Baksheesh

The world is insane and we are living in the end times. It’s true and I believe it. Reading this, you are probably thinking Davis has lost his nerve, has lost his mind, and has finally become so disinhibited that he’s now taking dictation straight from his Generalized Anxiety Disorder. Maybe he’s blown a synapse and has embraced Third Wave Christian Fundamentalism the way we always felt he would—the retconned hillbilly sci-fi apocalypse version, replete with heavily armed cyber-trucks, food riots, red sky, and the Beast of Revelation.

You would, of course, be wrong about everything. See, by “end times,” Davis is really just talking about the publishing industry. And by “publishing industry,” he’s really just talking about the MFA industrial complex. And, by that, he just means, “things that have never so much resembled airborne feculence of a certain incendiary variety,” which is to say, shitfire, but flaming shit simultaneously as an abstraction, a pungent metaphor, and a distinct and tangible possibility aimed directly at your face.

Yes. It doth burn, my son.

As the Bard says: everybody cool until someone find a way to light the toilet on fire. And it is only then that you will see the truth, wherefore it flusheth not. And flameth. And flyeth. Do I over-analogize and mixeth my metaphors? Do I protest too much? I do. But then again, the more I think about it, I do not.

So these are the end times. You know it and I know it. The Seven Seals have been opened: plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, plop, and plop, like little corks in a fancy restaurant, where none of the wines come in the screw-top variety—i.e. none of the sort that I could normally afford. No one said the apocalypse came cheap.

But why, Davis, you ask, is someone with your prodigious vocabulary and piledriving wit reduced to cheap-wine analogizing and end-times prophesizing on an obscure writing blog nobody reads?

Because, dear reader, the world is off its nut and therefore I can say what I want.

Because I cannot be cancelled.

Because you may put a bullet between my eyes but these words will still travel around the world like 1950s TV Superman, faster than a locomotive and a speeding bullet.

Because maybe I don’t care anymore

— about desperate creative writers snapping and barking for scraps at the literary publishing table (consider: extreme levels of desperation can be a prelude for mental illness, and my brother in Christ, let me remind you that no one is more desperate than a disenfranchised literary fiction writer without, perhaps, even an obscure writing blog where he could relieve such burning feculence as might arise and converge);

— about the ambient cruelties of the “process,” the writing process, as if it were some arcane monolith out in the desert that we only had to discover and teach ourselves to read in order to possess the writing success formula of Akhenaten the Great. And this must be conflated with the dominant publishing-and-marketing process because we all know that something we can’t successfully monetize is merely a hobby;

— about all the bad, ignorant, often deranged advice that accompanies this;

— about getting ghosted by a magazine because, after accepting one of my stories, someone decided that my writing was too “cis het” for their aesthetic (yes, one of the editors told me that and all I could do was laugh—at myself for submitting a story to them); shame on me;

— about the status anxiety and paranoia of the MFA creative writing students running said magazines and the slightly former MFA students still convinced that the “personal” and, by extension all art, must be “political.” And they are therefore afraid to read Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, or Flannery O’Connor because some inherent taint of uncoolness might rub off on them. Someone on a slick magazine I no longer read made a list of “red flag novels you should avoid” (as if this were Soviet Russia: I have not read, yet I condemn . . . ) and I couldn’t believe To the Lighthouse was one of the red-flag offenders.

And I most emphatically do not care about 20-something housecats with studio MFA degrees mean-girling me on social media after seeing my profile picture. For they are domestic and furry and harbor a deep love of kibble and do not read the books I read. No. This is Black Mirror. This is Tesla with machineguns. This is dystopia. This is not a bowl of Friskies, your clumpy sandbox, and a warm loving stroke-job from your beta readers. I’ve never had beta readers. I barely have alpha readers.

Instead, dear reader, in this time of dread and perdition, I’m asking for REPARATIONS.

Hear me out. On my dad’s side, given my Irish and Welsh ancestry, I figure the British Crown owes me at least a few million pounds for generations of colonizing, rape, murder, and impressing my ancestors into divers forms of servitude including, but not limited to, indenture and outright slavery. To say nothing of the fact that this eventually caused my people to flee to Canada, something which, in itself should add at least another million pounds sterling to the tab.

And then, naturally, there’s my mother’s Armenian heritage, which includes those ancestors fleeing Constantinople with whatever they could carry to escape an actual genocide—not the hyperbolic, figure-of-speech kind referenced on the internet along with “micro aggressions,” but the real thing. Henceforth, I’ve written a very firm letter to President Erdoğan, specifying certain payments that shall be made directly to me by the government of Turkey (the closest we can get to the Ottoman Empire—we’re all doing our best here). I have allowed for installments if he finds that necessary. I’m not an unreasonable man, which I’m sure President Erdoğan appreciates.

In my estimation, the reparations due to me for various forms of historical persecution visited on my ancestors by at least two world powers should be enough for me to purchase a small turret in Scotland, doff myself Lord Davis of the Moors, and declare prima nocta for as long as my reign shall last.

Davis, you say, you’re insane. To which I retort: NO! The world is insane. I just want my baksheesh. And if you don’t want to be “problematic,” you’ll stop with the micro aggressions and pay up. Everything that rises must converge. That means you, your wallet, and me.

What? You don’t have any baksheesh to make merit for the sins of your fathers against mine? You say this is crazy because it all happened generations before you were born and you don’t even know those assholes? You say you went to an expensive master of fine arts writing program, but all you got was a stupid T-shirt and “good luck” and an invitation to have dinner with the chair of your thesis committee while his wife was out of town? You say you’re broke? You were too cis-het for small-magazine fame? Bummer. No baksheesh for you, either. Perhaps it’s time for you to fall back on your trust fund. Surely, someone with your amount of privilege . . .

But I was talking about the end times, about the Seven Seals (plop!) and the horrifying Lovecraftian spectacle of fecal matter travelling through the air at speed. Phosphorescent fecal matter, no less. As in “banned by the Geneva Convention but still used in certain third-world proxy wars.”

Hallelujah!

Hare Krishna!

Give me your stinkin’ baksheesh that I might cleanse it and admit you to paradise!

You know you want it.

We went away from there and stopped at the Fountain of the Virgin. But the water was not good, and there was no comfort or peace any where, on account of the regiment of boys and girls and beggars that persecuted us all the time for bucksheesh. The guide wanted us to give them some money, and we did it; but when he went on to say that they were starving to death we could not but feel that we had done a great sin in throwing obstacles in the way of such a desirable consummation, and so we tried to collect it back, but it could not be done.

—Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be. I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing. I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness. And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep. I’m not proud of such feelings. But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care. It’s a hard world, Fluffy. Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago. Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke. At least someone still gets to enjoy it. But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine. I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat. I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance. Some writers really need to start drinking again. They’re not able to produce unless they do. Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.” That’s it. Light up. Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take. There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class. We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles). Of course, he had tenure. So he went on leave. Now it was almost Christmas. And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement. Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard. This is known. We were all trying to keep it together. Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees. There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester. Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive. But whiskey in Montana? Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy. She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant. I always ran into it because it was covered in snow. Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have. So I barked my shins on it regularly. But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot. Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember. I’d walk over and stand next to her. We wouldn’t talk much. The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift. Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school. This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness. No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift. But nobody knew anything. If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30. But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening. We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant. We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments. And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda. Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life. This was not real life. This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take. A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art. And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment. I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print. I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous. But she couldn’t write. Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten). But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors. Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages. I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.” Take that. Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah. Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea. After the program, we lost touch. I know Lauren didn’t publish another book. She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot. And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything. In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do. If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things. Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate. I don’t blame her. I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing. I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved. But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers. The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken. You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador. The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers. I hope so. Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in. At least I’m still working. I hope Andrea is, too. Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days. And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience. Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some. But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

Solving climate change one slick magazine at a time.

Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters

2010

First, a Sincere Declaration of Thanks

I’ve spent most of my life running in circles looking for something authentic, then waiting for permission to explore it, and harshly criticizing myself when I didn’t get that permission. Maybe other people have different experiences, but this has been mine, my personal through-line from childhood to the present. So I try to be as sincere as possible when I write about my frustrations and failures. Because what else can I do? While it’s true that sincerity doesn’t make you friends, at least it makes you the right sort of enemies. I imagine this blog post will do more of that.

Still, I try to avoid self-pity and, because of this, I usually take a long time to form opinions about what I’ve done or failed to do and how others have reacted. I ruminate. I turn things over, trying to see past faulty assumptions, convenient rationalizations, and other self-serving anodynes. Most people probably do this to some extent, but I think I do it more. Sometimes, it works. Other times, what I took for a true perception, for reality, eventually dissolves into just another subjective field, just another corridor of the maze that I have come to think of as my life. In a maze, you never know what the next twist will bring. Usually, it brings another twist.

With this in mind, I should begin by saying that in 2010 I came very close to ending my life. This essay is about that time, but it’s not just about depression and not really about suicide. It’s not a success narrative where I write about how I overcame great difficulties and am now nearing perfectibility. It’s not about taking revenge on others through a misguided petty hit piece. And it’s certainly not about castigating myself for the many imaginary errors I’ve regretted and then dismissed over the last eight years in order to keep getting up in the morning. It’s a slice of life—a big, fat, ugly slice that tries to embrace the broadest range of experience in order to get closer to the truth. In this, it’s a lot like an advanced non-fiction exercise.

“Advanced” because it is not easy and not something you would assign to a 17-year-old English major in an introductory writing workshop. “Non-fiction” because it’s a mode of creative expression that pretends a certain degree of inviolable objectivity, even though we know that’s impossible. Every memoir, no matter how fabulous, must begin implicitly or explicitly with an assertion of truth or at least with a sincere declaration of authorial good faith: “I did this. I saw this. This happened. At least, I think it happened.” Rousseau’s Confessions does it with style:

Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.

This is my favorite passage from the first part of the book because literary historians have proven that the Confessions contains many misstatements if not deliberate falsehoods. Such graceful bald-faced prevarication is a rare and beautiful thing. But I am not so talented. And I have no plans to weigh my heart against a feather on the last day.

Instead, I will put it this way: I suspect I am not a horrible person. I have faith that I’m not even tactless. I believe my greatest defect is that I lack the imagination necessary to see several moves ahead. I lack interpersonal foresight, which has made me a poor manager of nervous egomaniacs and a terrible chess player. But I love chess. And that is a serious problem, even if I hate the high-strung pampered egomania of academic writing programs, because everything toward the end of my PhD program was just a version of that game.

Robert Greene, in the acknowledgements of The 48 Laws of Power—a book loved equally by goateed 25-year-olds with a Libertarian Bitcoin fetish and the morose IT professionals you see combing the self-help section for books on how to become an alpha male—has a similar protestation of sincerity:

I must also thank my dear friend Michiel Schwarz who was responsible for involving me in the art school Fabrika in Italy and introducing me there to Joost Elffers, my partner and producer of The 48 Laws of Power. It was in the scheming world of Fabrika that Joost and I saw the timelessness of Machiavelli and from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born. . . . Finally, to those people in my life who have so skillfully used the game of power to manipulate, torture, and cause me pain over the years, I bear you no grudges and I thank you for supplying me with inspiration for The 48 Laws of Power.

If we read this carefully, we have to smile. Greene is doing what we might call an “inverted Rousseau,” making the same assertion in a backwards way: this is a book about real things; therefore, I thank all those who have manipulated and tortured me for providing good material and, in the process, I declare my sincerity.

Greene puts us on notice that his book is based on subjective material that emanates from his and Elffers’ lived experience, creating a Rousseau-esque escape hatch. As The 48 Laws of Power is all highly subjective (essentially a kind of implicit portrait of Greene stitched together in historical anecdotes), the value of whatever he writes defaults to his apparent sincerity (“I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood”). It’s not about an objective truth process. It’s about rhetorical ethos.

That is wonderful because ethos might be the only sincere rhetorical mode. After logos topples from an unstable foundation of assumption, appeal to authority, and generalization; after pathos is unmasked as merely a screen of emotion recollected in tranquility; the persuasive credibility of the speaker is all that remains. In a world where absolute truth does not exist, everything is ethos. And so I construct my own ethical escape hatch.

2010 was the worst year of my life, the year after my mother died of lung cancer; the year after my first book was published; the year I got my PhD in English; the year I attended my last AWP Conference; the year I traveled to the deep South for an excruciating week-long job interview and realized the English department clichés also obtain south of the Mason-Dixon Line; the year I got very ill; the year I was admonished by my mentor for questioning the value of my degree and told to be grateful for indefinite unemployment; the year my father began another surly adolescence; the year I began to think that there was no place for me in this world. There are many years I’d relive if I could. 2010 is not one of them. But I have been told to be thankful for these experiences because they have supplied me with a lot of inspiration. As such, this writing is my sincere declaration of thanks.

Prelude

You never know what the next twist in the maze will bring but, in 2009, I think I was doing as well as could be expected when I stood in front of the department graduate adviser’s desk and said I needed a leave of absence to visit my mother in hospice. For some reason, that moment stands out as a prelude for the upcoming year.

The adviser, the department’s resident medievalist, seemed to exist in an acid vapor of contempt for all creative writing students and their keepers. She disliked me in particular because I’d dropped her Old English seminar the previous semester and she’d taken it personally. Since I was doing a PhD with a creative dissertation (the final product would become Gravity, my first story collection), I didn’t need to be in her class. But she needed me there. Or, at least, she needed to feel loved by as many students as possible.

This was the woman who would thereafter try to prevent me from graduating so that my funding would run out. This was the woman—whether due to old workplace feuds or out of resentment that there were more creative writing events on campus than dramatizations of Piers Plowman and undergraduate maypole dances—perpetually tried to block funding to the creative writing program and force out the graduate students depending on tuition waivers. Her style of chess was to kill the pawns first. Attack the supply lines, starve the more dangerous units in their fortifications, and wait for winter. Classic medieval siege tactics.

However, standing before her desk, I was barely aware of the billowing acid cloud. I was half-blind with grief. All I thought about was my mom and how I had to get back to California to see her. Looking back, I’m surprised I even had the wherewithal to stand up straight, much less ask for a leave of absence. But I was very responsible. I took everything seriously. I thought a lot about my future in academia, especially in creative writing instruction. And I felt my future depended on me contentiously following up on every detail. I was, essentially, as sincere as I have ever been in my life. I shouldn’t have been that sincere.

Given my emotional state, what the adviser said to me didn’t register until I’d left the building. The conversation went something like this:

“I need a leave of absence to go to California because my mother is dying of cancer.”

She rolled her eyes, looked out the window as if she were considering it, sighed, then shook her head. “No can do. You only have so much funding. Your funding will not cover you for another semester.”

“My mother is dying. She doesn’t have long. I’ve completed my course work. My dissertation only needs to be approved. I don’t even need any more credits.”

Another sigh. More contemplating the clouds. “Well, that’s really too bad. You have to be in residence or your funding will run out while you’re gone. Good luck.”

I stood there, trying unsuccessfully to process this. Then she rolled her eyes and asked me if there was anything else.

The grief robot turned and left her office, got on the elevator, rode it down to the bottom floor, walked out to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and stared at the water for a long time. Only then, did he think of the graduate adviser rolling her eyes. Over the ensuing 9 years, the moment of her eye roll would be impressed in his memory as a perfect metaphor, a perfect image foreshadowing all the inspiration and gratitude to come.

The Tragedy of Not Dying

A hospice is a horrible place. It’s like being given a lollipop for a bullet wound. You’re bleeding out and everyone tells you to enjoy your lolly. It’s cherry. It’s got a smiley face. Why aren’t you happy? Visiting my mother with my father there added another layer to the experience. In spite of the pain and horror of the place, in spite of watching my mother waste away in her bed, hallucinating and suffering and being afraid, I came to understand that my father’s grief was different from mine. I was feeling bad for my mother. He was feeling bad for himself.

This was still 2009. My only course, aside from empty dissertation credits, was a German reading and literature seminar. The professor, a kind old man about to retire in his late 60s, loved his students the way he loved his trees—which is to say, far more than he loved the university. I asked him for advice because he was the only person I could ask. And he made it possible for me to exist in two places at once. I gave my own writing students two weeks of work and held online course meetings via Skype and I emailed my German professor my work, which made it seem like I was present. This is what allowed me to fly to California and see my mom for the last time.

In those first awful trips to the hospice, I’d naïvely hoped that my father and I could come together in our grief and support each other. Of course, this was pure fantasy since he’d always enjoyed being a father but had rarely done any fatherly things. I could count the number of times we’d gone to movies, the one thing we could do together because it involved no conversation. And there were a few other misadventures over the years where my mother badgered him into going to some school play (he stood by the door to be the first person out) or taking me fishing (we did a U-turn at the access road to the lake and went home) or camping (it rained and so we packed up in the middle of the night and left). He never beat me and he brought home a paycheck. To the best of my knowledge, he never stepped out on my mother. But he was never involved more than that; though, he lived with us in the same house—somewhat more than a housemate, somewhat less than a relative.

So my hope that he would be able, somehow, if in a manly way, to share this painful experience with me, was not based on reality. After a certain amount of talk about how sad he was, it became noticeable that he never talked about my mom. He sat by her bed, lost in his own self-pity, as the cancer ate its way through her brain and wasted her body. As she died by inches, he proceeded as usual, focusing on his own needs above all else.

I witnessed this. My wife witnessed this. But I was so aggrieved I could barely speak. Sometimes, my wife had to help me walk from the car to my mother’s room. Have you ever been so upset that you can barely walk? Until you have, you won’t know the feeling. When you have, you’ll never forget it. It transcends description.

I focused completely on my mom. I waited for her moments of clarity. I told her I loved her. I told her the good things about my PhD program. I made jokes and she tried to laugh. One day, my great aunt—a stately old Italian woman who sounded like my late grandmother and seemed covered in the old-world charm that vanished with her generation—showed up with a peach and a kitchen knife. She cut slices and fed them to my mom with a smile on her face. Even now, as I write this, I cry a little because it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That kind of goodness doesn’t exist much in this world.

It was a very difficult time. Two weeks later, I returned to finish my program. In one of her last moments of clarity, my mom had ordered me to go back. She didn’t want me to see her die and me being in the PhD program meant a lot to her. I think she felt ashamed that she wasn’t going to be around to take care of my father and me the way she always had. And knowing that I was going to get a doctorate was a relief, as if it would be the next best thing. She also had a lot of pride in her appearance and the cancer had been unkind. So when I offered to stay, she insisted that I not. About two weeks after that, my father called and said to say good-bye to her. I told her I loved her. And I think she died shortly thereafter.

I miss her every day. But this isn’t about that, either. It’s about the aftermath, how everything changed as a result of her death. Some people are the linchpins of their families. When they go, everything goes. That was what happened. I flew back again for her funeral. She was buried holding a photo of my father and me. It was a closed casket and I don’t remember much else, just bits and pieces. I was out of my mind.

As we moved toward the Fall semester of 2010, I felt melted down and recast as a different person. I’d lost my happy thoughts. I didn’t go out or talk to many people other than my wife and my program mentor. I stopped writing fiction. Most of what I did was perfunctory. But I knew I had to get my degree. Even if I collapsed afterward, I would complete the PhD.

The Reading Series

The year before, I’d allowed myself to be persuaded that working as the assistant coordinator for the university literary reading series would “look good on my resume.” And I did my best as the monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, flier maker, venue securer, introducer-to-the-introducer, complaint taker, fielder-of-calls from mentally unstable bookstore proprietors, irradiated scapegoat, and general handler of said low-rung celebrity infants terribles.

Sometime before I left town for good, one of the faculty members admitted to me that the assistant coordinator position was really only supposed to entail flier making and that the professor who was getting paid to be to be doing the other things had dumped the rest on me. But by then I was so depressed that I couldn’t summon the necessary outrage.

One writer wanted a per diem that wasn’t in his agreement. Another wanted intel on, in his exact words, “the most fuckable students who might be around.” The butch lesbian poet would only communicate with me through an intermediary because I was straight and male. The playwright was supernaturally high throughout his entire visit and had to be physically guided to the stage. The “local writer,” penciled in because there was a vacancy in the schedule that month, struggled to contain her spiritual darkness through the entire event such that when I handed her the honorarium (significantly less than what the other, slightly more famous writers had received), she snatched it out of my hand, hissed a “Go fuck yourself,” and then smiled broadly at an approaching faculty member. These were some of the more endearing ones.

Needless to say, it was not the greatest collection of individuals. They generally came across as worn out, mediocre, vain, full of fear, full of resentment, and perpetually on the hustle for any crumb of recognition. Calling them fools wouldn’t be accurate because they were all reasonably intelligent. They simply knew the score too well, knew they should have received more for their dedication and efforts. You could see that loathsome awareness stamped on their faces. Now they were privileged to read their work to the smirking tenured faculty who hadn’t hired them, a menagerie of twitchy English students, and whichever townies may have wandered in looking for free wine. It wouldn’t get much better than that.

I disliked the visiting readers even though I saw myself and my fellow grad students reflected in them. Most of the people featured in the series that year hadn’t been picked for life’s cheer squad. They were the leftovers, the understudies, the adjuncts with slim books from presses you’ve never heard of. Many, it seemed, faced depression so considerable that they were pharmaceutically enhanced 100% of the time. I wondered more than once how they could continue to produce writing. The greatest irony was that most of them had already gone further in their careers than anyone currently in my PhD program stood to go.

There were a few exceptions, a few graceful and brilliant souls who’d agreed to come as personal favors to various faculty members. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them as well as the moments of hilarity you find in every English department. 2010 wasn’t all doom and gloom, just most of it.

The second time I was told to go fuck myself was around 3 AM on a Sunday morning toward the end of Fall semester. My insomnia had become pretty dependable at that point and I was already awake when the phone rang. I got out of bed, told my wife I had no idea who it was, and shuffled into our tiny living room, where I sat on the couch and listened to the breather on the line. He was panting hard. I thought it was quaint that in this day and age people still gave breather-masturbator calls. The caller ID came up with nothing.

When he realized I’d said hello and was listening, he rumbled out a “Go fuck yourself” and hung up. I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about the human condition. Then he called back. It was F, one of the few grad students who’d been asked to read in the series. He mumbled some things and then shouted that he thought I had a problem and should get help. He was drunk off his ass.

I asked him why he felt that way and he broke it down for me. F had read with his wife, you see, and I’d made the mistake of introducing him before her. Neither of them were ever going to get over it. Plus, she was a Navajo princess and I’d introduced them as husband and wife. You don’t do that to a Navajo princess. Didn’t I fucking know that? What was wrong with my head?

“Princess? Really? I thought you guys were from Pittsburgh.”

He hung up again and didn’t speak to me until I ran into him at the AWP Conference a few months later—where he was keyed up and sweaty, slapping me on the back, telling me how he’d been featured in a very cool spontaneous reading held on one of the convention center’s escalators that drew an enormous crowd. Now he had a pocket of phone numbers to network. Amazing. He didn’t remember a thing about calling me in the dark and telling me what I could go do with myself.

Or maybe he’d repressed that memory along with his courtship of the Navajo princess, that hard winter living as tribe’s writer, the majestic swish of his khakis as he hunted buffalo, armed only with an unpublished manuscript. I haven’t seen him or heard a thing about him since the conference, but I suspect he’s either got tenure by now or he’s back in Pennsylvania selling pre-loved automobiles like it’s a poetry slam.

The End, My Friend

Depression is a very idiosyncratic and personalized illness. But those who have it tend to have a few things in common, one of which is that depression can be cumulative in its gravity and magnitude. Today, you’re not feeling good. Tomorrow, you can’t get out of bed. The day after that, you’re standing on a chair with a vacuum cleaner cord around your neck and you think you’re the only one in the history of the world who’s endured such a linear degeneration. Feeling alone is a big part of it.

I felt alone until I discovered Darkness Visible by William Styron and recognized a lot of what I’d been going through. I don’t know how I found the book, whether it was in the fiction section of the library where I sometimes studied or whether I encountered it in a used bookstore or somewhere else. While it wouldn’t be true to claim that the book “saved” me, I can say it helped enough to get me down off the chair, multiple chairs, actually.

Reading it was an emergency measure, but it was something I could depend on. I didn’t talk about my feelings. I’ve never been very good at that, not even with my loved ones. But I could read someone else talking about his. And since I loved Styron’s fiction, I felt like I could trust him. If he said it, I could accept it enough to be able to think about it. And that was usually all it took for me to keep going.

By Spring break, I was prepared to submit my dissertation. I missed my mom horribly and my wife and I returned to California to take care of the empty house where all my mother’s things sat gathering dust. My father wouldn’t go near the place. When he wasn’t drunk, he was hard at work rediscovering his hormones in erratic, awkward, and desperate ways. Our relationship, never substantial to begin with, began to splinter irreparably when, out of guilt, he started to regularly criticize my mom.

He was a self-righteous Catholic for most of my life, who often amused himself by telling me to get my ass to church and that since I’d been baptized I could never not be a Catholic. But after a year of drinking, trash talking, and a pissed-drunk rape attempt on my cousin in front of me, he was ready to start up a relationship with an equally neurotic married woman who’d run after him at an event.

He confessed this to me one afternoon because I guess he couldn’t confess it to his priest. Then he added that it was like a DH Lawrence love story. Then he said she was going to get a divorce from her despicable husband and they’d marry each other. Lovely. I didn’t want to hear about it. I especially didn’t want to hear him ask me to be his best man. I could hardly speak. It shows how detached and self-involved he was that he thought it was something he could ask me.

“What about all that Catholicism?” I remember asking. I don’t remember if he answered.

Around that time, because he wouldn’t help me clean out my mother’s things, I’d been over at the house, crying, putting her clothes in Goodwill boxes, packing up old photo albums, doing all the things we could have done as a family. Instead, my wife helped and we did the best we could in a few days. Much was overlooked, things from my childhood, things in the garage that I really do wish I could have kept. But we only had so much time. Now I imagine my father and his new wife paid at some point to have it all carted to the dump. But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t been back in years.

I do recall taking to the gardener, who revealed that he’d had my mother making food for him right up to the point where she went into the hospital for the last time. She couldn’t lie down straight in bed. So she was sleeping sitting up in a chair in order to breathe, then walking around on crutches, cooking and cleaning. According to the gardener, he screamed at her frequently. She was fucking dying and this is how he treated her. That’s abuse. It’s horrible fucking abuse. And my mother, who was just about a saint in every way, did her best.

My mother was a talented painter and sculptor, but he’d left her art in a shed that had a broken roof. It rained a lot that year and most of her work was ruined. I’d been standing in the backyard, looking at the shed, unable to get in because he neglected to give me the key to the deadbolt (probably because he didn’t want me to see what had happened) when he called with a task for me. It was something small, something to do with getting a TV boxed up for him and cancelling the TV service that my mom had in her hospice room. I’d already taken care of it, but he spoke to me with contempt, as if I were very lazy. He said, “After all I’ve done for you, couldn’t you take care of this one thing?”

I thought of my mother on crutches, making him breakfast. I thought of her art destroyed through neglect. I thought of my father drinking a case of my cousin’s high-end champagne and then trying to fuck her in front of me. I thought of all the nasty things he said about my mother when she was gone, after he’d cried his eyes out for himself, after he blamed me for not being there when she died, after the sizeable amount of heirloom gold from old Italy that my mom wanted to come to me but that disappeared right around the time my father and his new cadaverous lady friend got a second condo in San Antonio. I thought about all these things and saw that no matter what his paycheck had been worth, no matter how much I may have cost as a child, no matter what my mom and he may have given me as a teen or a confused 20-year-old, I owed him nothing.

I felt something snap and a certain coldness overtook me. My depression had come to be replaced with something more useful: calm, thoughtful anger. We had it out. He told my wife and I we had to be out of the house. Within 48 hours, we were. I’ve never looked back.

Gone for Good

I got my PhD without fanfare. My wife and I went out to dinner and it was nice, just the two of us. I knew I’d miss my mentor in the program and her brilliant husband. I’d miss certain things about the university town and my own writing students, several of whom had become more like friends. But I was glad to be done—done with the degree, done with my father, done with trying to hump the dream of being an academic creative writer.

In the eight years since the day we drove south, blasting M. Ward’s “Helicopter” with the windows rolled down, I’ve thought about 2010 quite a lot. I still get depressed. But I can cope. I’ve learned that it is possible and, for me, even preferable to have a life outside academia. And I’ve come to accept that family isn’t really who raises you when you don’t have a say in the matter. It’s who you choose when you do.

I miss my mom every day and I write fiction every day. As of this writing, I’m working on my third collection of stories with a novel draft mostly written. I’ve published over 30 items in magazines, worked as a freelance writer and journalist, and lived in 9 countries. I’m healthy. I really don’t have anything to complain about right now. And sometimes I even give myself permission to think I’m happy. Somewhere, there’s a Navajo princess riding through the clouds over Pittsburgh, but I doubt our paths will cross again.

STEM, Scientism, and the Decline of the Humanities – my latest on Splice Today

Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/on-campus/stem-scientism-and-the-decline-of-the-humanities

The MFA Distortion Field (yes, Dottie, and not just in Iowa)

I sat down today intending to write a piece critical of certain shrill MFA voices that seem to have gotten shriller since MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction hit the shelves last February. Is “shriller” actually a word? It is. But it only takes meaning as a comparative adjective once something that was brittle, high-pitched, piercing, and so exaggerated as to be deeply annoying gets intensified beyond the bounds of reason and tolerance.

In fact, this was going to be one of those, “I think yon highly privileged (shrill) MFA Child Of The Universe doth protest too much, Horatio” posts. In it, I would have been sure to impart a sense of having been there and done that, taking care to insinuate that I was a hard bitten veteran of the academic creative writing hustle. I might have added a touch of weary exasperation that the culture of many workshop-based programs is about everything but the work. And I might have tried for a some kind of brief reversal three-fourths of the way through so that I could have ended on a slightly hopeful note.

But come on. I’ve done all that. I’ve argued both sides: that MFA writing programs are excellent ways to focus on learning craft for two to three years without the distractions that would otherwise apply. I’ve also argued that the bloated culture of privilege and cynical, thinly veiled mediocrity in many of these programs short-changes students from the beginning. I still believe all of this. I also believe that if you go into it with open eyes, intending to use the program as a tool to facilitate your development as an artist, you will not regret your decision. If you go in and expect a big hug and Wonder Boys, your life will come to resemble a Muddy Waters song.

I’ve written a lot, here and elsewhere, on MFA programs—why I think we should still believe in them and the ways I think they utterly fail everyone involved. And by “everyone,” I actually mean anyone interested in the mission of creative writing, which I guess means everyone. The Big Everyone—like you, me, the kid on the big wheel down the block, President Obama, and Ray Kurzweil. Everyone. Because, in my opinion, the mission of art school is nothing less than cultural transformation. It’s founded on the assumption that the arts can and should have a place in society.

So I don’t know. Maybe I should recognize a certain degree of irony implicit in any post I write about gifted, neurotic, highly privileged 20-somethings in creative writing programs. I was one. In many ways, I still am. I feel at home with that crowd. And as a freelance writer and fiction instructor for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I’m still connected to the academic MFA world. I guess the question is whether there is anything new to be said about it. The perspectives in MFA vs. NYC have not been very surprising or insightful. It seems like the same old array of objections and justifications we’ve been hearing for years. Now they’ve been collected in a book instead of appearing in The Atlantic or on websites.

Maybe an even better question is whether anyone sees MFAs clearly at all. What if I point out that there is a perceptual “distortion field” around MFA programs which encourages students to believe themselves at the center of the universe? What if I argue that, because of this world-view, many MFA students also believe that the universe is in a state of perpetual collapse—because its center has been revealed to contain semen, bent paper clips, and cotton candy instead of the fire of the gods? And what if I describe the almost universal malaise that seems to descend on these young lords and ladies of creation around the time they’re halfway through their programs? A certain melancholy made from dwelling on the absurdly large student loans they took out in order to be “student writers” and how this seems like a perverse existential joke considering their post-program job prospects?

Oh, don’t be sad. There’s enough cotton candy for everyone.