Published Political Essay!

I’ve been political as long as I can recall. I fomented dissent in the 6^th grade, recited a subversive version of the pledge of allegiance in 8^th, and I went to a Quaker college in no small part due to their long history of promoting social justice. Guilford College has long been proud of its role in the Underground Railroad.

While there, I was keyed into a lot of eye-opening socio-political ideas. I got a student subscription to The Nation and Harpers. When those ran out, I sought new issues in the library.

It’s sorta odd, then, that I didn’t study journalism or political science. There are reasons for that, but what’s important are the actions I take today.

Media and Power

Today, I am happy to announce that I have published a political essay in The Big Smoke. It’s titled “Binary Trending,” and it’s about the intersection of media and power. It takes a look at the individual’s role and how even the best-intended can find their online activities used for purposes they did not foresee – such as the election of the very worst human being to the most powerful office in the nation, if not world.

I hope you’ll read the essay and give it a thought. As citizens we need to be aware of how we use online tools. Our voices are being broadcast, but we don’t necessarily control how they are amplified…

Writing Life

What does it mean to live a writer’s life? Well, it usually involves a lot of writing. It means other things, too.

Living as a writer means that I see story everywhere. Details pop out of nowhere and demand attention. Themes and tones resonate throughout a bus ride or a trip to a godawful shopping mall.

Being a writer means having a myriad of lenses through which I see the world. It means that there is no single answer or interpretation to a problem or situation. My personal panopticon appears, the multiverse happens here, now.

Writers know that revision is possible. I can take a piece of prose and change it from 1^st person to 3^rd. I can change the narrator. I can zoom in and out of a consciousness. I can omit details for later surprise or delve into the intricacies of the smallest thing. However, the important thing to note is that the best writing, the best writer, does not do this by a force of will.

That is to say, we know that there is no final judgment. There are truths we find and rely on to push things forward, but those truths are not absolute. When we change something in a story, what follows necessarily changes, too. This does not mean that we can change things at random. We make changes thoughtfully, and with an eye to all of the variables in play. Making a change simply to please a self-centered notion is a recipe for failure.

The best writers know that what they write is not theirs. The characters and stories are gifts from some other source. The writer’s job is deliver those to the page. We are mediums, conduits for truths, falsehoods, and all the things that make this nutty world. We own nothing, we are simple tools that ideas and stories find convenient.

Writers have a responsibility to the stories we’re given. The story is not there to aggrandize us. That is a grave error that too many make. This leads to writers not wanting to promote their work because it somehow is all about them. This is a simple ego-trap that harms their gift – the story.

In this world that increasingly relies on text, it seems that everyone thinks they are writers. While I am happy that more people are using text, I fear that they are not using it to its best and highest uses. Writing is a means of exploration. Through writing we can find out what we think, we learn what things are all about. When we only use a few hundred characters, we think that’s all we have to say. That’s often not the case.

I hope this new media sparks an appetite for more reading and writing. I fear it won’t, that people will continue to cheapen their language and degrade themselves for the two-sentence tweet. However, the potential is there.

Honesty in Nonfiction – Reflections on Elissa Wald’s essay, “Night Shifts”

Nowadays it seems we’re glutted with memoirs and tell-alls and other prose which purports to “honesty” and truth. Person A did bad things and now doesn’t do them anymore. Or still does but is unrepentant. Woman becomes stripper but isn’t objectified, she digs it. We’ve seen it and we all know it sells.

But, is it truly honest to lay out a laundry list of behaviors, especially taboo behaviors? I’ve seen people admit to all sorts of behaviors and call themselves “honest.”

“Yeah, I fucked your wife and yeah I shot dope and yeah I robbed people and shot people and stolen their dreams… At least I can be honest about it.” Is that honesty or is it shamelessness? The speaker is tacitly admitting that his actions were negative, and that he might possibly regret them, but the listing doesn’t quite ring as “honest” to me. It’s what I call “cash register honesty” – the day’s receipts are quantified and accounted, but not qualified and atoned.

I’ve long decried the memoir for its lack of honesty. I see so many books and essays in which the author seems to say: “Look at me for being so brave as to admit to doing something most people wouldn’t dare! Aren’t I the special one?” This is so much self-aggrandizement, so much conceit.

While it is true that people in dark places do dark things, it’s the inner story which is the interesting one. A fantasy is just a fantasy, a behavior only a thing to do. I think Elissa Wald, writing in Rumpus, has offered to me perhaps the perfect example of what I have been looking for in memoir writing. She lists taboo behavior she witnessed or participated in or whatever – but she offers this only as a listing, a bare accounting to check the box. She qualifies as a person who’s “been there” and has t-shirts to prove it.

Where her essay, “Night Shifts,” comes to life though is in her insistence on keeping to principles, the focus on the true inner story. Her poetry puts us there with her on this journey so that those of us who have not been to S&M clubs can relate. We all have night shifts and she acknowledges this with compassion and grace – you needn’t go to the places she went to be with her.

I’ve been in dark places and I’ve done dark things. I know others who’ve done far worse. There is an immense prurient interest in an accounting of those things. But such a laundry list is so often a smokescreen, a dodge against the real reasons a person was where they were or did what they did. While Wald doesn’t go into spiritual or psychological detail, she brings us there in poetry and shows it to us in such a way that we can resonate with her experience and say, “Yes, me too, I have a night self.”

I can prattle my abstractions all day. It’s raining outside and I have nothing better to do – and this is a fine distraction from the work I must do. You need to go read the essay. Here.