11/7/2024
Fearless for the Fuck of It:
Week 1 of November Writing Challenge
The days are getting shorter. Halloween has passed and left me with all the ghosts it always does, and now I am plunging into the dark of another month of dedicated writing. Unlike her sister in April, writing in November feels darker, colder, more effortful. I'm an interloper, intruding on National Novel Writing Month to hold myself accountable for writing poems. And, of course, almost on cue, I am grappling with the spiny tendrils of seasonal affective disorder. Hope is harder to access. This first week of writings has been closer to surgery than art, pulling words and feelings out of body unanesthetized. I've been theming my work around home. Around the homes we build and their relative safety, the homes we are denied. But, most importantly, I am attempting to treat each poem like a single piece of kindling.
I want these works to be flammable. I want to burn any tethers to respectability or publishability. I want this to be my joke album. My fuck you. I want to dislodge my need for acceptance from my writing process. I've gotten too scared.
In 2002, singer/songwriter/tin-can-full-of-aquarium-gravel Tom Waits decided to release two albums, Alice and Blood Money, at the same time. The albums are wildly different, Alice being full of largely softer, fanciful songs and Blood Money is full of bleak, violent howling ones. This decision made no commercial sense. They could've been a double album. They could've been staggered at least months apart, but Waits would not be dissuaded. It was an experiment. It didn't need to be a successful one and, based on album sales, it wasn't. Tom just wanted to do it.
Alice has gone on to become a classic. Blood Money has gone on to be one of my favorites, because I'm a little freak. Having confidence enough in your artistic vision to fully flaut the rules and expectation of your medium and its culture? I aspire. I crave. I covet.
This month will be dedicated to chasing that level of supreme artistic assurance that I'm almost certainly projecting onto a musician I like. In Tom Waits I am hoping to find a lesson, a medicine for what is ailing me, artistically lately. Part of that is coming to terms with this panic from pressuring myself through my second full-length project. I recently sent it off for a look-over with my editor and ended up having to completely rewrite the foreword.
Despite their many helpful notes on the draft I sent, I couldn't see anything salvageable in my first draft, but staring at the blank page and tasked with introducing and summarizing the work of last year I was equally hopeless. I had entered the ugly realm of absolute certainty that my work was garbage, that any attempt to front-porch them with an essay would be like putting Christmas lights on an abattoir.
While I eventually got those lights up on the slaughterhouse and rewrote the foreword, I have been dealing with a debilitating case of imposter syndrome since then. To refamiliarize myself with my own artistic confidence, I've decided not to publish any of my work from this month. No submission, no putting it up on the blog. No "oh maybe this will be a book" or anything of the sort.
Writing for the book, for the outline, these are scared tactics for me that take the fun out of my work. Writing cannibal poems because I love my girlfriend and want to eat her? A-ok! Writing cannibal poems to publish a book of cannibal poems? Scared. I will not be scared. I will not let my work be water, matching and warping itself to fit every container. I will not write for the market.
Similar to Tom Waits, Michael Haneke ignored conventional expectation, solely because he had a specific vision for his movie Funny Games. This is incidentally my favorite movie, but most remarkably, Haneke also directed the American remake. Rather than compromise, Haneke painstakingly recreated his first film shot-for-shot. He swapped out the German cast for a bankable Hollywood one and called it a day. Imagine that kind of self assurance. The only problem with my art is its audience.
It's a perfect distillation of the movie's own aggressive metatextual sentiment. Funny Games is off-putting and problematizes audiences' relationship with spectacles of violence. Once he realized the Americans who most needed to hear this message weren't going to see a subtitled movie, we got the remake. Again, fearless devotion to your own art. I need this energy back.
So far what is helping is the continued exposure to challenging art, to stories of unwavering faith, and to weirdos in Atlanta's live performance scene. As I read my little poems and essays I share the stage with puppeteers, burlesque dancers, storytellers, and musicians all capable of unfathomable weirdness that leave me feeling aspirational, hungry, and ready to wear out the little pen that came attached to my travel notebook.
One woman, in one show, led the audience in a twenty-second communal and primal scream. It was formless and tempestuous and accomplished more catharsis in seconds than I have in entire essays. It was reckless. I want to be reckless. I must be.
The elephant in the room as I write this is that we just wrapped up yet another Presidential election. I have nothing profound or hopeful to say beyond the simple admission that despair won't stop me.
The least qualified person in the world is the president.
Again.
Imposter syndrome is dead.
Again.
This month will be a celebration of that death. It will be a dance on its rancid grave. I will sing into the loam of its final resting place. I will be weird. I will not be stopped.
I have poems to write. See you next week, friends.
Yours with an open mouth,
-B
