Solstice Story

I have a lot of newsletter drafts that never came to completion, hopeful starts that became never-weres. The one I tried writing right after the election began “How’s everybody doing? Real bad?”

As with many attempts in the eight months since I last sent out a Not Knowing How, I stopped writing because was unsure I had anything meaningful to offer. I was comforted by the many smart, open, useful, frank newsletters I read in the weeks after November 5. I held myself to the standard of my perception of those essays—if I couldn’t do it as well, I wouldn’t do it at all. A few times times I started a draft about this miniature crisis of confidence, but there, too, I demurred.

I created Not Knowing How as an evergreen venue for my writing, out of the sense that I had things worth saying but nowhere to say them. And yet, despite the remarkable amount of kind affirmation I’ve received in response to this project, I’ve struggled with imposter syndrome more in the last two years than at any point in my writing life. Or at least so it feels. Is sharing that feeling interesting? Is it useful to anyone? I’m not sure. I have a probably incorrect feeling that I need to pretend to total confidence at all times. But I’ve written and unwritten about this feeling so many times, I’m finally convinced that I should just send it out.

For the past five years, give or take, I have occupied positions of authority and leadership in my chosen field. Running an MFA program and a writing conference has had a curious impact on my sense of myself as a writer. I was elevated into these positions after a decade of contract teaching positions, mostly adjunct. When I was hired at Antioch, it felt like a cool miracle to earn a salary with benefits.

When I write “imposter syndrome,” I’m not talking about my experience of being a program chair and an executive director. I am very good at what I do, in large part because I combine my high level of emotional intelligence and perceptivity—a skill I would have once called an inherent trait but don’t any more after my friend Mair pointed out that empathic awareness is learned in early childhood and, as a trait generally associated with femmes and caregivers, is generally undervalued—with my commitment to living my values and the professional knowledge and expertise I gained as a writer trained in academic creative programs. Despite the fact that I know that I’m good at my jobs, I struggle to see the work I do for money as my true work.

Without significant self-intervention, basically, I erase all of that labor to hold myself to the standard of the midcentury (male) art monster. Somehow, I castigate myself, I should be able to do all the things I do (two jobs, parenting, the occasional attempt at life in a body) and publish a book a year, plus lots of shorter pieces. This isn’t exactly a reasonable voice in my head; it’s more like a yowling ghost that raises its head when my creativity feels ignored, unwanted, forgotten. Even or especially the author of “On Pandering” herself has found the clarion call of the author lifestyle cliche impossible to ignore.

However problematic, this feeling is why I began 2024 determined to publish more, beginning with the unattainable-feeling (and potentially humiliating) goal of interviewing one of my favorite musicians. The yips I got took me by surprise. Hasn’t my mantra always been “fake it till you make it”? Didn’t I go through a period of describing myself as a “genius” to people I met at writing residencies, just to see what happened, daring them to argue with me?

Could there be anything more brazen than wanting something and deciding you could have it?

The weeks of trying to pin down the interview resolved into a generous conversation that gave me what I wanted: new ideas about creativity, about how and why to make things. Shortly thereafter, I published my first book review in nearly a decade. In the months that followed, there was more: another book review, an interview with a writer I love, a list of books I (am still) not reading, an opportunity to wade into a controversial literary discussion, a personal essay about my many lives in Hollywood, a piece about an art show that seemed made just for me.

As I worked on these pieces, I imagined that I would make a post enumerating them at the end of the year. I would look back on my work and feel proud, and I would share my pride. And yet even this goal—hardly unoriginal—seemed to me potentially embarrassing.

I love that Toni Morrison quote as much as the next writer, but I was so relieved when Danielle Lazarin wrote “Times of instability are not, though mythologized as such, good material for writers and other artists. I suspect many of us write as a form of survival, of not participating in self-erasure of our narratives as we exist in the world now, which is resistance.” My whole life was once powered on what I thought was a gleeful disregard for the judgment of others. And then I was punished for it, again and again, in subtle and unsubtle ways, until I learned my lesson. Which is? I don’t know. I haven’t shut up yet. But I’m warier now.

Before Open Me was published, it seemed to me, I knew I had something to say; I just needed to figure out how to say it, and how to get it out to the world. In the years since, I’ve struggled with new feelings, thoughts and challenges I didn’t know before, all orbiting my own inconsequentiality, my fear of it, my sense of having somehow failed. This fear is connected to the fact that I sustain myself by creating writerly experiences for others. Even when I enjoy and take part in the programming I’ve designed, I know that it is not for me, not exactly. I am the maker of something ephemeral that helps others make. Becoming the person in this role did not seem so much a choice as a series of happy accidents. I am grateful for my life and also, on bad days, hold myself outside it, wondering if I will experience the pleasure of a second book publication in this lifetime.

And then I think, the world is so difficult and full of pain, so very many bad things have happened and are happening, who cares?

Today is the darkest day of the year. I’m cozy and warm with my family. My son and I have matching sweaters. Truly, there are only things to be grateful for on a personal level, and I should use that anecdote as a balm for the fear I experience about the year, and the world, to come. Solstice doesn’t solve any of these questions. It gives me a place to put them.

I thought of what had helped me, what I might want to receive from me; I thought of the beauty and joy that shaped my year, and that I will carry from it—visiting my father and cousin in Chicago, seeing some of the best concerts of my life, the June and December Antioch residencies, my sister’s lovely wedding in London and the Cotswolds and the family vacation through southwestern England we took after, the 2024 Mendocino Coast Writers’ Conference, my son’s second birthday (my son in every moment, so much that I can’t look directly at the happiness he brings), adopting the habit of swimming several mornings a week at my public pool, spending my 40th birthday out in the desert with beloved people, reminding myself that I am a writer who writes, however erratically, however imperiled by my own stubborn fear that I am not, that there is no story left for me, however melodramatic and overdetermined that sounds.

I held all of that in one hand and thought, fuck it, I’ll write about “Dirty Wedding” by Denis Johnson.

I first read “Dirty Wedding” in 2008, in the anthology My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories, From Chekhov to Munro, a vaguely McSweeney’s-associated joint (all proceeds from the book went to 826CHI). I have a possibly invented memory of purchasing it at the gift shop at the Museum of Contemporary Art while visiting my parents that summer. I was twenty-four years old and halfway through my MFA. I picked the book up because I had been, in years previous, a big fan of its editor Jeffrey Eugenides, one of the first authors I asked a question during a Q&A. Middlesex was important to me as a senior in high school in a way I recall but cannot recreate. I don’t think I will ever reread it.

Every story in the anthology made a deep impression on me. When I taught my first undergraduate class the next year, 2009, I began the practice of teaching many of them to my students, which I kept up for years afterwards: “The Lady With The Little Dog,” “First Love And Other Sorrows” by Harold Brodkey, “We Didn’t” by Stuart Dybek. That summer I had taken a workshop with Dybek, in Prague—was it before or after I found the book?

I think it was after, because associated with the memory of buying the book is the memory of receiving a phone call from my then very-newly-ex college boyfriend, during which he told me, with some anxiety and the desire to be comforted, about going on his first date with someone who was not me. I had had my eyes dilated, and couldn’t see who was calling; otherwise I wouldn’t have picked up. We had broken up while I was in Europe that summer, and in my memory that is the day I bought My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead. (Today we are best friends.)

My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead was the closest I ever had to a textbook. A volume that held itself out and said, this is how you do it. That is what I wanted it to be and that is what I made it. My first copy was the hardcover, with its anatomical heart illustration; eventually, I loaned it to my sister, who promised to return it to me but never did. So I invested in the less-beautiful paperback with its heart cut into the interior pages of a book. Some students I required to buy it; others I gave photocopies of pages upon pages from its interior. The whole volume vibrates, in my memory, with a surreal, final import. For a decade or so it was my constant companion; then I lost or gave away my last copy, and now I haven’t owned it in years.

But "Dirty Wedding” was its own whole other thing.

It is the sixth story in My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead. At the time I first read it, I considered myself a Chicago writer, I was lonely for Chicago stories—discovering Stuart Dybek on the recommendation of an MFA friend warmed me totally—and so the first line of “Dirty Wedding” had me already:

The story is about an unhappy person, an addict, who takes his girlfriend Michelle to get an abortion and gets thrown out of the clinic for being an asshole. He leaves and gets back on the train, which is “delayed—those of us who had destinations, anyway.” He follows a stranger, he eavesdrops on a conversation, he gets a surprise erection when the man he has followed confronts him: “His chest was like Christ’s—that’s probably who he was.” It is a story of deep winter, of sorrowful intensity cut through with a batshit desire to still be alive that competes with a death drive constantly foiled by the narrator’s inability to follow through on any of his threats. It is a story about God and the devil and the blight of loneliness that is very, very funny.

Eventually our narrator ends up at the Savoy Hotel.

This atavistically terrifying setting, this nowhere space, this impossible venue.

That “darkly, darkly” line—it’s not in the New Yorker version. I added it above, from memory. Johnson must have added it between the story’s publication and his book’s release two years later. It’s always there in my writerly subconscious. Darkly, darkly, every day of my life. The magic spell that made me think: if I see, and say what I see, and do it exactly, it will be as wild as the work that has spellbound me; it will reach through time and touch the face of a person I will never know. It will take me out of the back-and-forth of the everyday, and I am allowed to do it, it is the reason why I am a writer.

Darkly, darkly is why I went to hear Johnson read at USC in 2010, an event hosted by the now long-gone Master of Professional Writing program. During the Q&A I asked a question about the ubiquity of Jesus’ Son on creative writing syllabi and was startled to watch the woman seated in front of me write furiously in her journal: Jesus’ Son isn’t ubiquitous. What an insipid question from this bleach blond…

I thought about confronting her, I wanted to; she was writing out all her thoughts like they were important, like they were for a project, which they probably were. But that would have cost me my chance to get my then-fiance’s book signed. He loved Denis Johnson, and when I told Denis Johnson that he had a Danish fan, he was tickled: “My name was originally Jensen, in the old country,” he said. He was Danish too, he said.

In 2017, on the day Denis Johnson died, I was in the same place where he died, Gualala, California, one of my newly adopted hometowns, but I didn’t know we were there together. I didn’t know he had died until weeks later. I hadn’t yet read Already Dead, his epic of Point Arena, California, another of my newly adopted hometowns, although I knew of its existence. Or maybe I had read it already. I have a timeless memory of lying in bed with tears streaming down my face, having closed the final page of a book by Johnson. But I think that was The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, of which I acquired an ARC after the news of his death reached me.

That fall I was living in Connecticut, teaching at Wesleyan, when I saw that there would be a memorial service for Johnson at the 92nd Street Y. I put on a leotard cut down to my navel—for years I had this quirk of wanting to dress sexy for important literary events—and drove into the city with my boyfriend.

The event was massive, the vibe surprisingly bro-y, guy after guy on stage talking about the fun they’d had keeping him sober on a ranch in Idaho. The actor Michael Shannon introduced himself as “Mikey” and played a rock song in his honor. There weren’t too many women in that inner world. Nicole Aragi and Johnson’s widow and a platoon of men up to snowmobile hijinx. As usual, whatever I had imagined myself inside of, I wasn’t.

What mattered were the words, taking me inside darkness, promising that describing just exactly, just perfectly, could be enough. It didn’t even have to heal anything. It didn’t have to cohere. It could just be, an observation, a lit candle.

“It was,” Johnson wrote, “what the mother and the father did together.”

There’s little original about loving “Dirty Wedding” or Jesus’ Son, although I wonder how many MFA students now read it, how many of the students in the MFA program I run read it. There’s little unique about any of this, except that I wrote it, it came from me, and today on the shortest day of the year I had the bravery to put it down, to send it out, in the hope that just as I have been so many times inspired, you, too, might find yourself moved to believe that your perspective matters.

He meant it like he meant it, but then he gave it to us, and I picked it up, like so many other people. This morning I walked by the ocean as the sun rose, feeling the rain in my hair. The world is bad. I myself may be bad. But once there was a story I loved, and a whole life grew out of that. The story I loved? You could say that it changed my life.