The Writing Life

The Future is Smaller Than You Think

Eleven years and a season ago, I was in the middle of the best summer I’ve ever had. I had graduated from college, received enough graduation gifts to coast for a few months, and was dating the woman I’d eventually marry. I spent my days studying the early music history that had never made it into my music major and my evenings playing ultimate frisbee. My commitments were minimal. I had the rare luxury of choosing how I spent my time.

Most importantly, though, I knew what was coming next. In August I would move to Ohio and begin a master of music degree in composition. I had an apartment lined up (despite not meeting any roommates), an assistantship lined up, and hey, how hard could more school be? (It turned out to be hard, but that is a different post.) I was a 22-year old with a plan. The future spread before me like an ocean.

That was the moment I should have checked my boat for leaks…or perhaps invested in a set of maps to give me some idea of what the other side of the ocean looked like. But c’mon. I had love, ultimate, and leisure to spend reading about parallel developments in madrigals and motets.

The future is smaller than you think. It probably isn’t big enough to hold everything you would like to pile into it. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not tiny. It’s just more along the lines of Heward’s Handy Haversack than a high-end bag of holding or portable hole. (Apologies to the non-geeks.) You cannot just keep dumping stuff there, hoping you will get to it later.

Still…seize-the-day posts and their cousin chase-your-dream wear me out. Days are slippery. Dreams move fast. Of course you have to sow before you reap. Sowing doesn’t guarantee a harvest. To sow is to sign up for endless days of weeding and shoveling fertilizer, of hoping for rain or digging your own ditches. And when you reap? As good as it might feel to heft your scythe, to cut the stalks and winnow the grain, even that doesn’t guarantee that somebody will be waiting at market to buy your harvest. Or that the miller won’t be an ass.

No step in the process can be dumped willy-nilly into the future. It is too small for that. This is what bothers me about “seizing the day.” If I spend the day writing, my kids will destroy the apartment (or one another). If I spend the day writing, I’m going to have a hard time staying in said apartment when rent comes due. I can throw myself wholeheartedly into chasing my dreams, but I’m setting myself up to trip over things in the now.

I am not against pep talks. We all need them. Sometimes we need the ones we give ourselves most of all. I just prefer to remember that we have only a short amount of time, and that, unlike the Doctor, we’re stuck experiencing it linearly. The future is smaller than I once thought it was.

It’s too small too hold all of the hopes I dumped there. The thing is, the now isn’t much bigger. I can worry about seizing the day, or I can get a fence around it to keep it from escaping. If my dreams are running too fast to catch, I can try to let them show me the best path forward. Most of all, I remind myself that a small future does not have to be a dark future. My future is still mine to fill. Yours is still yours. Think hard about what you stash there.

WTF is Epic?

A Google image search for “epic” yields depressing results—mostly “demotivational” posters (“epic fail” and “epic win”), and most of those prominently featuring breasts. (Go internet?) A standard search yields only slight improvements: the primary results are Epic Systems, the movie “Epic” (loosely based on a book by William Joyce), and, eventually, Wikipedia’s epic poetry page.

That gets us closer to a working definition of epic for storytelling purposes. (Today, at least, I’ll spare you the detour explaining Bakhtin’s notion of epic and novelistic chronotope.) What makes for epic storytelling? Is it attitude? Does the fate of the world (or multiple worlds) necessarily hang in the balance? Can we legitimately call one protagonist’s descent and redemption epic if it doesn’t involve saving the world? They’re big questions, and off the cuff I’d suggest that the main ingredient is simply scale. There has to be some sense that the story’s action has far-reaching consequences, whether it’s a ring of power, finding the Buddhist scrolls far to the west, or some evil deity ready to be unchained. Sometimes, if the interior worlds of characters are sufficiently realized, the interpersonal can become epic in scale.

Scale is tricky. Concerning yourself overmuch with it can lead to forest/trees issues in which you constantly lose one or the other. What follows is a discussion of one particular way of mistaking the forest for the trees, the storytelling technique I call “epic by addition.”

Some of you have heard me talk (rant) about this before, and you know which author is soon going to be in my crosshairs. Epic by addition is the attempt to create scale simply by adding more stuff. People, places, monsters…keep adding them until your editor cuts you off.* You can simply introduce new characters out of the blue, or you can build up the supporting cast into stars. The more stars you have, the brighter the sky, right?

Yeah. Maybe not. If you put too many bright stars in the sky, picking out the constellations becomes a chore.

From J.R.R. to G.R.R.

The first author I read to really embrace epic by addition was Melanie Rawn. She had foreigners invade her continent, and chose to trace that invasion through the soap-opera members of convoluted family tree of magic people. The most famous purveyor of epic by addition, though, is G.R.R. Martin in his A Song of Ice and Fire. The series’ narrative spirals out from Winterfell to the Wall to King’s Landing to Pentos to…well, pretty much everywhere. Along the way, Mr. Martin continues to give us new characters, not only including them in the story but featuring them as point-of-view characters. We get each character for a chapter, then jump somewhere far away to check in with the local haps.

I do not think Martin is a bad writer. His prose is generally crisp. Many of his characters are compelling (although few are likable). The books read briskly considering their heroic length. I just wish he’d get on with his story. I feel that I’ve lost track of what that is.

As a thought experiment, imagine The Lord of the Rings—usually acknowledged as the grandfather of epic fantasy—retold in Martin’s style.

The Fellowship of the Ring, I think, changes little. We start perhaps with Bilbo’s view of the party. Or begin (as Tolkien does) by gradually zooming in on Frodo. We might get some Samwise or Meriadoc or Pippin in the flight from the riders and into the Old Forest. Frodo again for the Barrow Downs. Aragorn, probably, for the misadventures in Bree and the hike to Weathertop. Frodo again there, then probably Sam up to Rivendell. We might get Elrond for the grand council, Boromir for Caradhras. Gandalf, almost certainly, for Moria, although you could excuse the Istari from POV duties and stick to Aragorn or Gimli. And so on and so forth until we end, similarly to the original, with Sam finding Frodo at the boats.

The Two Towers…that is where we start to lose it. The surviving members of the Fellowship all get their own chapters. We get one for Eomer, one for Eowyn as she leads the women and children away from Meduseld. Smeagollum gets his own chapter(s). Aragorn and Gimli and Legolas and maybe even Theoden. We get a chapter from Isengard by Saruman, maybe. Or perhaps that one comes from Wormtongue. We interrupt the string of Frodo-Sam-Smeagollum with a chapter from Faramir. (We also mix them all together rather than holding to Tolkien’s Orthanc/Barad Dur split.)

When the War of the Ring really gets rolling in The Return of the King? Can you imagine? We’d get chapters from all the remaining fellowship members. Eomer, Eowyn, maybe Theoden again if we’ve heard from him. Certainly several from Faramir. We’d probably get detailed accounts of battles that are skimmed over, like the ones leading up to Pelennor Fields. We’d hear all about Imrahil of Dol Amroth. If we’re hewing particularly close to Martin’s oeuvre, we likely have at least some politicking about who will lead Gondor. If we embrace epic by addition wholeheartedly, we skip back up to Esgaroth, Dale, and the Lonely Mountain to have a look at how they again fight off an invasion of orcs, and other material from Appendix B. It would almost certainly take two books to deal with it all…

…and it would drown Frodo’s quest. Among all those other momentary protagonists, the struggle of two small hobbits to cross Mordor would be difficult indeed to keep in focus. No matter how exciting it might be moment to moment, no matter how cool the characters, we would not have the same story. That is what bothers me about epic by addition. It muddies the shape of the story. You lose the forest in painstaking descriptions of individual trees.

Build your world. Set your characters loose in it. Don’t try to fill in all the corners.

*Related pet theory: authors hit a dangerous point when, on the covers of their books, their name is bigger than the work’s title. That seems to be about the time editors begin backing off.

Missing Characters

I am juggling a good number of projects right now. Writing cover letters, tweaking resumes, writing for games, thoroughly reworking some old stories to get them ebookified as quickly as possible. It’s all taken time away from my novel (working title “The Fairworth Chronicles”). When I woke up this morning, I missed it. I missed the characters. I keep wondering what they’re up to, what they will be up to when I can get their activities out of my head and onto the page.

Missing fictional people is odd. If they’re other writers’ characters, they’re seldom farther than your bookshelf (or e-reader, if you swing that way). I’ve missed others’ characters sometimes, especially the ones who have grown and changed. Brust’s Vlad Taltos is a fun one to miss, because he’s easy to revisit at various points over his development. The Vlad books are also short enough to plow through one in an afternoon. Zelazny’s Corwin is much the same. Others take more work to visit: Gaiman’s Shadow, Le Guin’s Ged, Chabon’s Kavalier, even Moorcock’s Hawkmoon. They don’t live quite as close to the surface of their stories. (There might be something about first person narration lurking in there, although Gene Wolfe’s Arthur Ormsby is not the easiest to visit in spite of the way he colors the narration of The Knight and The Wizard.) At any rate, even if they don’t live next door, other writer’s characters live on familiar roads, and getting to them is more a matter of time than of work.

Missing your own fictional people is harder. Even if they’ve thoroughly established residence in your head, as Maedoc and Zahra have in mine, getting to them takes work. Oh, sometimes it’s easy. It feels like your characters are sitting right next door, with a full pot of coffee and an extra cup. Usually, though, it’s a cross-country hike. Often it is painfully uphill. Sometimes there are giants at the top, playing you for a pin in a game of downhill boulder bowling.

Regardless, it is exciting to get there. You’re not quite sure what the characters are going to do, whether they’re going to cooperate, whether they’re going take your story and run with it so hard you’ll have to chase it. Or maybe your characters don’t want to run at all. They just want to sit there and leave you feeling very much like you do trying to get your three year-old to put on her shoes so you can go grocery shopping. When it’s been a slog to even get to them, this is inordinately frustrating.

The hard thing is also the cool thing: you don’t know until you get there. That’s what makes missing your own characters more exciting than anything else. There’s risk. We know, all of us, that adventures do not always end happily. We also know that unhappy endings might better resemble a hospital waiting room than a rubble-strewn battlefield. When you miss your own characters and go looking for them, it’s an adventure. That’s the important thing to remember, even if other clutter is blocking your front door. Go out through a window if you have to. The adventure is worth it.

Stories+Tells=???

A story is like the wind: it comes from a far off place, and you feel it.
—proverb of the Kalahari Bushmen (one I first heard from Terry Tempest Williams)

What makes a story? I spent a lot of time as an undergrad trying to answer that question. I read epic poems, novels, myths…I probably should have spent some quality time with Joseph Campbell, but he was so much in the air that I was satisfied with the commonplaces. I read Bakhtin. I tried hard to learn from the “mistakes” of others—mostly the authors we read (and sometimes picked to pieces) in my literature seminars. I worried about how to tell stories right, rather than how to tell stories well. I felt a constant tension between what I knew about reading critically and what I knew about writing.

That tension is especially obvious in my honors project, The Storyteller, for narrator and orchestra. Musically, the piece has all the flaws one could ask of a first orchestral work: it’s over-written, full of bits that muddy the overall sound and make it occasionally impossible to hear the narrator. After hearing the orchestra read-through, it was obvious that I needed to dramatically strip down the score to fit it more smoothly with the text. That text, though? It has some great moments. It also has moments that make me cringe—bits of faux-beatnik and occasional flings with exoticism. I started with the idea of re-parsing epic poems. Now, we’d call it a mashup, but this was the early Aughts and YouTube didn’t exist yet. (One of the earliest images, for example, was Beowulf’s Grendel emerging from the Trojan Horse.) The poem ended up being about storytelling itself, about the anxiety of influence and how hard it felt to tell stories that hadn’t already been told. In my notes and brainstorming, there’s a constant back and forth between the academicism of my references and my desire to write from the gut.

I’m dealing with some of the same questions here: how do I balance commentary and storytelling? I have to remind myself of John Cage’s words: “Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.” In terms of storytelling, writing a blog can be like “writing” a TV reality show. So many of the things that happen every day aren’t that interesting to me, never mind to you. Some interesting things that happen still don’t fit here. This has become particularly true as a few of my posts—notably Of Dreams…—have been distributed around the internet by others. That’s cool. On the other hand, it’s forced me to consider my audience in ways that I hadn’t when planning this blog. How do I keep the analysis out of the creation?

And what makes a story for me, now? I think that the Kalahari proverb is probably the best answer I know. To keep you coming back—and, more importantly, to keep me coming back—I need to write things that we feel. This story, the story of Walking Ledges, isn’t out of its prologue yet. There is so much more to do and to write and to figure out. It is the story of leaving academia, but also the story of a 33 year-old taking a chance on a 16 year-old’s dreams. It’s the story of me letting myself dive back into the world of stories, to think again about how we write and read, how we tell. “Tell” is so much more vital than “write” or “say.” It’s a declaration, but also something that’s not entirely under one’s own control. A tell at the poker table is the unintentional betrayal of a secret. Good stories are the same way. They hint at secrets, tell us more than their plots and words do. I hope that the tells here will be worthwhile for all of us.

I could have picked a few different lines from The Storyteller to close with, but this is one from the middle of the piece that I particularly like:

“Tell the wind. Tell games. Tell journeys. Tell motion and tell the future. Never tell emptiness.”

You can find my honors project in the Macalester College library in St. Paul, Minnesota (http://macalester.worldcat.org/title/storyteller/oclc/52113087).
I’ve added the complete poetic text to the new “Works” page. 

Good Wil Wheaton

I struggled with many questions. Was I ready to admit defeat? Was I ready to admit that I’d given it my best shot, but I really was a washed up has-been? Was I willing to say out loud that I was . . . That Guy?
—Wil Wheaton. Just a Geek (Kindle Locations 3050-3052)

That passage comes near the end of Wheaton’s Just a Geek, as he ponders accepting the infomercial job that would, he believed, kill the acting career he’d been chasing since childhood. He needs the money. His family needs the money. That struggle—between dreams and realities—is the constant, beautiful thread through Wheaton’s book. A mixture of reflections and selections from the original wilwheaton.net, Just a Geek is a Bildungsroman without the “roman,” a story about a grownup working hard at growing. Wheaton’s got a remarkable ability to take his raw early blog posts and turn them into the foundation for a compelling narrative of what Neil Gaiman calls “creat[ing] his own second act.”

I have a lot of future blog posts penciled in about my favorite writers, about what they’ve meant to me and why I admire their writing and storytelling. Wil Wheaton is not exactly one of my favorite writers, but I don’t think I’d be doing this blog without Just a Geek. I stumbled across it in a Humble Bundle shortly after I received my last batch of rejection letters for academic jobs. It was the first book in the bundle I read, and I devoured it in one of those clock-defying binges word-lovers know well.

The book works for many reasons, but I think the vital one is Wheaton’s ability to get through the heaviest moments with a light touch that isn’t simply crying coming back around to laughter. There’s funny throughout the book, don’t get me wrong. But when Wheaton (I’m still too much an academic to call him ‘Wil’) talks about the bad times, he doesn’t let himself become self-indulgent. He’s unflinchingly self-critical and leavens stories of his past self-indulgence with gentle self-mockery. He lets us know how bad things were without just telling us how bad things were. All of this is a fancy way of saying that I liked the book as a book, even if it fell my way because Wheaton has carved himself out a space as a geek culture hero.

I’m posting about it, though, because it’s as close as anything is ever likely to get to the intersection of my two previous posts. I didn’t have anything like Stand by Me or Star Trek: The Next Generation in my background to “live up to” or “grow beyond,” but I did have 30 years of people telling me I was awesome and could be whatever I wanted to be. I was really good at school. I paid attention to my work and, whether in front of a keyboard or a classroom full of undergrads, I believed I belonged. I had a long way to go, but I knew my craft and consistently worked to improve it. I was supposed to be serious business.

Of course, all of my friends were also serious business. The bigger problem was that institutions of higher learning were even more serious about conducting a certain kind of business. They didn’t want me for that one. As with Wheaton’s string of unsuccessful auditions, good work was an imperfect defense against rejection. After my lightning read through Just a Geek, one of the anecdotes that stuck with me was Wheaton’s story of meeting Sean Astin at an audition. They’d been friends but fallen out of touch, and they happily caught up with each other in the waiting room. And they were competing for the same job. Neither of them got it. Welcome to every academic conference in the fall hiring season. No matter how happy you are to see your friends, you’re all on the hustle to meet the right people, try and be memorable (good memorable!) to anybody who might be on a hiring committee or a reviewer for a journal. There’s no more money in being an underemployed academic than an underemployed actor.

Wheaton took the infomercial job. He put his family ahead of the ambitions that had led him to quit TNG in the first place. That dream had stalled out, and he had others that were going somewhere. Slowly, through his writing, he was finding other ways to be the person he wanted to be. And as this was happening, he was also finally coming to terms with what TNG meant to him. He allowed himself to be comfortable with it, to take joy in the friends he’d made and the work he’d done. He let himself geek out about the things he wanted to geek out about. That’s worked pretty well for him—in the nine years since Just a Geek came out, he’s been featured everywhere from The Big Bang Theory to The Guild to more webcomics than I can count. He’s become that guy, but not the one he dreaded when he pondered that infomercial.

I knew him as that guy when I read Just a Geek, but it didn’t matter as much as it should have. It was easy to put Wheaton’s subsequent success aside and see the reality of his struggles. That is why the book means something to me, something important. I don’t feel like my struggles are so different as I let go of something I’ve wanted for years to keep my family fed and housed, to do the things I feel I should be doing. I didn’t need Wil Wheaton’s permission to do this, and there isn’t anything in Just a Geek that says “go out and make art.” It isn’t a self-consciously “inspirational” book, which is what makes it inspiring.

Trouble shared is trouble diminished. Reading about Wil’s struggles (and here I’ll break tone and go to the first name), knowing what he’s accomplished since—it made the darkness a little less dark. So thank you, Wil Wheaton, for writing a book that’s meaningful for me, for coming to peace with Star Trek, for sending Aeofel into a pit of acid in the name of role-playing. Thank you.

You can keep up to date on Wil Wheaton’s geek career at http://wilwheaton.net. If you’re interested in his more formal writing, you can find his digital works—including Just a Geek—at http://wilwheatonbooks.com/. Go check it out. 

Heimweh (On Writing and Place)

You can be a little ungrammatical if you come from the right part of the country.
          —Robert Frost

When I was 16, I had lived in two houses, one of them for fifteen years. By the time I was 25, I had lived in three dorms, three basements, four apartments, and—briefly—on a porch. Then I managed to live in one apartment in North Minneapolis for seven years. In that apartment, I started and finished a PhD, spent sleepless nights with two infants and watched them grow. I cooked a lot of meals in the kitchen with the floral-print wallpaper. Yesterday, I put the fourth set of license plates on my trusty, rusty Dodge: Texas (following, from most recent to oldest: Minnesota, Ohio and Idaho). For the first time in a long while, I’m a newcomer.

Place grounds writing. It might allow you, as Frost suggests, to be “a little ungrammatical.” Even a few generations into mass media’s flattening of regional accents, changing places changes the sounds of the language around you. (Never mind moving far enough to land in a different language.) If, like me, you write fiction, you have to pay attention to dialogue. The story of a torrid Miami Beach affair should not feature the linguistic cadences and quirks of North Dakota.

Writing and place intersect in more profound ways than dialect, though. The intersection is also about landscapes—the real and the imaginary. When I moved from Idaho to Wales, my stories filled up with fragile cliffs and dramatic tides. In Minnesota, I was suddenly writing about trees a lot more. Summit Avenue in St. Paul is lined with wonderfully big, old trees, and they seeped into my work. Characters climbed trees, or stared at them, or marked out the seasons by their leaves. I wrote about snow, of course, and snow still occupies a prominent place in my mind, the way it can be a blanket, an obstacle, a coat of paint…

Imaginary landscapes are just as important—in high school, I went to a writing workshop in the same part of Idaho that Hemingway had once called home. That mattered just as much as the dry hills and hidden streams. Summit Avenue? It had big, old, expensive houses to go along with the big, old, trees, especially going up towards the Cathedral. It was the place where F. Scott Fitzgerald grew up, and what led to much of his bitterness about the rich. The Idaho of my youth was all sage brush and cowboys. I knew a few when I was a kid, old hands who’d been on horses since the Jazz Age was happening on the other side of the country. Sometimes it felt like there were more animals around than people. In Wales, it was not hard to populate the fog and the rolling hills with bits of Arthurian legend or the Mabinogion, to read omens into the flight of a crow. Places wear their stories.

So that’s one way writing ties to place: it supplies you with a mental geography. There’s another thing, though, that has really affected my writing over the years: the places I actually do it. I’ve done a lot of writing in coffee shops. True to type, right? But coffee shops are all a bit different. In Bowling Green there’s a combined coffee shop and used book store called Grounds for Thought. They do their own roasting and the coffee is great. Working there usually combined the best aspects of coffee shops and libraries. It was pretty quiet, there were books all around, the light wasn’t too bad…and, like I said, great coffee. There was another coffee shop, though, whose name I’ve forgotten. It was a few blocks closer to my apartment. The coffee wasn’t as good. The lights were brighter than I liked. Usually, there was Christian Rock playing too loud, too. There were times when I needed to go there to work, even though I didn’t “like” it as much as Grounds for Thought. I needed a place that was a bit abrasive to force me to focus. The distractions were just unpleasant enough to make me shut them out. I composed a lot of music in that coffee shop.

I wrote most of my dissertation in two Minneapolis coffee shops a few blocks apart. Sometimes the shops’ hours would decide which one I went to, other times I’d decide on the painfully mundane basis of whether I wanted better coffee or better pastries. (Once in a great while, I could legitimately base my decision on picking the coffee shop with the faster wi-fi.) Over the years, those two coffee shops became almost too familiar for me, and I had to cast further afield to find the right place to write. In the last phases of my dissertation, I’d bike across the river and down towards campus, spending the whole day writing and revising in a coffee shop that I don’t think I ever visited recreationally.

How does all this tie into the post’s title? Heimweh is the German word for homesickness. “Heim” translates to its cognate “home” pretty smoothly, but “weh” is less about illness than about ache. “Heimweh” is as much nostalgia (which has its linguistic roots in the pain of coming home) as it is homesickness. I’ve been feeling a lot of that with the move to Texas. I miss my old haunts, miss my old real and imaginary landscapes. When December comes and there’s no snow on the ground, I expect to be jealous of my friends in Minnesota complaining about windchill and snow emergencies. Thinking about where I am now, I cannot help thinking about all the places I’ve been before. When I get tired—especially when the things that have worn me out are the hassles inherent in 1200 miles’ worth of relocation—I just want to be back there with my familiar joys and concerns.

In the last few days, though, launching this blog and committing myself to writing, I’ve remembered something: from my earliest days as an aspiring writer, I’ve always written on trips. That’s the flip side to Heimweh, Fernweh—the ache to be traveling. (“Wanderlust” can also be translated to and from German as…”Wanderlust.”) The first big text I completed was a travelogue of my adventures taking trains through Europe. Even on shorter, busier trips, I usually keep a notebook and jot things down in it.  An academic conference in New Orleans, for example, inspired key points of the novel I’m writing. Even though there’s cliche in the thought, Texas is a big place. It’s not precisely another country, but it likes to think of itself as one. Along with the Heimweh comes the opportunity to explore this new landscape, to write in new places…and to find new favorite coffee shops.

I think I’ll get by.

What about you, my pioneering handful of readers? Any thoughts to share on how place has affected the content of your work? Or the process of creating it?

If You Build It…

“If you build it, they will come.”

The whispers of Kevin Costner’s cornfield ghosts are not pearls of secret wisdom: if you build it, they might come. They might not. Especially if you don’t tell anybody about it. To get to the truth in those whispers, season them with some negatives: if you don’t build it, they can’t come. You will never get anything published if you do not complete your manuscript. You will never get in better shape without actually doing the exercise.

All the to-do lists in the world won’t change that.

Seventeen years ago, in a rental car somewhere in Appalachia, I told my grandmother I wanted to be a writer. That was my plan. I went to college with that plan, happy to be an English major and mix creative writing with literature courses. I wrote for the school weekly. I put (my) poems up on the wall outside my dorm room. I wore a lot of black.

And then I signed up for a second semester of music theory to secure reduced-price trombone lessons. Even though I kept wearing black, I was soon spending most of my time in the music department. I still took my English courses, and I still enjoyed them. The intersection between words and music fascinated me. I concocted an honors project that involved writing a piece for orchestra, accompanied by a longish narrative poem. I hadn’t given up on being a writer, but I was busy being a composer.

If I had been a little less confident in my writing, things might have been different. As it was, I convinced myself that pursuing graduate work in English was wrong. I hated picking apart literary works; it felt like vivisecting a bird and being dismayed that it no longer flew. I did not think I would get much from an MFA beyond the time to simply write. (Never mind that I was and continue to be interested in the kind of writing usually dismissed as genre fiction, which was not exactly popular in the academy.) No, if I was going to learn something, it would be by pursuing further study in music composition.

That lasted about six weeks. I missed writing papers. I found the pragmatic questions composers asked about music shallow. (I was 22. I thought a lot of things were shallow.) I switched from composition to a dual degree in composition and music history. I got to write papers again. I got to research the esoteric questions that interested me. Meanwhile, I kept composing. I wrote some music that I still like almost ten years later. I was not writing a lot of prose, though, and poetry had pretty much fallen out of my life until I had to concoct a libretto for my thesis composition. By the time I started my doctorate, my work was about performance and theory and sociology, not about words.

I became a scholar, and that conversation in the rental car fell away.

I have spent most of the last seven years of my life taking care of my kids and working on a Ph.D. in musicology. The former gave me perspective on the latter. Maybe a little too much perspective, because I could not make myself obsessed with my research. (I eventually managed to foster an obsession with getting it done, which proved much more fruitful.)

The writing never went away, not really. I’ve written constantly for games, started but not finished a pair of novels, and continued to live with words. Academics live with words a bit differently, but I think that I am mostly finished with being an academic. I’m ready to get back to writing, really writing…writing the stories I care about, the poems that catch in my mind’s ear, about the way that favorite authors have kept me going.

So here I am trying to build something. Thanks for coming. I hope I do my job well enough to draw you back.