How it started

Was it the book that gave you permission? Or was the book just Dumbo's feather?

Photograph © James Hart

So maybe you pick up the book because on day four of your summer squat it’s a toss-up between a ten-minute walk to the library and a forty-one hour drive to California to keep from losing what remains of your sanity. You’re between apartments, between semesters, between jobs. Your new lease doesn’t start for another week so you’re staying at your buddy’s place until move-in day. His lease is paid up but he’s not there, he’s home for the break and put a hold on his utilities. You can’t use the range, the microwave or the air conditioner. You wake up at eight every morning because past that it’s way too hot to sleep. There’s no TV, powered or otherwise, and your smartphone is no help because you don’t have one yet—it’ll be years before phones will be described in terms of their intelligence. You think long and hard about the drive to California, then decide the library is the cheaper and lazier option. So that’s where you go that morning. That’s where you get the book.

Maybe you pick it up because your dad read the author’s stuff in college. You remember the story about your dad tracking him down during a conference in New York. This was in the 70s. The author slipped out of the conference along with Carl Sagan and the two went into a downtown hotel. Your dad stalked and followed them into the ground floor restaurant. Your dad apologized for interrupting, then introduced himself, told them who he was and that he was a teacher. They smiled, invited him to eat with them but your dad was young and completely strapped from making the trip. At the time, he couldn’t even afford a cup of coffee. So they offered to sign his conference programs. The programs will later be on your bookshelf, alongside all the other books you’ll read but right now you have no books around, no bookshelves, no electricity, no place to stay and you’re out of your mind with boredom. So at the library you peruse the books by one of your dad’s favorite authors, check out his collection of early stories and leave the library.

Maybe you do other things on campus before heading back to your buddy’s place; the rest of the day is hard to remember. But eventually you do head back, sit down on that bullshit three-legged couch you’ve been sleeping on, try to ignore the sweat building around your legs and back and read the book.

That’s when you first think of it. You’ve never considered it before—it’s funny how things start. You sit on that crappy couch in the heat and you think, hell I could do this, too. I could write.

You don’t think much about it then, but some time during your last semester, you do start writing. Later you can see just how terrible that early stuff was but you were getting the reps in, you were exploring yourself and the worlds your imagination revealed to you.

You were having a fucking blast.

You graduate and get jobs in the sciences. You write on the side. You get hired for a better position and write more when you can. A couple of years in, you have an existential crisis and you’re let go from your job. The net falls out and you find yourself at a late-night bakery, barely able to pay your bills. You write some more. You get into editing as a career. Smartphones become mainstream. You have a couple of absurd relationships and think about applying to grad school. You sell your stuff, move to Australia and start an MA. While in Sydney, you meet the people who will become your best friends, you teach English to expat children on the side and you write your ass off. You gain some competence.

You move back home. It takes you awhile to find your feet again, but you scrape and claw your way toward stability. Then the block hits.

The writing and publishing community looks strange, you think, and you begin to doubt your chances of sharing your work. Why only write to fill up the drawers in your desk? You fight against the blockage, you struggle terribly, but doubt eventually takes over. No one’s ever going to read this shit, you think and so you stop.

You stop writing.

You get better jobs, though, and through ruthless practice with your old material you become a decent editor. You start working in magazines but continue the struggle with yourself. You land a dream job at an international publication that you remember checking out as a kid, and move to start the job. It’s not what it’s cracked up to be, but it takes you awhile to see that.

The blockage continues. You try photography for awhile. You learn all about aperture, the rules of thirds, odds, Adams’ exposure techniques and you make your tens of thousands of early photographs and all the while you want to get back to the writing. But there are things you can’t reconcile and you don’t know how to start again.

The dream job crumbles and you quit. You realize that you were in situations that you’ll often think about later. You move back, picking up crappy job after crappy job as a freelancer, but over time you once again begin to figure some things out.

Maybe you were trying to do it for the wrong reasons. Maybe you were never guaranteed that there was anybody out there, ready to listen to you. Maybe it is just a gamble in the dark.

But not everything is darkness. There’s certainly plenty to wade through, and maybe the writing helps you make sense of it. You make tentative steps to start again, and it seems to be going okay when something strange starts to happen.

Your imagination starts to go rouge.

You read up on the phenomenon. Turns out it’s not so strange—Tom Waits and Eric Johnson had spoken about it, as had Ray Bradbury. Salvador Dalí found it necessary for his process and for Johnny Cash, it appeared in the form of Queen Elizabeth. If that was normal for them, then maybe it’s okay for you. But just what is that, and how exactly does that work? There seem to be no clear answers, but it’s a wonderful thing and it keeps you writing.

You also start to think that maybe you can share it all somehow—it just needs to be in your own way.

You consider the possibility that maybe you’re ready to give it a go again. Online somewhere, with a platform you can manage yourself. Your own private sandbox you can use to build what you want, with a chance to share it with whoever might be out there. The chance is all you’re guaranteed, you see that now, but that’s okay. That’s enough.

And so maybe you decide that in between meetings today, before the drive to the pharmacy but definitely after the coffee, it might be good to play with some words and lay out where you’ve been.