Or this:

Or this:

Now that I’m a more experienced writer and committed to a novel that is 100% fictional, I understand what those writers mean. My characters will sit quietly in my brain for hours, even days, until something triggers them and they start talking to me. For long stretches they won’t say a thing, but I often think of them when passing a shop window or listening to the radio: Molly would look good in that, James would hate this song. When we do get together, we can spend hours in each other’s company, and it’s fun. It’s like rooming with good friends: I might not spend every waking hour with them, but I see them most every day and I enjoy our time together.

But I have some visitors in my brain of late: Mickey and Cecily, my characters for the two versions of The Odd Couple. They’ll only be staying with us until mid to late February, which puts me on company behavior until they leave. They get first dibs on my time and attention. I try not to neglect my novel characters, but I feel the pressure of our limited time and I can’t ignore my visitors for long. And the two groups don’t play well together. I don’t want to banish my novel characters, even for a few weeks, but I only have so much creative attention to give–it runs out long before time does. When I’m feeling particularly torn between them, I find myself retreating all together, ducking out, hoping the characters will figure it out for me.

In an ideal world, I would have enough energy for everyone. I could spend the mornings in my novel and the afternoons in the plays. There would be no blank stares, no uncomfortable silences. But they’re both fighting for one portion of my brain, and I can’t seem to expand it. I can’t cannibalize the part that calculates my daily expenditures, or the part reserved for guitar practice, or even the section designated for reading. It’s as if my brain doesn’t want me to spend my whole life in fictional worlds, talking to and developing people who don’t technically exist. It demands that I create things with my hands, that I do math from time to time, that I look at the world in front of my eyes.

When I have company in the real world, I set my regular life aside so I can focus on them. I reconfigure my schedule to spend maximum time with my guests. I talk to them more than I talk to my husband, but I do still talk to him. What’s most often sacrificed during a visit is my alone time, but I often find a way to have some, whether it’s going to bed early or taking a solo trip to the grocery store. If I don’t take these breathers, I start to become a useless hostess–quiet, distracted, surly–and by the time the guest leave, I’m ready to collapse.

I keep feeling guilty when I take time away from my characters (lately, I’ve taken solace in the serene repetition of my crochet hook) but I’m starting to think it’s okay if it prevents total burnout. I can’t neglect my novel characters entirely, but I have to know when to rest. It was my tendency to push myself too hard that made my first “novel” stiff, dry, and unimaginative–at least in part. I just have to trust that my novel characters will be faithful, and that when Mickey and Cecily leave, they will be waiting.

Maybe Nuremberg Needs One of These?

Der Klügere gibt nach.  (The cleverer give in.)
–A German Saying

A retired German man was walking in a German city not long ago. He saw a group of people trying to cross the street at a dangerous intersection. The cars wouldn’t stop so some women created a human chain as a barrier to help the others cross. An Audi drove up to the woman-made-chain and pushed their bodies out of the way with his car. The women were shocked; their hands dropped, chain broke, and they didn’t know what to say.

The retired man went over to the Audi and told the driver to stop pushing people around with his car. The man in the Audi opened his car door, got out, and yelled at this thin man who must be in his late sixties. The thin older man pushed the driver back into his Audi and shut the car door. The driver opened the door, got back out of the car, and towered over the old-ish man, yelling some more before driving away.

The retired man said when the Audi drove away, he looked around and no one was there. The pedestrians who all needed to cross the street, the women who made the chain—they were all gone. The only person standing by him was his wife. “And she was probably hoping this was her chance to get rid of me,” the retired man joked.

I heard this story in a short story reading group at the German-American Institute last week. We were discussing an essay about a woman who didn’t stand up to racism on a bus in London and later wrote her regret into the essay, “She Shall Not Be Moved.” The leader of the short story group asked us if we would have told the old white ladies on the bus in London to switch seats so the Nigerian woman could move her stroller out of the aisle.

Of course we all want to say we would stick up for the Nigerian woman with the stroller, but it feels juvenile to act too sure of what one would do in a complicated situation roiling with undercurrents of racism. Especially when you have a child to protect, as Sheeren Pandit, the author of the essay did.

In some ways the retired man’s story is inspiring, but he almost seemed to regret having stood up to the man in the Audi. In fact, he’s the one who quoted the German saying above (The cleverer give in) after telling us his–as he put it–”disappointing story.” I let him know how much I admired his act. He offered resistance to jerkiness, and he got concrete evidence of his wife’s loyalty that day. Besides, isn’t the regret of not doing something worse than the regret of having done something?

I can’t say I disagree with the quote about the cleverer giving in, but given Germany’s history, this particular value concerns me. Tonight I’m going to a book group to discuss The Book Thief, which is about a German family during WWII, who end up hiding a Jewish man in their basement. Despite the flaws of the book, I found myself drawn, deeply, into the story and can’t stop thinking about the Holocaust. Nuremberg was a significant place for Hitler. Therefore, the city was bombed into oblivion, and I see relics of these bombings daily.

Nuremberg has sites that document the area’s Nazi history, but I haven’t yet seen a memorial for the Jews in this city. I was surprised how comforted I was to see a giant menorah in a square in Munich on Christmas Eve. I haven’t yet seen any art in Nuremberg that pays homage to the Jews that this city sacrificed. And I want to.

Any ideas?

I had never heard of this brand until recently.

About a week ago, I spent a Saturday evening drinking scotch, telling stories and having some laughs with a small group of people who all happen to be smarter than I am. Our hosts had some music on in the background, and I recognized a particular piece. In my typical self-deprecating manner, I pointed out how I loved the piece (Ravel’s String Quartet in F major), but my primary association with it was that it signified the title sequence of The Royal Tenenbaums. So as opposed to, you know, being a genuinely cultured person and knowing specific compositions by name, I only recognized the piece because of a movie. I didn’t have to make that connection out loud for everyone– as I said, they’re smart people– so our host, being a good natured person, smiled at my idiocy and proceeded to tell us a bit about Ravel’s history, alluding to some criticism he’d received as a composer and telling us that he’d died a virgin. Which was cool– I love that she knows stuff like that.

When I think about the evening, I think about it in two ways. First, as I said, it was lovely, and I went home glad I’d chosen to go. It was warm and cozy, the conversation was good, I laughed a lot, and I got to know one of the people a little better. But now that I’m writing about it, it’s changed. That’s what happens, right? We make decisions about how to convey scenes. As I’m thinking about the night through the filter of the music conversation, I can point to the various moments that exemplify my opening comment about the others being more intelligent than me. Two people were bantering in Russian, someone alluded to their time teaching at an Ivy League school, someone quoted an obscure passage from a Vonnegut novel I’ve never read, so on and so forth. Now, that doesn’t mean there weren’t penis jokes– even classy people like those– but as I drove home, the moment of noticing the music, and particularly noticing why I noticed the music, caused my mind to travel down a little rabbit hole and land in a room where all I could think about was why I like the art and pop culture that I do.

The experience of hearing the exact moment in that movement that I adore– the part that makes the whole piece for me– reminded me of a scene from The West Wing. It’s something Sorkin does often, weaving a piece of classical music into a scene where it’s not just in the background, but instead the characters themselves are experiencing it and commenting on it. This works because all of the characters on the show are insanely smart and well-rounded, which we’re willing to suspend our disbelief about because we’d like to believe you have to be brilliant and kind and hard-working to work at the White House. I thought about how the characters on the show appreciate classical music and play basketball and toss around religious, philosophical, and literary references on a regular basis, and that’s part of the reason I enjoy those characters. I’m drawn to the characters on the show because I like them. That’s not so bad, right? Except that I’m drawn to the characters on the show because I want to be like them. My love for the show reflects ambition and longing and covetousness. Which is sort of pathetic, right? But also kind of hilarious.

It comes down to this: I want to know obscure statistics off the top of my head and debate gun control in casual conversation and have witty repartee with friends & coworkers. I want to be able to speak quickly and intelligently about any number of topics, to work long hours without complaining, to be slightly flawed but basically kind and good and nice-looking.

Now, this may seem a little obvious. It’s not like I’m observing something new. Advertising & marketing have been playing off our collective insecurities forever, and the entire fashion industry is built on it, among others. But I’d never really held it in my hands and turned it this way and that in the context of pop culture or art. Have you? Have you thought about why you like certain films or plays or books? And I don’t mean in the big-picture sense that we usually care about, how the thing broke the rules or said something profound about human nature or expressed a worldview you hadn’t considered. I mean, on a basic level, why do you like the things you like?

I followed the rabbit hole deeper. I started thinking about the movies and books and columns I can’t get enough of, and how many of them I relate to because I aspire to have certain characteristics. I read Anne of Green Gables as a kid and identified with Anne-with-an- ‘e’ because I wanted to be more outspoken like her (guess the pendulum really swung the other way on that one, eh?). I like Good Will Hunting because Will knows everything but he comes from nowhere and works hard. I read columns by Bill Simmons and Katie Baker and John Buccigross because I (still, ahem) want to be a sportswriter. I read various literary websites because I want to pretend I’m a writer. I devour books about mountain climbing because I think I’d want to do that. And so on and so forth.

This is part of why people watch reality television, yes? They like to watch rich people because a) they want to be rich and famous and b) making fun of rich and famous people makes them feel better about their own lives. Or they like to watch Top Chef or Project Runway and imagine they could have done a better job at a given challenge than professionals who’ve been working in that field their whole lives. Now, is watching Hoarders the same? No. Do people like Dexter because they want to be serial killers? Probably not. Not everything we watch or read is because we admire the protagonist or narrator. But it seems that a significant portion of the pop culture and media that we consume, we select because we just wanna be like them, whether we’re making that decision consciously or not.

So what does this mean for those of us who write fiction? Do you find yourself creating characters who, despite being desperately flawed, have personality traits or interests that in some way reflect your own ambition or longing? Poets, do the speakers of your poems who aren’t you do this as well? In other words, how do we exploit our own shortcomings or silly insecurities and make them serve a function in our work? I wonder if it’s even possible to do so consciously, or if they just work their way in naturally and we notice them during revision.

In the Robert Lopez interview of Issue 69 of Willow Springs, Lopez says:

I tell students that you have to cultivate your fears, your perversions, your peccadilloes, your compulsions. You have to use that stuff because it’s ultimately going to make the work vibrant and come off the page. All the stories we tell have been told a million times before. Nobody’s going to come up with a new story. It’s all the same old thing; somebody is losing something, somebody wants something, somebody is afraid of losing something, somebody is afraid of wanting something. We can’t not write those stories. We cultivate the strange things that make us unique, and that uniqueness is what connects us to other people. Otherwise strangeness is just a freak show. Like what you see on Jerry Springer.

Does the same principle apply for characteristics we admire or covet? Do they make the work more vibrant? Or, because so much of what we find interesting about our characters is their damage–their fucked-up-ed-ness, to steal a phrase– is it more about exposing the damage than it is about examining what we aspire to be? Again, it seems obvious to say that it’ll be a mixture of the two: maybe you love & admire the toughness of your character, but that toughness comes from being damaged in some crucial way, and the damage is more interesting, harder to figure out, harder to write. Or is it?

This is how I’ve developed my character for the female Odd Couple. I’ve made up the last name, but the husband’s name is in the script, and she only shows up onstage to play Trivial Pursuit. According to the Samuel French version’s costuming guide, she wears a cop uniform throughout the play, with a skirt instead of trousers. Neither of these things will be true for our rendition, as far as I know; the costuming is not yet final, but as of now, Mickey does not sit like a lady, so a skirt might be a poor choice. Also, she’s a cop, not a meter maid. But I suppose if the costumer insists, I will have to adjust.

I’ve had this happen before, with lights instead of costumes. I had a very long monologue in The Shadow Box, and my character was shy and evasive, so I spent much of it looking down. But when the lighting designer finished his work, I was lit from below, which meant if I looked down, my eye sockets darkened and, as the stage manager put it, I looked like Satan. They loaded me up with highlighting makeup, but to little avail, and the lights would not be moved. So I adjusted. I looked up, to the rafters, and looked side to side when I felt uncomfortable, instead of casting my gaze more predictably down, and my performance was actually enhanced because of it. But my character had to be tweaked. She had to get slightly braver, slightly more defiant. It bled into the rest of the play and made her a more complicated individual.

So if Mickey wears a skirt, she might have to sit knock-kneed, which might spread to her gait, which might make her Muppet-like, which might make her compensate with a louder voice and more violent gestures. Or maybe she’ll have bike shorts underneath and sit boyishly anyway. A skirt would make her angrier, less comfortable, less patient. It might change her character all together.

When developing a character in a play, there are three things for which an actor must comb the script:

1. What do other characters say about her?
2. What does she say about herself?
3. What do the stage directions say about her; what does she do?

Everything else is provided by the actor, in conjunction with the director, the costumer, the lighting designer, the props master, etc. The smaller the part, the more the actor gets to provide. For example, no one says much about Mickey in the script. They say she’s a cop. They say she makes people nervous when she’s nervous. They tell her to calm down a few times. Of her own life, she reveals little, except that her husband likes that she’s a cop because he can handcuff her to the bed.

I have always felt that my experience acting in and directing plays has helped me with my writing, both in moving characters through space and in their development. Even if my character only appears briefly on the page, I usually know her whole history, which lets me know how she’ll behave in any situation that might develop. I think a lot of writers who’ve never acted do this, too, but I wonder if acting has made me give more importance to that background info. I do like to feel my characters as I’m writing. I like to get inside their skin. And it’s easy, especially when writing a device character (which is basically what Mickey is, providing exposition and reacting to the situation differently than the principle characters, thus providing argument, tension, etc.) to reduce them to their function within the work, and not think about where they were before they entered the scene, or where they’ll go next. In Act One, Scene One, Mickey has come from a long shift at work and hasn’t had a chance to change. She’s tired, hungry, and a little edgy, but she’d rather be with her friends than at home where her husband will pester her with questions. When she leaves, she’ll go straight home and tell her husband all about her friend Florence’s divorce and suicide drama, and will feel very grateful to have her nuisance of a husband. They might not have sex–she’s exhausted–but they’ll definitely cuddle.

Did Neil Simon know this? I have no idea. I’m sure he had a vague notion of Mickey’s life, but all I have to work with is the little described in the script, which is great because I’m less hemmed in. The problem is, when I start going into daydream development land, I start wanting to change Mickey’s lines, or to give some of them away. I think, That line should really be Sylvie’s. But while I can slightly change the wording of a line and blame it on my memory, I can’t really mess with the script. It might feel restrictive at times, but I’ve always worked best with restrictions. It almost makes me hope for some costuming or lighting wrench in the works to force me down another road, toward someplace better.

So says Daphne Williams Fox, the grand-daughter of William Carlos Williams, as she responds to the new Herbert Leibowitz book on her famed ancestor.   Leibowitz suggests that the Rutherford physician had an unconsummated affair with a Dadaist artist, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven — and with names like these their mere introduction to one another probably sucked all the oxygen from the room.   And can you imagine what might have passed for flirtatious chatter between the two poets, The Mind’s Games?

If a man can say of his life or
any moment of his life, There is
nothing more to be desired!  his state
becomes like that told in the famous
double sonnet — but without the
sonnet’s restrictions.  Let him go look…

Looking, of course, is always an option, and Williams undoubtedly engaged in the activity a lot.  His optic nerve never grew tired.   A coastline?   “Today small waves are rippling…”   Tomatoes?  “Green/ in one basket and, in/ the other shining reds.”   Violets?   “Once in a while/ we’d find a patch… big blue/ ones in/ the cemetery woods…”   An old brownstone church?   “Among a group/ of modern office buildings…”   Look!  Look!  Look!   And finally–Look!

But what happens when someone looks back?   When the writer as observer or as imaginator becomes the one who is seen and known and, as Daphne admits, “open to interpretation”?   My sense is that creative writing, as a discipline, has no clear-cut answer.   Nor does the practice of crafting a simple declarative sentence that is true come with an operators‘ manual.   No safe place exists for us — not even the library, not even the local delicatessen.   Those people behind the reference desk are always watching.  Those slicing lunchmeat have built-in baloney-detectors.   And so, the conundrum that fascinates Leibowitz in telling the tale of William Carlos Williams is also the issue that Leibowitz himself may encounter some day.  (He can only hope!)

Something Urgent I Have To Say To You stipulates that a poet’s subject matter cannot help but raise a window shade on what really happened behind closed doors.   If Williams succumbed to certain philandering urges, for example, poems like Chanson and excerpts of Classic Picture might help to decipher the code.   Daisy Fried, in her New York Times Review of the biography, addresses this aesthetic and offers an insightful critique.  Way to go, Daisy.

Still I have to wonder whether speculation, neither confirmed nor denied, about the Pulitzer Prize winning author’s trysts really have a place in appreciating the following:

This woman!  how shall I describe her
who is wealthy in the riches
of her sex?  No counterfeit, no mere
metal to be sure–

yet, a treasury, a sort of lien upon
all property we list and transfer.
This woman has no need to play the market
or to do anything more than watch…

Oh baby!  Someone, please call the National Inquirer!  Chanson, in just two measly stanzas, has revealed a little cleavage in the way we know what we don’t know about a person.  Where is Geraldo Rivera when we need him to dig up a little dirt?  And what about this?  What is this but some cryptic pre-nuptial agreement between two star-crossed souls?!!

A woman’s brains
which can be keen
are condemned,

like a poet’s
to what deceptions she can muster
to lead men

to their ruin.
But look more deeply
into her maneuvers,

and puzzle as we will about them
they may mean
anything

***

Now that’s just plain bizarre — and well within the context of the 1955 Greenwich Village milieu, when a female might aspire to the mentality of poet through simile alone.   Today, of course, we would have to capitulate to the obvious every Classic Picture:  whether or not women still fuss with their hair, as Williams observed, at least one woman’s brains are inherently poetic — Mutatis Mutandis!

In fact, the Baroness, as Elsa Von Fretag-Loringhoven came to be known, has finally broken into publication.   In 2005, bookstores finally felt brave enough to display Body Sweats; The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Von Fretag-Loringhoven in full view of their paying customers.  The title poem of the collection reads like so:

Body

Sweats

Mind

Rags

Agony

Unceasing —

Heartleech

Bloodseeps

Agony

Unceasing —

Life

Pollensweet

Diebitterness

Churn

Unceasing —

Figure

To

Flee —

Shape

Unceasing

Top

Me.

Well, there you and I have it.   And, as Billy Joel has sung, we have what we have on the basis of “our respective similarities.”  It turns out the condition of Ol’ Grand-Dad’s marriage is not important for Daphne.  She has this:  “Be patient that I address you in a poem, there is no other/ fit medium…”

Peace–

(I feel sort of like Inigo when he’s trying to explain to Wesley what’s going on after they wake him up from being almost-dead. “Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”)

So there’s this young female writer who had posted a couple of pieces on Thought Catalog about losing her virginity and spending a day as an escort in London.* She had her own blog under the pseudonym Marie Calloway, which she has since taken down, but many of her posts were about sexual encounters with men she contacted through the internet, and a few times she posted naked pictures of herself. She read and admired some writing by an older man in New York, who is apparently in or on the fringes of one of the cool kids’ clubs of writers in the city. (As a non-resident of New York, an unpublished writer and a decidedly uncool kid, let’s just say I’d never heard of the guy in question.) She made contact with him, and suggested they meet up and have sex while she was in the city. They met and did have sex, despite his admission that he had a girlfriend but that he was “bored,” and the fact that she was traveling with another man who’d paid for her trip and who she was also sleeping with. (She says the other man, Patrick, was supportive of her plan to sleep with the writer, and that he was happy with how he was portrayed in the account/story.) She took some photos on her phone, and wrote a detailed account of the whole liaison for her blog, using the real names of everyone in question, publishing the photos she took (including one of her face with the writer’s semen supposedly all over it), and essentially giving a play-by-play of all their conversations. Oh, and also play-by-plays of all the fucking.

So people started to notice it, and her blog exploded with hits, and then (this is where I get fuzzy) for some reason she took the post down. Not sure what that was prompted by. But then, a couple of days later, lo and behold: nearly the exact same account, in its entirety, was published on Muumu House as fiction, with one main change: the male writer in question’s name was changed to Adrien Brody, at the suggestion of Tao Lin. Ms. Calloway had communicated with him previously and sent him her writing, so she sent him her 15,000 word piece and he agreed to publish it, advising that she change the man’s name to that of a celebrity.*

So then, by some magic, everyone was supposed to treat the story as fiction, even though most people were aware that it had been published online as nonfiction, and even though the “story” uses actual quotes from the man’s writing that anyone could plug into Google and find out his name in approximately fourteen seconds. (Which I did.) So the internet exploded.

First, Emily Gould wrote a response to the original nonfiction blog post, in which she says that she couldn’t tell if Calloway understood what amazing things she was doing in the piece, and that she wanted to “locate her story in a tradition because for years I didn’t understand that my own writing was part of a tradition.” Gould then updates her own post after the piece is republished as fiction, and makes it clear that she’s absolutely unsympathetic to the fact that the male writer’s privacy may have been violated by making it so obvious who he is, and so she says: “But mostly you feel bad for women, who are in this and cannot escape and especially can’t escape themselves. At least they can describe their situation and I guess that’s what part of what I like, when people do that.” *

 The New York Observer did a piece, sharing some juicy gossip about how after publishing her story, Tao Lin invited Marie Calloway to accompany him to Paris but later rescinded the offer. Gawker weighed in, suggesting that the whole thing was ridiculous and that it wasn’t productive or necessary to take one woman’s account of sex and try to force meaning upon it:

I suspect (though I am no psychiatrist, or expert person of any sort) that people flock to sex stories for roughly the same reason that people watch pornography: because people like sex. There is nothing inherently noble, or brave, or feminist about relentlessly focusing on one’s own sex life to the exclusion of other topics. We all like sex. Most of us like reading about sex. But it does no favors to young female writers to convince them that they are courageous voices in the wilderness for dedicating their talents to writing stories that are received as lurid, not literary. (Hamilton Nolan for Gawker)

 Roxane Gay wrote a piece for HTMLGIANT, raising some questions about the ethics around disseminating such intimate details when Marie Calloway and “Adrien Brody” weren’t the only ones involved—his girlfriend stumbled across and read the very graphic account of them having sex, and had to deal with the fallout from everyone knowing that “Adrien Brody” was really her boyfriend. Kate Zambreno argued pretty vehemently that the story does have literary merit, that Calloway was aware of all the choices she was making in the piece, and that culturally we’re so dismissive of girls and young women’s experiences that everyone wasn’t taking the piece seriously simply because it involved a young female writing frankly about sex.* Zoe Zolbrod said “I was completely drawn into the story. It nakedly addresses so many issues I’m perennially interested in and currently writing about or around: Gender, youth, age difference, sexuality, power, honesty, attraction, ethics, transaction, responsibility.” Here is Tao Lin’s response to someone insulting Calloway and the story, in which Tao Lin defends the story and also Marie Calloway herself, and he does so by calling the person stupid, but he also asserts that the story has “relatively little sex and, I feel, no ‘shock value.’” (Which I disagree with, but that’s fine.)

There’s probably fifty-seven other responses to this whole thing, so good luck trying to be productive today if you get sucked into them.  So you’re pretty much up to speed, except for one thing.

The Rumpus posted an interview with Marie Calloway on December 29. Stephen Elliott did the interview, and makes it clear that he’s very sympathetic to her as a writer, that he enjoyed the story, and makes a point of saying that since the account was “published as fiction it seems only fair to treat it as such.”

And then he adds this at the end of the Q&A:

Postscript: While the story Adrien Brody is supposed to be based on a real experience Adrien Brody was published as fiction. I think it’s only fair to read it as such and to withhold judgements from the participants as you would with any work of fiction.

Wait, what? Seriously?

Not only am I confused as to why he’s so adamantly defending both the writer and the “story,” but I sort of thought it was my job as a reader to evaluate fiction and make judgments, good or bad, about the actions and motivations of the characters. But in this case, since everyone fucking knows that it really happened, it’s more complicated than that, and Elliot seems to be ignoring that, as if it’s insulting to artists everywhere that we won’t talk about the piece as if it were fiction. Calloway chose to share it with the world as nonfiction, and changing the guy’s name to a Hollywood actor doesn’t mean it’s a piece of fiction. (Note: Since I never read the original, nonfiction blog post, and it was taken down a while ago, I’m not an authority on what exactly changed between version 1 and version 2. Generally people seem to agree it was very little, mostly identifying details about the man. Although, as I said, even with the “fictional” edited version, I found out his name in less time than it takes to type “The quick brown fox” sentence. So only some identifying details were taken out.)

Does this whole mess raise some interesting questions? Yes, absolutely. Does the reaction to the piece prompt some thinking about fiction versus nonfiction, gender roles, cultural expectations, power dynamics in the older man/younger woman scenario we see everywhere (and I’ll admit I’m fascinated by it, too, and I generally love work that explores it, like Disgrace). My problem isn’t with those conversations. My problem is that the actual piece of writing which prompted all this doesn’t examine those issues in any meaningful way. Any number of things are referenced in the piece– feminism, Marxism, gender roles, pornography, narcissism, and more– but nothing in that piece opened up anything about the world for me, or made me think in any meaningful way about any of the subjects she mentions.

Instead, it reads like what I believe it is: a confessional piece by a young woman who is early in her writing career, who makes a lot of mechanical and grammatical errors, who is interested in writing about sex and probably compelled to write about it by the events in her past she alludes to. She seems to read a lot and take writing seriously, but the writing is rough. It just is, and that’s fine, because she’ll get better. But right now, there are many edits to be made, not to mention she has a tendency to drop in huge bombs alluding to information about her past and then never return to them. Reading the piece felt sordid, because I was basically just waiting to see if they’d fuck, and then they did, in detail. Could the writer have been trying to achieve that effect, to make the experience of reading the story like watching a porn? Yeah. But there wasn’t anything else going on– the story wasn’t doing any work, in my opinion. And while I hoped that reading her answers to the interviewers’ questions would prove that she was intentional and crazy smart and hard core feminist and trying to say something about the world, and she might be all of those things, but her answers struck me as immature and cringe-worthy. It feels condescending to talk this way about her, probably because it is, but I should try not to disrespect her. She’s a fellow aspiring artist, after all. My point is that I didn’t get much out of the “story” that was published. I think Tao Lin wanted to publish it because he’s Tao Lin, and he tries very hard to be provocative. I think Marie Calloway, pseudonymous writer from Portland, should keep writing, and if she wants or needs to, keep writing about sex. I know I’ll probably keep writing about the things I’ve been writing about, despite lots of eye-rolling, so if sexuality is what she wants to write about, she should, and the more she writes and matures, the better it’ll be. That’s all I can hope for in my writing.

P.S. The asterisk denotes things that piss me off, which I’d be happy to elaborate on, except that this post is already obnoxiously long. So you should probably just share what you think in the comments section, and if it’s related, maybe I’ll explain myself.

I hate to agree with this girl on any level–if she were to tell me snow is white or grass is green, I’d be inclined to argue–but I’ve recently had to admit how much I like to control my own art. It’s not, as this girl might have suggested, that I like to rewrite reality by fictionalizing it, or that I get any sick pleasure from controlling my characters when the rest of the world is uncontrollable. It’s that as a writer (and this is true of poets and nonfictioners, too, except those few who somehow write books in pairs or by focus group/committee) I am the sole author of my work. Editors might come along and tweak things at certain points, but for better or worse, I am the one who writes my stories. I make all the choices, from sentence structure to plot points. If I want to cut a line, I can act unilaterally. My work is not a group project.

I have long taken my artistic autonomy for granted.

I realize this now because on Tuesday night, I attended the first rehearsal of the first play I have been in since I was twenty years old. I am back to being an actor, which, though actors often forget it, is to be a pawn on a chessboard. Actors are virtually powerless to control a play’s destiny; they have the illusion of control over their roles, but the director, costumer, lighting designer, even the other actors can upend any plans they might have for a performance. They can’t rewrite scenes they think are weak. They rely on countless others to make the play succeed, and if another actor is struggling or the sound cues are tinny, it isn’t their place to fix it. They have to trust their director, stage manager, and everyone else involved, whether those people have earned that trust or not.

I am new to this theater troupe. I have no previous knowledge of any of their productions or staff. They do many things very differently than any company I have worked with. The audition process alone was somewhat foreign to me, with no prepared monologues required, and once that was over, we didn’t start rehearsals for a few weeks. In my experience, the first rehearsal is usually the day after callbacks, and the director sets forth his or her vision of the play, which the actors then use as they develop their characters. But with the holidays standing between auditions and rehearsal, I had time to think for myself, unguided. I read the play many times, thought about my character’s story, about how I would like the set to look and even how I hoped other characters would be played. I made the mistake of thinking about the play as a unit, instead of breaking off my little chunk. I started thinking like a director. For an actor, that is never safe.

When I was younger, I looked up to anyone who had more theatrical experience than I did, which, for a while, was just about everyone I met. And by the time I had some plays under my belt, I was familiar enough with most of the directors and crew I worked with to like and respect them. Being an established member of the group made everything easier. I knew what I should and shouldn’t say, and to whom I should or shouldn’t say it. I was more accustomed to standing in lines and obeying hierarchies.

Now that I’m older, I’m more opinionated. I’m more stubborn. But as a newcomer to this group, I tend to feel like I shouldn’t say anything to anyone, at least not in disagreement, and because I am used to controlling every aspect of my art, that means holding a lot back. I want to mold things my way, and because I have directorial experience, I know exactly how I would do it. I also know how much a director hates to be contradicted by his actors, how it feels to argue with them, and how one dissenting actor can poison the whole cast. I also know that actors can be fired, and with the exception of principle roles, easily replaced. And the fact is, I’m used to acting for a very different audience in a very different city. I’m used to having a bigger theater and a cast full of young people hoping to make it big rather than people for whom acting is a hobby. These facts that might have made me look down my very long nose at these people when I was younger, but now, I realize that this makes me the inexperienced one.

I haven’t worked in this theater. I haven’t performed for these townspeople. I don’t know what this director likes or how to interact with these actors or, on a more personal level, how to juggle a play and a husband (at least I don’t have to kiss anyone onstage). And since I’m in a whole different age bracket than I was when last I acted, my characters are much different than any I’ve ever played (I keep saying I’m in a play but actually I’m in two plays, running in repertory); one is in her early thirties, one closer to middle age. Though I know all the terms and have a specific process, I almost feel like I’m new at this all over again.

I’d never thought about it this way before, but I went through a sort of funnel on my way to becoming a writer. I started my theatrical career as an assistant stage manager, moving set pieces and sweeping the stage and basically controlling nothing. I worked my way up to being an actor, got better and larger roles, then tried my hand at directing and producing while still keeping one foot in the spotlight. Eventually, I decided that I wanted to go to Europe, and I had to work full time in addition to school so I could afford it. The roles I was getting were fine, but I was a bit bored of the people I’d been working with, and I wasn’t so wonderful that I could pick my roles in other theaters. I didn’t have the money to produce shows of my own and didn’t much relish the yelling and screaming part of the job, wrestling coffee cups out of actors’  hands and forcing them to work. I started writing short stories, and found it satisfied the same storytelling urge as the theater, but without the theater’s problems. Writing was peaceful because writing was controlled.

But peace gets boring. So now I’m back near the bottom, relinquishing control to all those above me. It’s scary, but in a sort of wonderful way. And though the stubborn know-it-all in me will undoubtedly plague my husband with a few post-rehearsal rants, it’s bound to be a brand new experience: story fodder, at the very least.

I came across this video on the internet today. A couple, Judith and Richard Lang, make art out of discarded plastic they find at the beach. They go to Keyhole Bay in California and comb the beach for plastic. Then they take what they’ve found home and organize it in boxes so they can use it in sculpture or mixed-media art. They create some truly beautiful pieces and clean up the beach. It’s a beautiful win-win.

This got me thinking about what it is to salvage and collect things in order to use it for something larger or greater than the thing itself. This is like writing, I think. As a nonfiction writer, I observe the world around me and collect data in a notebook and store it for later use, like a topic or a piece of an essay. At least that’s the goal. Something, whether it is a bottle cap found on the ground or a random quote you heard in the line at the grocery store, can meld with another small something and a really interesting connection or product can be made. Collecting is an art and by that I mean that it’s not limited to material things. I’m not condoning hoarding of ideas or things, but we search for something and when we find it, something happens and we can’t let it be lost. If I didn’t carry a notebook, so many ideas, good and bad, would disappear from my memory, lost forever. And as an artist, as a writer, I can’t afford to let that happen.