Devastate

Let me tell you a story.

I have become awash in the workshop. One writing course last term, three writing courses this term. Likely another three courses next term. At no point in university did I take a creative class. Thus while I have done creative projects, I have rarely been in a creative community where people have some commonalities in their work. In small group workshop, you get eighteen minutes on the clock. Read out loud, talk positives, talk constructive critiques.

Watching people be painfully present is awe-inspiring, putting parts of their guts onto the offering slab. It is incredibly difficult to do. I have to do the same thing. It's cathartic, but catharsis isn't a fun thing to experience. It's a process of clarity.

My feedback style, regardless of the type of writing, is exceedingly small-scale. In an essay of a thousand words I will be going over a half dozen syllables in the middle, whether they make music or strike off-key. I am perhaps most comfortable talking about the craft of writing because it is the most indirect way to offer feedback. Whatever the person's larger goals, the way they talk about their feelings, I think well, if the sentences are tightened that can shine through better.

It's wish-casting on my part- most of my history, when I show people my writing, they say it's 'good.' This means 'technically adept.' It's very evident that I write a fair amount and that my style has cured in the cellar for a number of years. I don't hear much about emotional impact. I don't hear my writing connecting to important events in someone's life.

I want to write stuff that isn't just a description of the present, or writing that leans into elegance at certain points. I want to write things where if a reader could grab my arm in a train station, they would tell me a story about them, not a story about me. I want to write ugly things that make people dislike me as the author. I don't want to find new ways to write grad school papers again, this refining of a dry technique.

I want

I want people to go back to when they fell in love the first time. And I want people for a moment to think about how good that moment was, even if the memory is not joyful in the end.

I want

I want

I want people to think about some gay shit they've done, whether they were a teenager or fifty years old. I want people to think about when they woke up and realized the closet was too small to fit in the rest of their life.

I want

I need people to feel something. Often I don't feel much at all- it's my condition, I try but there's only so much I can do with me. I would like to think that doesn't exclude me from reaching inside someone's thoracic cavity and to pump the left ventricle a couple times with my hand.

I know I can't make everyone like me. But if not me, Artemis, perhaps the authorial voice I stick into poetry, fiction, these essays I throw up on Ghost. If not the voice, then what the voice is trying to do.

I want, I need, I know.

Artemis