Artist's Date #58: Fan Girling

It finally happened: I lost a file and now I need to go through every one and name them and store them somewhere in an organized fashion. I basically shouldn't write anything new until I do this work, not even this essay. I wonder whether this isn't what AI isn't trying to solve: how we've all gotten ourselves in such a state of confusion with our computers that we have found no other way to deal with them as human. So we had to invent new computers to deal with those computers that were so confusing. It's also happens that I have to quit using AI cold turkey even though I do not want to, but that is another essay.

This one was supposed to be about last night's reading at Green Apple Books. Deb Olin Unferth read from her new book Earth 7 about two women meeting and falling in love even as the earth and their own selves have disintegrated the way a sand dune might do in a storm. But I kept writing the event review over and over again in different ways, which is exactly what I did when I tried to write about a reading with Patricia Lockwood from back in November. I blame Rita Bullwinkel, the interviewer of both author's readings, who refuses to take the position of intellectual authority while she interviews. Instead she comes from a place of love for the writers she's talking to, not only of their work but also, it feels, for them as people.

The most I could summon today was to let Rita know that I loved the reading in a note on Instagram and then I read my last note to her, which was that I would write up a story about the Patricia Lockwood reading and send it to her when I did. I remembered I had sent this but to see it I had sent it in November was a terrible surprise. NOVEMBER! Well, surely it would be easy enough to solve. I would just go into my google drive and grab the old file and give it a quick read and sent that out today, while also writing up my thoughts about last night to publish next week.

Instead I couldn't find the essay I wrote. I searched google drive and I searched my laptop for the names that would be in the essay and nothing came up. I continued to search, opening folders (the dread!) and finding rough drafts of a birth announcement I never sent out a decade ago. I'd put that right here but I feel it's too painful.

I remember a bit about what I wrote. The draft was about friendship and women and intellectual space, and that's what I would have said generally about last night's reading too. How much I need it and when I get into that place how I start to unwind.

One thing I absolutely must document about last nights' reading – besides the writer's obsession with sand, besides her story about when she gave a prison guard a fictional certificate for not abusing her incarcerated creative writing students for just one exact day, besides her assertion that the best thing she has is not her marriage to philosopher with lots of friends (although it seems like a huge asset – a thinking man with friends!) but her friendship with her writing retreat adventure partner who was in the audience – is both Bullwinkel and Unferth's shared love of Kelly Link - a slipstream author who's short story The Faery Handbag is my favorite story of all time. This story, and the book Memory Police, were recommended to me by Marissa Levien, author of The World Gives Way, in her Sackett Street class on speculative fiction.

There's so much to more report. About the expansive way Unferth writes and speaks, about the way that she uses POV to confront standards of omniscient narration, about the question I didn't ask during the Q and A because I promised myself I would not do the thing where I asked a question and felt disappointed in myself for asking such a dumb question though Unferth had even brought gifts (!) for people who were brave enough to raise their hands. About whether slipstream isn't really naming the real, and wether realism isn't actually the thing that is made up. And about how I wanted to cry when she told her story about the guard because she said "Of course, he was so nice after that."

I'll end with a list for myself about what else I learned:

1) Have something you care deeply about and be willing to go so far into it that you might not come out on the other side.
2) Do a shitload of research about a micro obsession and then absolutely feel zero obligation to stay true to any of the research as it related to your book.
3) Feel free to make the first chapter a vibe.
4) Feel free in general. Do whatever you need to do to stay in a place of emotional freedom so that you can be true to those emotions when you write because that's what people care about.
6) Don't fucking compromise! Don't compromise what you think or your vision or what you care about not even for one single sentence.
7) Answer the question. This one is from Rita who answered a question so generously (while I was thinking about how it was a "bad" question) and then Deb answered it with the beautiful story that made me almost cry.
8) Talk to the person next to you! The person next to me said hello and asked me my name and what I worked on and I was awestruck, as if I'd never met a person before.

And also, name you drafts on your drive.