Night is upon us, deep night nearly to the place where it is early morning and before the moon hung in the sky high and yellow. Full. I want to lock myself up here. I came home from the coffee shop and stayed alone, drinking my own coffee, smoking cigarettes, listening to Kenneth Brannagh read someone's book on a CD until I was ready to work on my own. The night would not be complete until I could be at peace to write. As much as I love other people the peace of my own solitude with my own work cannot be matched and the ones I treasure most are those who know this.
What can I say about writing, about our writing the writing we do? We, yes, the secret sister and brotherhood a few of who I know. Everyone around you wants very badly to make a dollar. Dollars are nice. I like them, and when I am broke and doing something I don't like then I will worry about making them too. But there is this idea of the starving artists and that we are it because we are not Anne Rice, because we are not... whoever is being paid a half a million dollars or more to write a book, and of course all of your friends, everyone you know is telling you about these people. Comparing you to them. Not knowing you have made it already.
Nor are we the artists with the NEA endowments. Endowments are nice. They are wonderful, but don't think you deserve them! Grants are good things, maybe we'll get them, maybe not. But it is a poor thing to follow in the footsteps of the writers that America has now. The ones the professors like or the ones the people in the checkout aisles like. There are enough of them, but I know you wanted to be something else because so did I.
You heard of the ones who were exiled from their home and country, who died, of the ones who made printing presses in their basement and did a new thing from the ground up, who had to write and said to hell with the old thing, the status quo. You heard of magicians who wished to changed the world and gave up all wealth, all bullshit for that gift. You heard of enchanters who spun up worlds with their words. That's what you wanted, who had fire in their blood.
I know.
I want these things too.
It is late when I am saying these things to you. Nearly two in the morning.
When we think of those gone before us we think of those poets and storytellers who did not work for their own glory, but gave of their very flesh and blood food to those who needed it. In America who is willing to do that? Or, for that matter, how many people need it? Need to read? I trust there are a few and we are for them. We and our priesthood.
<< Home