So much of this post resonates with me. I failed first as a poet, then as a fiction writer. I veered into academia and that kind of writing with its paragraphs as stiff as steel beams. But I kept coming back to the sentence and how sometimes it's enough to craft one that hooks onto things in an interesting way.
Thank you for sharing your long road to the here and now, Steve. Your pieces that I've read this past month have the depth and rhythm of a life filled with heartache and gifts..this is a beautiful, heartwarming and true essay.
Uuuuffff...this is so good! "I couldn’t answer the big Aristotelian questions: Who are you writing for? Who are you writing as? In whose interest are you writing? I had only that gnawing hunger to be seen and a love for language." I'm taking this in deeply since I'm in the editing phase of my first book. Saved this so I can go back and ready our 2024 pieces.
You spur me to the page, Steve. When my professor asked us why we write, my answer was “to get a word in edgewise.” I was 19 years old then. Now I’m staring at 56 and my answer is the same! It’s strange having grown up in Connecticut, transplanted to Indiana for 11 years, and then moved back here … I hold a lot of Indiana in my personality, and your writing has that same familiar feeling to me as some memories. I tend to reread your pieces a few times just to hang with your aesthetic! Have a wonderful new year, and thank you for sharing so much of yourself through your writing. YOU ARE SEEN. :)
It is a pleasure to read your sentences. Seriously. I just read the essay in Yale R., and this-- "mobbed its branches," sent my brain up and down the nearby hills. Can't wait to somehow steal it! I relate to your story....well, maybe I do. I am bipolar but these last few years I've begun to wonder at how many things I have in common with my autistic son. (And my daughter also believes she is on the "spectrum.") So I don't know exactly....so much of what you've written pegs me, but....having a bipolar/autistic child who also has some pretty significant intellectual degradation, makes it hard for me to tolerate all the talk of, and focus on, the "spectrum." I can see, from an intellectual space, how useful and inclusive such a spectrum is, how it has helped countless people. Oh the other hand, like any "new" terrain in psychology, it's also another go-cart for SO many people to hop on and ride. But in your case it seems to have changed your life in priceless ways and I am happy that you got your diagnosis when you did. If you're anything like me, you wish you'd been diagnosed sooner. I'd reclaim the 15 yrs lost to a depression diagnosis in a heartbeat, if I could. If only. I'm rambling now. Love your work.
This is so beautiful. Your writing always touches something deep and ancient inside me. I've wondered, especially since discovering you are a native Midwesterner, and more specifically, a native Hoosier, if that is the part that seems so natural for me to relate to.
This paragraph, especially, spoke to me today: "I did not know—did not, did not, did not—that nothing satisfies a desire like that. Not publication. Not awards or praise. Not crafting a fully realized literary masterpiece. There’s always the next thing. Then the thing after that. The part of me that wrote in order to be seen was like one of those hungry ghosts from Buddhist lore, the ones with enormous bellies but tiny little mouths with which to feed. Even if I somehow managed to give it a book a year, it wouldn’t have been enough."
Just yesterday I finished reading the hybrid memoir, ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR by Michael Specktor. In it, he mentions something along the lines of what you wrote here, and I've been mulling that over the past day. Going back to the "why" of it all--why do I show up and stare at the blank page or screen (almost) daily, when no one asks me to, no one wants me to, no one "out there" really cares at all?
Except for me. I care. I need to write. Like you said, whether life is in a season of scarcity or abundance, those sentences somehow emerge from my subconscious. And they form a strand that sometimes means something universally, but always something to me. Words give me meaning. They clarify what I've tried to reconcile through rage and tears. They soothe, too.
Like you said, they are a form of embodiment--an incarnation. They come alive. Those skeletal fragments I can form flesh and muscle and cartilage and organs around.
And, like you said, not everything I write will be published. Nor will publication or any sort of quixotic dream related to it fully satisfy me. I have to love writing for its own sake, without attachment to my desired outcome.
By the way, I believe deep in my bones that you absolutely could have, and would have, become Indiana's "poet king," Steve. I wish so much you were still here in this state, because we need excellent writers here. I need to know that I'm not the only perceived "rube" in this country who can --and will--use language to teach, to mentor, to heal.
See you at the January writing workshop. Looking forward to it!
So kind, Jeannie! I definitely think a Midwestern sensibility permeates my aesthetic. 😂😂 Glad we share that! I’m really looking forward to the class, too. So many fun things planned! And I just found out that it is full, and one of the participants is Kathy Fish. Do you know her work? It’s amazing. Wishing you the best!
Thank you. Your essay resonates like the thrum of a bell. This past September, I was mid-sentence in yet another revision of yet another version of a novel I’d been trying to write for thirty years, when finally, mercy found me. A certainty struck. I was done. Not with writing but with my need to tell that story, my story, from the supposed safety of fiction. The reader I was trying to convince most passionately to accept my telling was me. Not a waste, though. A process of contending with “the violence and the beauty.” I wish I felt ready to take your class.
This piece has stayed with me, especially the notion of literary writing as a way to feel seen (or not), and of writing as a kind of permanence. It occurs to me that I've been circling around similar questions and have even written about them, without homing in the way that I think you have done beautifully here.
In case of interest, here are two pieces that are perhaps related: the one to the question of the writer and wanting to feel seen, and the other to the question of the writer and a desire for permanence.
There is so much relatable material in this article. I’m glad to have found you and look forward to reading more of your work.
Likewise! 🙏
So much of this post resonates with me. I failed first as a poet, then as a fiction writer. I veered into academia and that kind of writing with its paragraphs as stiff as steel beams. But I kept coming back to the sentence and how sometimes it's enough to craft one that hooks onto things in an interesting way.
Right? You just keep coming back.
Writing to be seen…. And I thought I was the only
One. Thank you
Not by a long shot! Thank you for reading!
I was laughing at myself how I try to tell non writers who never listen how much I’m loving writing and being heard and they just GLAZE
OVER. how many times does it take for me to get the lesson? Life!
😂😂
Thank you for sharing your long road to the here and now, Steve. Your pieces that I've read this past month have the depth and rhythm of a life filled with heartache and gifts..this is a beautiful, heartwarming and true essay.
Grateful to connect on here, Nancy! Thank you for reading & for these kind words.
The essay in Lit Hub on endings is a gem that I will be reading again.
🙏🙏
Uuuuffff...this is so good! "I couldn’t answer the big Aristotelian questions: Who are you writing for? Who are you writing as? In whose interest are you writing? I had only that gnawing hunger to be seen and a love for language." I'm taking this in deeply since I'm in the editing phase of my first book. Saved this so I can go back and ready our 2024 pieces.
OK. This is my vibe. Great to connect with you, Steve.
Thank you for your writing and your vulnerability!
🙏🙏 Thanks so much for reading! Nice to connect on here.
You spur me to the page, Steve. When my professor asked us why we write, my answer was “to get a word in edgewise.” I was 19 years old then. Now I’m staring at 56 and my answer is the same! It’s strange having grown up in Connecticut, transplanted to Indiana for 11 years, and then moved back here … I hold a lot of Indiana in my personality, and your writing has that same familiar feeling to me as some memories. I tend to reread your pieces a few times just to hang with your aesthetic! Have a wonderful new year, and thank you for sharing so much of yourself through your writing. YOU ARE SEEN. :)
Indiana is…so much! Thank you, thank you for the kind words. Happy new year, Colleen!
It is a pleasure to read your sentences. Seriously. I just read the essay in Yale R., and this-- "mobbed its branches," sent my brain up and down the nearby hills. Can't wait to somehow steal it! I relate to your story....well, maybe I do. I am bipolar but these last few years I've begun to wonder at how many things I have in common with my autistic son. (And my daughter also believes she is on the "spectrum.") So I don't know exactly....so much of what you've written pegs me, but....having a bipolar/autistic child who also has some pretty significant intellectual degradation, makes it hard for me to tolerate all the talk of, and focus on, the "spectrum." I can see, from an intellectual space, how useful and inclusive such a spectrum is, how it has helped countless people. Oh the other hand, like any "new" terrain in psychology, it's also another go-cart for SO many people to hop on and ride. But in your case it seems to have changed your life in priceless ways and I am happy that you got your diagnosis when you did. If you're anything like me, you wish you'd been diagnosed sooner. I'd reclaim the 15 yrs lost to a depression diagnosis in a heartbeat, if I could. If only. I'm rambling now. Love your work.
🙏🙏 Thank you for such a thoughtful and kind note. There’s always so much to learn and think about, isn’t there?
Yes. So much to learn. So true the older I get.
Wow! You have so much to say that reaches the deep end of the heart. Thank you, for writing. So much here to discover and learn from.
Thank you, Kat! ❤️
Steve,
This is so beautiful. Your writing always touches something deep and ancient inside me. I've wondered, especially since discovering you are a native Midwesterner, and more specifically, a native Hoosier, if that is the part that seems so natural for me to relate to.
This paragraph, especially, spoke to me today: "I did not know—did not, did not, did not—that nothing satisfies a desire like that. Not publication. Not awards or praise. Not crafting a fully realized literary masterpiece. There’s always the next thing. Then the thing after that. The part of me that wrote in order to be seen was like one of those hungry ghosts from Buddhist lore, the ones with enormous bellies but tiny little mouths with which to feed. Even if I somehow managed to give it a book a year, it wouldn’t have been enough."
Just yesterday I finished reading the hybrid memoir, ALWAYS CRASHING IN THE SAME CAR by Michael Specktor. In it, he mentions something along the lines of what you wrote here, and I've been mulling that over the past day. Going back to the "why" of it all--why do I show up and stare at the blank page or screen (almost) daily, when no one asks me to, no one wants me to, no one "out there" really cares at all?
Except for me. I care. I need to write. Like you said, whether life is in a season of scarcity or abundance, those sentences somehow emerge from my subconscious. And they form a strand that sometimes means something universally, but always something to me. Words give me meaning. They clarify what I've tried to reconcile through rage and tears. They soothe, too.
Like you said, they are a form of embodiment--an incarnation. They come alive. Those skeletal fragments I can form flesh and muscle and cartilage and organs around.
And, like you said, not everything I write will be published. Nor will publication or any sort of quixotic dream related to it fully satisfy me. I have to love writing for its own sake, without attachment to my desired outcome.
By the way, I believe deep in my bones that you absolutely could have, and would have, become Indiana's "poet king," Steve. I wish so much you were still here in this state, because we need excellent writers here. I need to know that I'm not the only perceived "rube" in this country who can --and will--use language to teach, to mentor, to heal.
See you at the January writing workshop. Looking forward to it!
So kind, Jeannie! I definitely think a Midwestern sensibility permeates my aesthetic. 😂😂 Glad we share that! I’m really looking forward to the class, too. So many fun things planned! And I just found out that it is full, and one of the participants is Kathy Fish. Do you know her work? It’s amazing. Wishing you the best!
I have heard of Kathy Fish, yes. Wishing you the best, too, Steve!
I see you Steve. ❤️
❤️❤️ back atcha!
Thank you. Your essay resonates like the thrum of a bell. This past September, I was mid-sentence in yet another revision of yet another version of a novel I’d been trying to write for thirty years, when finally, mercy found me. A certainty struck. I was done. Not with writing but with my need to tell that story, my story, from the supposed safety of fiction. The reader I was trying to convince most passionately to accept my telling was me. Not a waste, though. A process of contending with “the violence and the beauty.” I wish I felt ready to take your class.
This is my class! And you’re teaching it! What a perfect distillation of what I felt too.
Thanks — so much to think about here! It really resonated.
Thank you for reading & sharing! 🙌🙌
This piece has stayed with me, especially the notion of literary writing as a way to feel seen (or not), and of writing as a kind of permanence. It occurs to me that I've been circling around similar questions and have even written about them, without homing in the way that I think you have done beautifully here.
In case of interest, here are two pieces that are perhaps related: the one to the question of the writer and wanting to feel seen, and the other to the question of the writer and a desire for permanence.
https://open.substack.com/pub/notesfromlinnesby/p/a-translated-poem-and-memories-of?r=2u2cxe&utm_medium=ios
https://open.substack.com/pub/notesfromlinnesby/p/on-delighting-in-permanence?r=2u2cxe&utm_medium=ios
Excited to read! 🙏
"To imagine the moment that way redeemed it." Endings as redemption - loved this, Steve. Great piece with much to ponder. Thank you.
Thanks for reading that one, Sean!