Why It Matters

I’m on vacation, and between time zone changes, sleepless hotel nights, family issues, and time away from the black book I’m coming up empty.  On top of that, I received a half-dozen rejections last week, which really isn’t so bad considering I also placed three pieces, but it’s so much easier to focus on the rejections.  This is one of those weeks when the will to write wanes, and bad alliteration slips past the goalie.  I need a little quiet, some time in the woodshed to sort it all out.

During this trip, I saw Los Angeles from the window of an airplane.  Twenty years and two months have passed since I left that town.  I have no roots there, my L.A. vocations are now antiquated, and I was miserable when I left, and yet, somehow the place still feels like my real home.  My kids asked if I’d ever move back, and I told them it was an option for me after they’re on their own.  “Why would you come back here?  The air is gross,” my daughter said.

“It’s a good place for a writer,” I said.  “Besides, I can be the old guy in the background in movies who yells “Watch out!”

Los Angeles was just a connecting flight, the final destination my parents’ house.  Seeing the South’s red clay again was nice, or stepping out of the hotel in the mornings and watching my glasses fog up.  I might be the only person on the planet who prefers humidity.  “It’s a dry heat” are words best left for Hell.

The sadness and the tension of a visit with my family overwhelm me.  I always return to California twisted and confused, like an inflatable James that has been slashed and stuffed into a box designed for a Jim.  Did I invent a fake persona when I left home, or did they invent the child that they wanted, or at least try to?  I heard stories about me that never happened, yet to the teller they were as real as red clay.  Maybe there’s no difference.  Maybe it’s all real if you just believe it’s so.

Deflated and stuffed back into my box, afraid to write, afraid to lay it down.  This thing takes guts and honesty.  There’s no sense writing bullshit, or maybe there is.  I don’t know.  I know I don’t like to read bullshit, so there’s that.  Sometimes a reader leaves a comment that is more ballsy and candid than the babble to which it’s responding, and I grin like an idiot and cheer the bastard all the way to the last line.  Good writing is about getting the reader there and nothing else.

The rejections pile up and I question my own principles.  Maybe good writing is about all of that other stuff — plot and forms and genre and blah blah blah.  Reading the submission guidelines for the hundreds of literary magazines out there makes me feel like a simpleton:

We are a non-profit press dedicated to the diffusion of writing in all of the forms it can take.  Its backbone is an editorial collective from different backgrounds and geographies that keep an eye out for compelling projects that, in any number of ways, challenge expectations of what reading and writing should be.

I have no compelling projects that challenge expectations of what reading and writing should be.  I lay it down, you pick it up.  That’s all I think reading and writing are.  Apparently I’m no writer, just a charlatan typing simple stories about average people.  What a fraud. I have no place in the rarefied air of an editorial collective from different backgrounds and geographies.

That’s my first thought, but I keep sending my pieces out anyway.  My next thought: What the hell are you even trying to say? I think they mean: “Our editors are scattered all over and we are looking for good stories to publish.”  Why not just say that?  Why do we insist on this ridiculous notion that good writing is some sort of Gordian knot?  Just lay it down simply so that others can understand you.

I’ll paddle my way through the rest of this vacation until I can catch the wind again and offer you more than rambling.  I’ll be back next week with a simple story about simple people told in simple language.  It will not challenge your expectations of what reading or writing should be, and it probably won’t find a place outside of my little home here on the intergooglewebtubes.  But it will be honest, and because I’m too stupid to learn from failure I still believe that’s all that matters.