Art/Work Podcast

Hi hi hi!

Guess what came in the mail today?! These days, under the pressure of climate change and war raging in Ukraine and Yemen, I’ve been questioning why art matters and if it’s even an ethical way to spend the few weeks I have left to live on this planet. Then my issue of The Thalweg came in the mail. Co-founder and managing editor, Dory Athey writes about just this question in her intro! The synchronicity and magic of life will never cease to amaze me.

In honor of this beautiful creation, I did a virtual reading of the poems here, just for you! If you want to read them in print, consider buying/donating to The Thalweg.

In other news, I made a playlist in honor of The Void. In case you missed my video essay about Instagram and The Void you can watch it here. I talk about all the philosophical and existential reasons behind why it’s so hard to quit Instagram but why I needed to quit in order to maintain both my sanity and my humanity.

Live long and prosper,

Sammie

I'm in love! I'm not in love! I'm crazy! I'm not crazy!

-Anacreon

Hi Lovely Humans!

In honor of February and the dreaded holiday, Valentines Day, I’ve made a playlist of ‘torch songs.’ What is a torch song you might ask? Well, according to my friend Wikipedia:

“A torch song is a sentimental love song, typically one in which the singer laments an unrequited or lost love, either where one party is oblivious to the existence of the other, where one party has moved on, or where a romantic affair has affected the relationship. The term comes from the saying, "to carry a torch for someone", or to keep aflame the light of an unrequited love.”

So here’s my contribution to the genre. Full disclosure I am a cheeseball and this playlist may or may not include Cher, Phil Collins, and Heart. Listen at your own peril :)

Also— I have some poetry forthcoming in Issue II of The Thalweg. Pre-order if you’re so inclined. All profits are split evenly among artists <3

Okay, and now to the History of Love :)

To Reach is to Love

*the podcast is the abridged version of what follows: a deep dive into four writers and thinkers. If you don’t have time, just listen to the recap.

When I was seventeen I started my freshman year of college. That same year the city of Chicago was making a bid for the Summer Olympics and every museum was free. So, instead of spending my spare time on campus where I felt lonely and disoriented, I rode the Metro North line into the city any chance I could. I'd sit in the stairwell in the modern art wing of the Art Institute of Chicago and stare at Georgia O'Keeffe’s Sky Above clouds for over an hour, hoping, I too, would dissolve into blue.

When I took the L train around the loop I stared through the glass at window after lighted window—each a block of yellow cut against the night. I could make out the shapes of humans. Beings without gender or form. I remember watching those bodies in the windows and being filled with a palpable existential terror. I pulled my knees to my chest and let the panic flood me. The fact that there could be so many brains, so many bodies that I would never know, never meet but who, nevertheless would wake the next day in rooms I would never see, speak with voices I would never hear, was an understanding beyond my imagination. How could I be surrounded, overwhelmed by the bodies of others and yet never, not once, expand beyond my own? The knowledge of how much was out there for me to know was instantly met with the impossibility of such knowledge. The only mind, the only skin I'd ever live within, was my own. Panic soon gave way to hunger. The impossibility of true understanding made me ravenous for it.

Some of you have been wondering, why romantic love? And this is the answer: when I fell in love for the first time—I mean real, generous love, not love for utility or pleasure, but love for the sake of other person—this existential horror returned in force. How could it be possible to love someone and never know them?!?!?! But when I spoke to friends and acquaintances about this fear I mostly received confused stares and therapist recommendations. So, I did what I always do when I feel most alone: make like Hermione (also a Virgo) and head to the library. I wanted to know if there was even one single person in the history of the earth who felt that the more they loved the more they understood how completely and utterly alone they were.

It turns out, I am not alone in my aloneness.

So, I lied to you. I’m not going to give you all the History of Love Part 2. I’m just another dude with an agenda—muahahahahhahaha!

If I wanted to provide a true History of Love Part 2 I’d have to talk about Shakespeare (who I love, yes, but there’s so much out there about Shakespeare already) and Freud (who I don’t love and don’t care to spend any time discussing) among many, many others.

Instead of the History of Love Part 2, I’m going to address the question that brought me to the study of romantic love in the first place: why do we engage in romantic partnerships?

This is my answer:

We seek romantic partnerships out of an inherent existential separateness.

Love is essential to human life.

By engaging in the act of love we can come as close as possible to the oneness we seek.

In order to make this argument I’m going to show how the Greeks first articulated this existential separateness. Then I’m going to speak about the Romantic period and how Mary Shelley and John Keats show that despite our inherent separateness human connection is essential to human life. Then, I’m going to demonstrate how philosopher Erich Fromm believes we can engage in the action of love and achieve union.

Greeks and The Origin of Loss:

tl:dr

Man is plagued by the feeling that they’re missing an essential piece of themselves. They spend their lives trying to fill the void.

Once upon a time man was a single orb: spherical and perfect. And yet man’s perfect oneness and perfect happiness was too pure, too strong. So palpable was man’s joy that his power threatened Olympus. Zeus commanded Apollo to split each man in two. Suddenly, man was rendered separate from his perfect oneness—he’d lost the essential part of himself that made him whole. And so, man was doomed to wander the earth searching for his missing half.

This is the story that Aristophanes tells his friends at Socrates’s table. In this myth Aristophanes is saying: we are separate from that which we once had. We are missing. There is a void within, an emptiness we seek to fill.

One could argue that this is where the origin of humankind’s belief in their existential separateness began: in Plato’s Symposium and around Socrates’s table. It was here that a few key ideas were first articulated:

* Humankind feels as if there is a void, a missing piece within them

* You cannot desire what you already have

* Once you have what you desire, you will no longer desire it

* Therefore, desire is lack

* Or, more accurately, desire is the space between what you want and what you have

This could sound negative but it’s not. What the ancient Greeks are trying to establish through their dialogues is that love is knowledge. We always want to know more and there is always more to know (if you are confused about this, refer to the History of Love, Part 1).

Everything cannot be made clear to a single person—there is always the reach for more.

Anne Carson delves deeply into this concept in her essay, Eros: The Bittersweet.

The word Eros, Carson explains, is in and of itself a paradox. Both bitter and sweet in one. “In Greek the word Eros denotes ‘want’, ‘lack’, ‘desire for that which is missing’. The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.”

The crux of Carson’s argument is her belief that the Greeks demonstrate that it is through love and the act of loving that we come to understand our own edge—the place where our self ends and the world begins. Without encountering another body to love and cherish we would never truly understand the limitations of this form.

“Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counter glance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive… The main inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.”

The Romantics, Human Connection and Negative Capability

tl:dr

Romantic love is, at its heart, human connection. And human connection is essential to human life.

We call romantic love “Romantic” love because of the Romantic period. The Romantic period was an artistic movement that originated in Europe at the end of the 1700’s and lasted until approximately 1850. What makes the Romantic era unique was its study of emotion and the individual. For the purposes of this newsletter, I am going to talk about two Romantics: Mary Shelley and John Keats.

Mary Shelley:

tl:dr

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein which is a testament to the innate human need for connection. Through her allegory she declares that when we’re alone and rejected from our community we make monsters of ourselves and if we subject another creature to a loveless existence, we too, become monsters. Love is essential to being alive.

She was an incredible and unique woman. When I think about all my fears and my desire to conform I just have to think about this brilliant person who wrote one of the greatest books of all time at age seventeen and remember to be the pioneer of my own f*****g life—if Mary Shelley could break free of convention in 1818, what am I waiting for?!?!!

Brief bio:

She was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft a prominent feminist and proponent of free love. Wollstonecraft had several lovers and only married Mary’s father when Mary Shelley was conceived. Mary Shelley met her future husband, the poet Percy Shelley, when she was sixteen. He was already married at the time but Mary and Percy eloped! There was a great meeting of the minds. Percy wanted their relationship to be open, as we would call it now, and they tried it out. For a while Mary was involved with both Lord Byron and Percy Shelley but that wasn’t really her style.  Percy was definitely what I would call a rake and women fell in love with him and/or he seduced them. Both Mary’s younger sister and Percy’s first wife committed suicide out of desire/pain/longing for him.  

Frankenstein is, perhaps, an investigation into this loss and the responsibility that Mary felt she and Percy had for the deaths of her sister and his first wife. Ultimately, Frankenstein is about the fundamental need for human connection and the belief that without connection we make monsters of ourselves. The monster in Frankenstein is not the nameless creation, but the master, Frankenstein himself. It’s a truly chilling examination of what happens when we strip our fellow humans of their ability to connect, of their ability to love, and the cruel transformation of a person forced to live without love.

I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.

-Frankenstein’s creature

John Keats:

tl:dr

Coined the term “negative capability” which roughly means that through the annihilation of self and the search for many truths we can hope to enter the eternal mystery but can never hope to define it.

Brief Bio:

Talk about a traumatic childhood. When Keats was eight his father died in an accident. His mom remarried and left only to return when Keats was fourteen. Keats cared for her while she died of tuberculosis. Later his younger brother also caught tuberculosis and Keats cared for him as he died. Woof.

His friend, poet Charles Brown said of Keats: “From his earliest boyhood he had an acute sense of beauty, whether in a flower, a tree, the sky, or the animal world; how was it that his sense of beauty did not naturally seek in his mind for images by which he could best express his feelings?”

Keats is not only famous for his poetry but also for his love of Fanny Brawne—a relationship that’s been preserved by his letters to her. Keats was poor and financially dependent on others when he fell in love with Brawne and so they were unable marry.  Despite the limitations of their courtship, the affair lasted three years until Keats died at twenty-five. While it was by all accounts unconsummated (which honestly feels tragic to me, I don’t know why that hits me so hard, but so sad! To love someone so much and so fully and never be able to feel their touch—devastating), it was clearly a passionate and deeply feeling relationship that inspired his great odes.

In her book, Keat’s Odes, Anahid Nersessian says “The best poets, Keats says are ‘camelion’: they change to match their surroundings, sometimes entering fully into the psychic and sensational orbit of other beings. Keats gave this talent a name: it was negative capability and he had it to spare. ‘When I am in a room with people, the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me so that I am in a very little time annihilated…’”

Keats believes that in order to truly love and in order to create art there must be an annihilation of self.

The boundary between one and the other needs to blur. You need to take in that which surrounds you and make it part of you.

It is not a single answer that art and love seek but many—an entire world of feeling and emotion is required for someone to begin to truly understand.

Keats wrote in a letter to Fanny Brawne, “You have absorbed me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving.”

Anne Carson speaks about this in her essay, Eros the Bittersweet. “In Greek the act of love is a mingling. Desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded…Sophocles compares the experience of eros to a lump of ice melting in warm hands.”

So—Keats is with the Greeks—in order to love we need to melt, dissolve, lose our form and join with the other and the world. Even though there is an essential, impregnable boundary between self and other we must reach across the void. Not because we seek truth or certainty but in order to find Beauty.

The Romantics remind us that even during the dawn of the individual, human connection was seen as essential for existence.

Erich Fromm and Art of Love

tl:dr

Love is an action performed daily and it can bring us into the sense of oneness we crave. Without such oneness we literally go insane.

Brief Bio:

Born in 1900, Fromm fled the Nazi’s and settled in the United States. He’s described as a social psychologist but he is also a philosopher.

Fromm’s basic philosophy of love can be summed up as follows:

1. We are driven to love because we inherently understand that we are separate from the world and if we don’t love, we will go insane.

“Any theory of love must begin with the theory of man, of human existence… When man is born… he is thrown out of a situation which is definite… into a situation which is indefinite, uncertain and open... Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself… This awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.  He would become insane could he not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.”

“The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome his separateness and leave the prison of his aloneness.”

2. There are many ways humans try to overcome their intense feelings of separateness:

Orgiastic union

* Since the beginning of time humans have engaged in orgiastic rites to overcome the feeling of separateness—but the sexual orgasm is transitory. It can’t really overcome separateness because it fades. But humans seek orgasms or similar pleasures w/ alcohol and drugs in order to have that momentary escape from feeling so alone.

“One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic states. These may have the form of an auto-induced trance, sometimes with the help of drugs… In a transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it.”

“It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.”

Conformity

* As civilization has gone on humans seek to become one by conforming. If we are like everyone else, then we will be less alone! If we pursue the same goals: marriage, pursuit of material things etc… then we will forget we are separate. But that isn’t enough.

Mature Love (the only true way to overcome separateness according to Fromm)

* In order to engage in true love you have to maintain your individuality and integrity

“In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an act of power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.”

* True love is not exclusive—while you might only share in erotic love with one person, you cannot truly love one person if you do not also share love for all of humanity

* True love is an action

* True love is the only way to achieve union

* True love is essentially an act of generosity

* The ultimate “act” of generosity is that of sharing yourself. If you are not generous with your true self you cannot really be said to love

* Because love is an act, it can never be “arrived at” instead it is a constant process, a practice, like the artist’s practice, that must be engaged with every day

“Love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as a result of a compulsion… In the most general way the active character of love can be described by stating that love is primarily giving, not receiving.”

“The most widespread misunderstanding is that which assumes that giving is ‘giving up’ something, being deprived of, sacrificing… Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power… What does one person give to another? He gives himself, of the most precious he has, he gives up his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other— but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness… In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the other’s sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness.”

“Love… is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together… two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than fleeing from themselves.”

3. There is a lack of love in the western world because of capitalism

* Because we’re constantly pursuing material goods we aren’t engaged in any pursuits that feed the generous act of love.

“Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at shop windows, and then buying all that he can afford to buy… He looks at people in a similar way… Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market considering the limitations of their own exchange values.”

“People capable of love, under the present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present day western society.”

In Conclusion

Human beings are f*****g alone. We are isolated by our very minds and bodies. But just because I can never truly know another doesn’t mean I shouldn’t reach for them.

Like Aristotle says— “all men by their very nature reach out to know.”

Just because we’ll never read all the books, watch all the films, learn the history of the earth, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to understand all we can.

So it is with Love.

Love lives in the space between me and you as we reach through.

* I know you’re all waiting for the History of Love Part II— don’t worry! It’s still coming on February 12th :) In the meantime, here’s an essay about some of the thoughts that have been rolling around in my brain about why we make art and why we share it.

If you’re my friend, or even a close acquaintance, then every October you've probably been forced to listen to me go back and forth on a question that has plagued me seasonally for a decade: should I get an MFA? In order to determine if I should apply to MFA programs, I made excel spreadsheets containing the names of my favorite writers with columns like:

Masters? (Heti and July, no. Krauss, Yuknavitch, yes) 

Age of first published book? (Morrison, 39, Robinson, 37, Carson, 36, Rooney, 27) 

Day Job? (teaching) 

The question I thought I was asking was: how do I make this whole life as an artist thing work? How am I going to get the money, the stability, and the experience to create out-of-this-world irreplaceable fiction? I’ve even emailed famous writers asking for their opinions: what should I do with my life?!?!? 

This winter, I'm realizing that the questions I've really been asking are: is my art worthy? And does my voice matter? 

My partner is a musician. When I see her perform something magical happens. The art she is literally creating in that singular moment is conducted through the bodies of others and transformed within their beings and from their bodies, energy is born. You can feel it. It swells. There is a call and response. Her work transforms and is transformed in an instant. I have never felt that with my art. 

I want to apply to an MFA for the same reason I send my work out for publication in literary journals– I want the Art Gods to bless me! I want to feel chosen—lifted from the crowd of dull beings and deemed creative! Inspirational! Genius! I want to kneel before the Gods of Art and be knighted by their steely grace. Yes! the MFA will say, you are worthy! Please go on! Please don't stop! 

I was in a poetry workshop a few weeks ago with Andre Hoilette (he's amazing by the way, take a class), and he said that publishing is a capitalistic endeavor. I’ve never heard that before, but it resonates deeply. He went on to say that publishers are looking for what will sell and what will sell is dominated by the whims of the “audience” which is essentially a collective consciousness that is, in and of itself, manipulated by those who are trying to sell. 

Money legitimizes my art. When I give someone my story and they give me a check, there is an implicit sense of value. My first poetry publication paid me fifteen dollars and I was ecstatic. I never cashed the check. I kept it as an artifact to remind me that what I created was worth something to someone once!

When I say I'm a writer people inevitably ask where they can buy my book. I'm always slightly embarrassed to say they can't buy it in a bookstore. It was published by a micropress, so it's not available to indie booksellers. Alternatively,  being published by Simon and Schuster, the Paris Review or Granta is like being promoted to the corner office with a sexy view. You've made it! You've been deemed worthy by the most legitimate brands writers and readers know. 

My eternal oscillation about graduate school can be boiled down to the fear that without an MFA or a brand name publication I am not a writer.  In other words, if I haven't been paid, does my art still count? 

I know many artists who realize in their mid 30s that they're never going to be famous like they thought. They're never going to make six figures on their short films or their poetry and an existential depression sets in. How can you be an artist when life demands your time, your energy in other directions? How can you call yourself a writer when no one knows your name? Are you an artist when forty hours a week you sit in zoom meetings and answer slack messages? If you don’t wake up making art and fall asleep dreaming of your work, if you spend more time putting the kids to bed and washing macaroni and cheese out of the couch are you really an artist?  I watch as these people pack up that marshmallowy, creative, joyful, oozing, difficult artist within themselves—containing their messiness—and can't help but think: you're missing the beat that you were born with.

And yet, here I am, at a similar crossroads. Self-publishing is very taboo in the writing industry. If you publish your own work, you’re considered without craft or talent. There’s also an assumption of ego or narcissism in the writer (but who are we kidding, aren’t all writers narcissists? See George Orwell). Art made outside of the tender, loving gaze of the Art Gods drips with hubris. Who said you could speak! We have not graced you with a megaphone! I struggle with profound feelings of shame when I share my work outside the traditional bounds of the publishing world. 

But there are some self-publishing success stories. When I worked at Airbnb, I met Jerry McGill. To this day he is the most dedicated writer I’ve ever met. His first book, a memoir, Dear Marcus, A Letter to the Boy Who Shot Me was self-published at first and then bought by a publisher. Laurie Moore wrote a stunning review in The New York Times. His latest book, Bed Stuy, is even better.

Sometimes when I go through all the cringe-worthy moments of my life, I replay a conversation I had with Jerry wherein I, a self-centered, white, 23-year-old bemoaned my inability to make a living as a writer. Jerry, gently but firmly, suggested that I might have a better chance than him as the publishing industry was inherently racist. I didn't really believe him (insert white privilege here). This was 2015. He asked me to see which publishing houses had Black or Brown editors and how many of The New York Times bestsellers with Black or Brown characters had white authors. Spoiler alert: they were all white. I think this was the first time the benevolent Art God that smiled down on us and bopped us on the head, saying either you're an artist! Or you suck!, became less like a gleaming, omnipotent, objective deity and more like the proctor of an ACT exam. 

My mom says that I'm the type of person who will cut off my nose to spite my face, and it’s true. A kid at my high school who I thought was as dumb as cement dust was awarded a perfect score on the ACT. So, I decided I wouldn't take any standardized tests. As a result of not taking the ACT or SAT, I couldn't apply to most of my top choice colleges, but I couldn't stand the thought of being anonymously measured against cement dust kid and coming up short. I'd rather not play the game at all then suffer being flattened in a system so unfair. (I said this as a privileged white girl who attended an arts magnet school in Denver, Colorado.) When it comes to applying to MFA programs, I feel a similar panic at the prospect of being judged, of impartiality, and ultimately, of failure.

But where does that leave me as an artist, an MFA-less writer? We've established that, for me, art gains its meaning through connection—when artist and lover are united and transformed. The dialogue between two disparate bodies. But if that were truly enough, I wouldn't quit sharing work here, one of the few places in which my art has provided connection or meaningful transference of energy. Art needs connection, but as much as I’d rather cut off my nose, I also deeply crave approval. 

And yet, the benefit of publication isn’t merely in approval. Publication provides a space where writers can refine and enhance their work through the judicious gaze of the other. Mark Mayer (a brilliant writer who has  an MFA) said that the most beneficial gift an MFA provides is a community of believers. Yes! Writers can't grow in a vacuum. You need the friction of your idea bouncing off another in order to create dissonance and energy. You can't write alone. Writing with other people is uncomfortable, it hurts, but there is transfiguration.

Nothing I've written hasn't been edited by talented people I respect. Like Kaisa Cummings, Daria Reaven and Alyse Knorr. My partner read an early draft of The Family and said she wasn't engaged until the scene when Miriam and her father were looking in the mirror. That scene was halfway through the book! It hurt. New love doesn't take kindly to criticism. But I made that scene the opening, and it's a better book because of her advice. We can't become better people alone (except, perhaps, if you're a Buddhist monk), and we can't become better artists in isolation. It's difficult to take responsibility for yourself without others to hold you accountable. 

Still, whenever I think about applying to an MFA I look through my work and think that it  will never measure up. It’s too personal! It’s memoir! There is no veil between narrator and author. Where is the craft? Where is the story?

In A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, George Saunders says, 

I teach “The Singers” to suggest to my students how little choice we have about the kind of writer we will turn out to be. As young writers, we all have romantic dreams of being a writer of a certain kind, of joining a certain lineage…But sometimes the world, via its tepid response to prose written in that mode, tells us that we are not, in fact, that kind of writer…We have to become whatever writer is capable of producing the necessary level of energy... This writer may turn out to bear little resemblance to the writer we dreamed of being. She is born, it turns out, for better or worse, out of that which we really are: the tendencies we've been trying, all these years, in our writing and maybe even in our lives, to suppress or deny or correct, the parts of ourselves about which we might even feel a little ashamed.

My work that creates energy and generates movement in the mind of the reader is the work that's truly personal, real. I don't mean literally real or “this is what really happened”, but emotionally bare. If I could be so bold as to say so, my talent as a writer lies in my ability to be emotionally honest to the moment. The writer William Henderson said, you should ask yourself “what should not be exposed” and that's where your story truly lies. I took a class with Benjamin Whitmer and he said that most writers will write until they get to the scary scene, the emotional scene, and instead of writing about what occurs in that dark place the writer cuts to the next. Our goal as writers is to write through that scene and out to the other side. 

And yet, why expose myself to the public? Does exposure make art? No,I don't think so. Does a newsletter where I lay my thoughts bare make art? No, I don't think so. My most recent novel, ORACLES, is experimental autofiction. ORACLES is about my experience tending to my estranged father as he died. I wanted to explore the central questions: how do you give your anger an end? and how do you love right? While I don’t consider it to be a memoir, I wanted to be as honest and objective as possible. Just because the narrative centered around my emotional experience didn’t mean I wanted to glorify or even condone my behavior. I wrote the book alone in my apartment in the fall of 2020 and it was a very painful experience because, in order to be emotionally honest, I thought I needed to be exposed–not as in “make something visible by uncovering it” but “reveal my true, objectionable nature.” The first draft of the book contained a scene where I described the worst thing I've ever done. Even writing about it now floods the cavity behind my lungs with acid. All my early readers agreed it should be cut. But why?! I wondered.?! The reader needed to know how horrible of a person I was! They needed to see what I'm capable of! Could I dare write a book without this darkness?!? Yes, the readers all said. The scene was like self-flagellation. It was abusive and served no artful purpose. 

I realized my book wasn’t objective–I wasn’t letting the reader decide. I inherently believed I was bad, and I’d crafted my argument to force the reader, and myself, into a corner of self-hatred as a way to justify this loathing. However, art can't be the tool we use to exercise  our inner demons just because we need a witness to all our betrayals. Art can't be the machine we use to wring out the vapid, useless parts of ourselves and ask, forlorn and desperate, now that you see me for who I really am can you still love me!? Art needs to take what life you have to give and metamorphose into its own being, become a creature with its own pulsing heart. My book has a lot of me in it and a lot that I'm not proud to share, but I've left those scenes because they flow to a greater understanding—as in sympathetic awareness or tolerance. Not a moral, not a “this-is-what-life-means” platitude but hope that each scene carries an emotional weight that transcends the self and, ideally, touches on a more universal feeling.

My art that conducts energy is deeply personal and exposed. I’m not the writer I’d hoped to be—the intellectual, all-seeing Anne Carson or the playful and surreal Jeanette Winterson. I identify with Saunders when he says of a story he’d just finished:

When I finished the story, I could see that it was the best thing I had ever written… The story was oddly made, slightly embarrassing–it exposed my actual taste, which, as it turned out, was kind of working class and raunchy and attention seeking. I held that story up against the stories I loved… and felt that I let the form down. So, this moment of supposed triumph (I'd “found my voice”) was also sad… 

This is a big moment for any artist…when we have to decide whether to accept a work of art that we have to admit we weren't in control of as we made it and which we are not entirely sure we approve. It is less, less than we wanted it to be, and yet it's more, too. It's small and a bit pathetic, judged against the work of the great masters, but there it is, all ours.

When I was twenty-six, I felt artistically and emotionally starved, so I quit my job and moved to New Zealand. On one of my first days there, my friend, Erika, was driving us to Piha beach outside of Auckland. I'm not sure what prompted me, but as we wound our way through lush, wet earth on a tiny New Zealand road, I asked her if she believed she was worthy of love. She said yes. Without pause, without doubt. I was moved by her certainty and also a little devastated. I’d never felt that I was worthy of love, but I wanted to feel as assured in my own value one day. 

Writing and sharing your work is similar to love in that you're offering up your body, your mind, your desires, and wounds and asking: do you want me? Do you desire what I have to offer? It's admitting to another: I want your attention. I want you to look at me and desire to know more. But, just as in love, you can't wait for your beloved to judge and weigh all that you are and determine your worthiness. To move forward with a reader, a lover, you have to offer your voice, your tenderness, knowing in your heart that this is who you are and because it is you and it is honest it is also worthy. 

After a workshop I took with an author, we were talking about my novel and I felt concerned that people wouldn't understand my protagonist. She shrugged and said, well they're just not your readers. What? I didn't have to write for everyone? My readers would come to me and not the other way around? It was simultaneously liberating and terrifying. Just who were my readers?

Just as you can't be a harmful and toxic person and expect to be loved (although I truly believe that everyone, even harmful and toxic people, are worthy of love), you also can't expect people to engage with your work without personal effort and growth. What an artist does, George Sanders says, is take responsibility for their art. And isn't that what we do as people in relationships? Take responsibility for our work? To commit to becoming better daughters, sisters, lovers? To own our choices and make better ones? 

In the end, though, while art yearns for connection and approval—that is not why I am driven to create. If I was the Count of Monte Cristo and imprisoned on Château d'If, I’d still find a way to write. Alone in a windowless cage without time or matter—I would still make art. 

I am driven to make art because I am tormented by confusion in this life. Don DeLillo says:

Art reminds us that we're alive, that you have something in you that's receptive to the mysteries. You see yourself in the art that you love, you feel something sweep through you that you can't analyze or speak clearly about, makes you feel alive in the world, reminds you that you have a range of being that is deeper and sweeter than you knew.

I'm not content with mystery, but I honor its presence. While I demand an examined life, art is an attempt to find peace, or at least some minimal comfort in a world of limitless mystery. In his essay, “The Creative Process”, James Baldwin writes, “The entire purpose of society is to create a bulwark against the inner and the outer chaos, in order to make life bearable and to keep the human race alive.” To be an artist, he says, is to tear down that wall—let the chaos through. 

It’s through art that I can bear the chaos flooding through this body. The question isn’t: should I make art? But: do I deserve to share what I create? And the answer to both is: it doesn’t really matter, do what you want.

While the question itself of whether to get an MFA is often driven by pressure from the publishing industry and gate keeping set by capitalism etc… I don’t have to succumb to such pressure. Through thoughtful investigation into the pros and cons I’ve decided that, for now, I’m going to forge my own path and try to think outside of the conventions of what it traditionally means to be an MFA-awarded writer.

As much as I crave approval and connection, they are often the desires that fill me with shame, and I’m not really interested in being ashamed of who I am any longer.