Destination: Somewhere

First draft written directly to site.

In college, I drove three towns away, where no one knew me, to buy books I liked. With my jacket collar popped, and wearing a hat to cover most of my hair, I snuck to the fiction shelves, peering over my shoulder every few seconds just in case... When I went to the counter, I tried to make my eyes vacant and my smile a little dumb so that the cashier wouldn't squint suspiciously at me and ask, "Aren't you that English major from CU Boulder?" I could picture the look of accusation, the holding up of the novel I'd pined for at a thirty-mile disadvantage, with the cover facing out to mock me--"Why are you buying this book?"

No one ever asked me that, but I was ready for the day. I kept a stack of pleasure reads under my dorm bed, behind my laundry basket. My roommate Tracy, bless her heart, wouldn't have cared in the least, and even would have enjoyed some of the books herself, but I never knew when the unexpected English major would drop by, what might happen if... well, I shuddered to think.

What was worse, I stopped enjoying the books while I was reading them. A lurking voice surfaced from deep in the occipital lobe of my brain and made its way forth--temporal, frontal--informing me in an ominous tone, "This book is not good. This book is not real life. This book is teaching you nothing. Feel, feel your IQ dropping.... Feel, feel your naivte taking over...." And as I'd look nervously up from the book's pages, the stack of required reads on my desk looked pathetically tattered, dusty, abandoned... and yet immensely threatening, like truth and chaos were bubbling inside them, waiting to boil over or explode.

I tried to tell myself--I tried. I tried to think, this hierarchy of literature--it's all vanity. It's mental and social, and by adhering to the system, you're reinforcing it. But the words were hollow. True on the outside, with no substance to support them from the inside. An exoskeleton; no organs.

And slowly, my fiery love to read depleted to little more than a glimmering ash, waving and withering fragilely beneath charred inspiration.

And that made writing very difficult. What did I know about the world? What could I write more than the superficial, inconsequential stories of sorority girls and homecoming queens? I couldn't hope to write about the struggles of the invisible lower classes of America, or poverty in Africa, or religious wars in Asia. And I began to wonder if there would ever be any way to bridge the chasm between escapist fiction and postmodernity.

I remember once, I met with the "in" professor--the one who had connections and superior taste and who'd gone on a Fulbright to Lithuania--the professor everyone wanted approval from, because if she approved any student's work, that student might actually have a future in writing on the horizon. I told her, I said:

I don't want to write the next Great American Novel. I want to be able to support myself.

She looked at me in horror. You don't want to write the next Great American Novel?

No.

Why? Don't you think you should give it a go at least once?

... I mumbled something indistinct, I think, and turned the conversation back to the purpose of my meeting her, whatever that was. I forget now.

I started accumulating straggling credits from different schools as I closed in on my degree. I took a course on ethnic literature in America at another state school, where I was introduced to Octavia Butler, Julie Otsuka, Mark Kalesniko and Junot Diaz. Other writers, too, but I didn't care so much for any of them. In fact, I didn't even like Diaz all that much, but I learned something from him.

We read his book Drown in that class, which is a novel built on a series of short stories. I'd always wanted to complete a project like this, because I thought it might easier than writing something great at length. I have a tendency to want to give my audience all the important information at once. Ever since I read Beverly Cleary's books on Ramona Quimby when I was in second grade, I've known it is possible to draw out a greater story in smaller-taled increments. What I've always ended up doing when I've attempted to copy the pattern, however, is make my great story into a short story. Bad. Bad bad bad.

Diaz, though, in Drown, didn't deliberately tie the chapters to each other--not in a distinct chronology or traceable plot. Instead, he strung his stories together with recurring characters and locations at various moments in time as they applied to his overall theme. (His theme was, of course, what every great postmodern author's theme is: white European male = scum. This definition I acquired from my favorite high school English teacher, whom I returned to when college began to wear me down. He didn't have a taste for postmodern work after T.S. Eliot, either.)

I had my epiphany as I was curled around Drown at an unfamilar library with an old friend. I was sitting next to fake potted fern on one side and a window that was letting too much of the winter temperature from the outside seep in around its edges on my other:

If I could pick just one thing to write about, something that had influenced my life, something I already had some authority on... I wouldn't, per se, need a plot-driven story. A central question, certainly--but a theme could drive my book forward.

And in that moment, I knew what I had to write about. I knew my theme as though it has been as close as my shadow all along. [...]

Reviews

[Ashleigh]

As a fellow university student also majoring in the English field, I understand this very same torment. It certainly can feel at times as though we are drowning in a sea of "let's be different and non-conformist" to the point where being different and non-conformist has in itself become the same and conformist purely through its popularity.

I'm going through this same dilemma; can anything I write be of any value? What I want to write about is the same as what everyone else is writing about. How can I write about what is important to me without being labeled as "The Same"?

This is a very good piece of writing. I enjoyed reading it. It's not often I come across a piece of writing that directly relates to me in this particular way.

[W.k.kortas]

It's a nice little synopsis of something all Anguish majors go through; fortunately, odds are that you'll eventually get over it (whether the "it" is intellectual guilt, or actually being an English major).

[Samuel Dickens]

This is some very good writing, Janet. I believe you've got a few more commas than what's needed, (My bane as well) but aside from that, it's very solid and interesting.