 1999, I moved in with my good friends John and Rob. They were both students and were nice enough to let me have a room in their rental house. Even though this house would eventually come to be known for its own disasters, there were a few months of peace and quiet where I was, with the help of my friend Joe's word processor, finally able to clean up my handwritten drafts of Empty Marquee. I completed it in late July.
Empty Marquee came together through my insistence to not give up on the project, even when my life was unable to buttress the focus a story needs to survive. I had written The Lonely Season in little more than a month. It came to me like a wave of secrets being constantly uncovered. The secrets that were hiding in Empty Marquee took serious time and effort to uncover, and a great deal of chaos to overcome.
As I reread the piece this week, I still believe that the time and effort was worth it. Even the poverty seems to act as an underlying metaphor throughout the piece. The fear and loneliness of uncertainty dangle from every paragraph.
It is not perfect. I was still learning the craft. Certainly, I would make different choices now. Some sentences are poorly drawn, and maybe even extraneous, but it hard to argue that a five thousand word piece is too long.
I have a deep, unwavering affection for Empty Marquee. The spirit of the Nouveau Roman is all over this story, and I believe that the objective narrator was put to good use in this piece. I referred to it in my journals as if it was a dream, and it still has that dream-like aura around it. It may be, when all is said and done, my personal favorite. Maybe it is still so dear to me because, during one of the most difficult times in my life, it was my touchstone, a fictional world that saved me from having to face the lucidity of reality.
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July 06, 2007
The Writing of...The Lonely Season
I had moved to Berkeley in the spring of 1998 to dedicate myself to poetry. I took a student loan overage check, decided I was through with college, and took a bus to Berkeley to live in the Nash Hotel with my friends Scott and Joe. Needless to say, three guys in a cramped hotel that offered communal bathrooms and the bare bones of life's other amenities offered a volatile life experience. It was a time begging for the most earnest of bohemian pursuits. And Berkeley was the perfect place for us to adopt the writing life.
Berkeley is nothing if not a place of characters, and one of the characters I met while I was there was a PhD student of Mathematics at UC Berkeley, who I only knew as Stewart (Stewart will pop up again in a future story). I never thought to ask his last name, but I spent a significant amount of time with him at the Au Coquelet on University Avenue, just a few short blocks from the cafe where I wrote the first seeds for what would later become The Lonely Season. Stewart and I often talked about music, poetry, and literature. Sometimes he would even lecture to me about mathematics, even once showing me parts of his dissertation, which of course was merely symbolic to me.
I remember Stewart entering the Au Coquelet one night looking particularly tortured by some episode he had just endured with a woman. No details were forthcoming. He was a very soft-spoken man, and I can find no physical description more apt for him than Kafkaesque. After ordering a cup of coffee, he approached my table and told me that he was going to head home and immerse himself in Robbe-Grillet. He held up the small paperback he had in his hands with the pride of someone who knew a special secret. The book was Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy. Perhaps, it was the exotic sound of the author's name, or Stewart's tacit recommendation, but I took the first available opportunity to visit a used bookstore, where I bought Jealousy and Djinn. I tried to read Jealousy, but the tedium of Robbe-Grillet's description of banana trees nearly drove me mad. I new there was something special in his voice, but I was not quite ready for the tedious loops of Jealousy's prose. So, I read Djinn instead. I fell in love with the objective voice of the narrative, the dream-like world that seemed to ease in and out of some manufactured fog. It was honestly like a new door opened up and the writing world had all of a sudden become larger and I felt like it was a world that I wanted to be apart of.
I had thought of myself, at that point, exclusively as a poet, and now my perspective was shifting, the horizon of my work was being widened. Yet, after a few attempts at prose writing at that cafe on University Avenue, I learned that I was not quite ready to dive into storytelling. I had the beginnings of an idea, but I was not quite prepared for navigating the geography of prose. It just wasn't time.
Fast forward to November of 1998. I had been back at Ohio University for several months. My friend Scott, the same friend who talked me into moving to Berkeley, had moved to campus, and we began having nightly conversations about prose writing, long, late-night, coffee soaked conversations about themes, characters, and our burgeoning love affair with the authors of the Nouveau Roman. I must admit that Scott had more of an affinity for the authors then I did. I was much more in love with the concept of Robbe-Grillet's objective narration then I was in the content of the novels by the other New Novelists.
Regardless, these late night talks inspired me to take another crack at The Lonely Season. Unlike my previous effort, this attempt felt fluid. When I sat down to write, the words were just there waiting for me to put them to paper. It was a wonderful experience, the discovery of myself as prose writer. The story followed me around like a ghost. There was not a moment to escape from it. I was constantly thinking about it, traversing its possible twists and turns. I was writing every night and going to classes during the days. However, I became so drunk about the writing process that I ended up quitting school to devote myself wholly to the story.
I can't say exactly when I finished the story. My journals from the time are sporadic. My best guess is that I finished it by the end of January 1999.
As I reread the story, I found that its greatest gift is the mood it paints, the dream-like scenes that weave themselves throughout the piece like a Robbe-Grillet fog. It is true that a portion of the narrative is in the first person, but--true to the Nouveau Roman--I have maintained an air of the objective narrator throughout the majority of the story. Also, as with many of the New Novelists, time is not linear in the confines of this story, but I believe that the narrative is constructed in such a way that the reader should never be confused.
I have to say that it is certainly not a conventional piece of fiction, and the tedious and repetitive nature of the piece reflects the fact that I was working under the spell of the Nouveau Roman movement. There is no doubt that I would handle the story differently if I were to write it today. Some of the sentences are poorly structured, and several paragraphs--specifically in the hopscotch scene--are deliberately tedious, and I would scale those sections back if I were writing them today. All that being said, this story is a fair reflection of the volatility, the passions and the emotional devastations that were living within me at the time it was written.
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