The Big Push

The Big Sleep, The Big Clock, The Big Knockover:  noir novels seem to flourish under titles that start with "The Big," so I'm titling this post "The Big Push."  Here's why.  My clever and dashing agent has deemed THE DESIRE PROJECTS a hair's breadth from being done, and I have until September 6th, Labor Day, to labor over the final changes.

Unto everything there is a season--including, apparently, submissions to publishing houses, and right after Labor Day is when scads of big, exciting projects go out.  Color me tickled that said agent believes THE DESIRE PROJECTS fits that bill.  Fingers crossed, y'all. 

However, while to most people a September 6th deadline would seem to offer leisure and luxury, school starts sooner.  Numerous non-optional "retreats" (a misnomer that always kills me) begin even sooner than that, and I still have a syllabus to write and a new position--Associate Director of Ethnic Studies, yey!--to gear up for.  And so, gentle readers, I've been lately immersed in the big push, and I'm trying to finish up revisions tonight.  (Before Mad Men, if I'm lucky and good.)

In the little gaps between polishing new scenes and scrubbing old ones, I've been thinking about the vexed relationship among political mandates, ideology, and writing--and by writing, I mean writing as art, not writing as opinion pieces or rhetorical arguments or book reviews or blog posts, but as The Real Thing, the kind we sit down to make with our hearts in our hands.  I've been thinking about the difficult, ongoing necessity of carving out a safe, protected space for that kind of writing, a space for it to be what it wants to be, rather than to fulfill our agenda for it. 

If that makes half an ounce of sense.

This passage, from an essay called, "The Long Haul" by Stacy D'Erasmo, is vastly clearer on the topic, and it seems worth quoting in full:

 . . . I have also begun to believe that the writer who continues to write, and to write well, to write deeply, often finds that she quietly, year by year, constructs a system of values that is by nature resistant. It’s not that one sets out to do this, exactly; but it happens, it accretes, as the choices the world offers inevitably arise. It may begin as an uncomfortable awareness, a prickling, even a sinking feeling. But you know it. You see the deal. You hesitate, almost wishing you didn’t know what you know, which is something along these lines: You cannot continue to write well if you believe that money is the measure of a person’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you believe that critical consensus is the measure of an artist’s worth. You cannot continue to write well if you are protecting your family, your children, your community, or your social position. You cannot continue to write well if you don’t believe in the value of art as such—as itself—not in the service of some greater cause or system or set of beliefs, whether those beliefs fall to the right or the left or rise to the more spiritual realms above. You can write well without money, without praise, without social or political approval—you might not be that happy or look that great, but you can do it—but if your writing is essentially obedient to any of these powerful forces, its light will slowly flicker and then go out.

Oh, thank you, Stacy.  I love that. 

Resist.  Be true.  Don't write agitprop, no matter how noble the goal.  "[I]f your writing is essentially obedient to any of these powerful forces, its light will slowly flicker and then go out." 

I don't want that for my work, and I don't want it for yours.  The world wants your complicated, paradoxical, messy, real art that contradicts itself and contradicts you and every unimpeachable view you'd cop to at a dinner party.  Go ahead.  Contain multitudes.  The water's fine.

The rest of the essay is good, too.  (Gratitude to Tayari's blog for pointing me to it.) 

For example, I really like the appreciative yet knowing way in which D'Erasmo talks about her two communities:  the public community of the university, which provides a necessary shelter, and the wilder, private community that nourishes, provokes, and sustains her. 

I'm sure others who read the essay will find their points of connection, as well as their own sticking points. For me personally, for example, I'm not sure that you can't protect your children and also write well.  But I could be wrong, and in general, I like very much what D'Erasmo's saying. 

And that part above:  that's worth framing.

Okay, back to scrubbing, polishing, and stripping away the fat.