In the basement of Port Authority I was told that the bus route I was holding a paper ticket for had been permanently canceled, so I had to race across Manhattan to catch a train to New Haven. In New Haven I would need to get a taxi for the thirty-mile ride to Middletown, an extravagance I hadn’t budgeted for, so outside the station I haggled with a few drivers over the fare. I ended up in the backseat of a cab driven by a man who wanted to know if I had a boyfriend and then, encouraged by my honest response, told me he loved me and asked me to “take a break” with him.
I did, then paid the agreed-upon fare. Later I’d write an essay about that kiss, which would become one of my first published pieces, but this was before we talked about harassment in the way we do now, and it was just meant as a funny story. I don’t remember any of the lectures at that conference, but I remember the auditorium where I sat among a couple hundred people—mostly white women, mostly a few decades older than me—taking notes on whatever the speaker was saying, or scribbling away for ten minutes on a given prompt.
I was twenty-five, caught between the first and second years of my fiction MFA, the beginning and the end of “becoming a writer,” and it seemed to me that the room was crowded with a kind of desperation. Something like a shimmer of heat arose from every last aching wannabe, each of us terrified of our impending irrelevance, such that the space burned with the dry fever of ambition. I wanted to write a book, a book that people—many people—would want to read.
The content of the book was hazy, but the outcome was clear: I wanted to be the person at the podium, the one talking right now about his journey from hard work to critical acclaim. I wanted to be the one whose words were being scribbled down, the one whose advice we’d paid for, who everyone was craning to hear. I am talking here about an uneasy, narrow, claustrophobic topic: the self.
Specifically, the self as it materializes in the realm of writing. It’s 2017 and I’m reading applications for a two-year fellowship at a small college in the Midwest, where an emerging writer will be paid $25,000 a year to teach two courses, advise two student groups, and sit on a couple of committees. There are over a hundred applicants, some with a book or chapbook and many with no books, and their CVs list every poem they’ve published, every story, every essay in every online journal, every prize they’ve won and every contest in which they’ve been a runner-up or finalist.
The more CVs I read, the more each accomplishment seems a grain of sand, a crumb: “I persuaded Unknown Journal to publish my seven-line poem, which a dozen people have skimmed,” or “My five hundred-word flash fiction was a finalist in four contests I paid fifteen or twenty dollars each to enter, possibly for the very privilege of listing these half-baked laurels on my CV.” I empathize with the gulf of longing underneath these catalogs, the longing any one of us might feel for the crumbs together to coalesce into—what? At the same time, I begin to sense I am reading accounts of where a writer has left behind a flake of dry skin, a scant set of words upon which a few other starved writers have cast a glance. To be concerned with self-image is to be frozen in a kind of rigor mortis at the shore of the pond where you’ve glimpsed your own reflection.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
