The Fun Part
Since I earned my Master’s from Pacific University in January, not much about my daily rhythms has changed. I work certain days a week at the liquor store, staring into space and scribbling notes on the back of receipts. The other days, I work at home, drafting or line-editing essays and slowly contributing to the behemoth that is my manuscript-in-progress. It's a tragicomic memoir about growing up evangelical and dating atheist boys. Or, it’s a tragicomic memoir about moving back to my hometown after a decade away and confronting the psychic shadow of my devout adolescent self. Or, it’s about deconstruction and marriage and loving the "wrong" people.
It’s changed shape, and structure, and content, several times. On one hand, I don’t have a lot to show for the past two years of drafting and editing and revising and re-drafting. The more serious I've gotten about my writing, the less I'm able to whip out a blog post and keep on truckin’. I drafted part of a blog post in mid-February and then realized it was actually a rumination on the essay I’d been editing, one about conversion. Well, I thought it was about conversion when I started it, but it turned out to be about church camp. But another essay I was working on—about the narrative form of the testimony—turned about to be kind of about conversion. All the same ideas, swimming around in circles in my mind. I print out drafts and arrange the pages on the floor of my craft lab. I took a stack of pages to the bar with me last week for happy hour (and I made some great edits while I was there).
I’m trying to get these pieces published, eventually. (It’s scary to admit ambition.)
Publication is the external validation that says, you did it, but publication is also a false god. When I was putting the finishing touches on my thesis last November, I told my spiritual director that I’d identified one of the sources of pressure that I felt. Subconsciously, I kept thinking, if I write a good enough thesis, everyone will love me. It will be the proof that I’m worthwhile, that I'm lovable, that I’m good.
“All those people you want to impress,” she said. “What if they already think you’re good?”
I’m striving for publication because I want my work to be out there, to live in the world and achieve a wider reach than what I can conjure for this humble blog. But ultimately, when I'm not guided by vanity, I want my work to be out there because I believe in what I'm writing, and I want people to connect with it. I want readers who encounter vestiges of their own experience when I articulate mine. I want to write work that returns people to themselves.
Earlier this week, I spent a few hours reviewing line edits from a fellow Pacific grad on one of my recent drafts. The piece was a vulnerable one, full of big feelings and self-exposure and incrimination. My classmate sent me a two-page response of his own “hazy, fluorescent-tinged" memories of youth group and teenage religious fervor, and teenage religious misalignment, and adult anger and grief. The piece resonated with him. That's ultimately what I want for my work.
This is the fun part. It’s not about striving for some unknown, ever-moving finish line. I can't pin my hopes to the day I get published in The New Yorker, or The Paris Review, or the Taco Bell Quarterly. But I can pin my hopes to the day that my writing sparks a connection with someone, a moment of eye contact accompanied by the admission, “I've been there too.” And that's today.
Sure, I’m hoping for professional success, to write a book that sells at auction, to make it on the New York Times bestseller list, to travel for book events and meet other weirdos with big feelings—but those are perks. The life I want is a quotidian pursuit, and it looks like this: midweek zoom workshops with other writers dedicated to similar questions as I am; getting to edit on the back porch when it’s nice out; glancing up often enough to appreciate the cat bounding through the unmowed grass, not judging myself for when the material is hard and I take an instagram break.
It’s beautiful out. I’m making art I really believe in. This is the fun part.
