Lazy days in Billionville...
Little time remains...
In just over two weeks--either on the 9th or the 10th--I'll hop into my Honda and make the 600-mile, four-state solo drive from Milledgeville to Baton Rouge. Needless to say, aside from the travel itself, I'm very much excited to get out of town. The weeks following spring break have been and always will be the pits. April, I suppose, is indeed the cruelest month. Thankfully, not too much stands between me and the end.
For Prose Forms & Theory, my final assignment is to compose an apologia--that is, a justification for my becoming a writer. While this seemed to me an easy task--easier than, say, actually writing a short story--my presumptions proved dead wrong. As usual, I stumbled with the beginning stages, and spent three days writing and deleting and re-writing and re-deleting before I finally managed to get myself going. My troubles, I finally realized, were rooted in my vain attempts to identify influences and chart a literary path between my childhood and the present. Then it dawned on me that such an avenue did not exist. And so I've written an apologia in which I divulge the ugly secrets of my past--a youth wasted under the anesthetizing spell of the television, an academic career by and large spoiled by the tragic flaw of my laziness. To say the least, working through this has been an interesting experience, a process not unlike self-performed psychotherapy.
Without hesitation, I can appraise my life and see that its great changes all came at the hands of good luck and happenstance: had it not been for Betty Moss' fleeting comment that I might like LSU, I would've never thought to apply; had Randolph Thomas not informed of the MFA's very existence, I wouldn't be living in Milledgeville, trying to write short stories. These examples, of course, are few (another that bears mentioning is that I wasn't planning on rushing a fraternity until, weeks before my college departure, my mother, assuming the contrary, took me to Stein-Mart and bought me some nice new clothes), but you get the picture. I don't know whether my chance-life is at all unique or even worth thinking about, but it struck me as a pretty odd and somewhat irritating.
Anyhow, here's the end of my apologia:
Again, there exist many reasons for my not becoming a writer. Though I will soon be armed with the requisite education and training to call myself one, my prospects are none-too-hopeful. In an article from January of 2009, the New York Times reported that the population of American fiction writers exceeds that of American fiction readers. Downturns in the economy have forced publishing houses both large and small to impose harsh limits on the number of books they print, and people all over this country still live and die by the ads and pretty faces on primetime T.V. At AWP Chicago, I found myself in the company of over 6,000 fellow writers, all of whom were anxious to make a name for themselves, perhaps less than fifty of whom that had.
So why become a writer?
My answer is simple: When I was twenty years old, I took a fiction class and read a short story by a man from a different time and a different country. Though the writer was famous, I knew nothing of his work, and had no concept of his importance. The experiences of which he had written were not ones that I could claim for myself, nor could I relate to them directly. But by the time I reached the end of his piece, I felt shooting pains in my arms and my legs and found myself reflexively muttering, “Oh my God. Oh my god.” He wrote this story because he wanted to relate something truthful about all of life and human emotion. He wrote and re-wrote this story until it was so good that fifty years later, a boy in a classroom in Baton Rouge could read it and feel a burst of emotions so new and so profound that he saw, then and there, that if he too could craft a story like this just once in his life, then his life would not be wasted.
This is why I write.
In just over two weeks--either on the 9th or the 10th--I'll hop into my Honda and make the 600-mile, four-state solo drive from Milledgeville to Baton Rouge. Needless to say, aside from the travel itself, I'm very much excited to get out of town. The weeks following spring break have been and always will be the pits. April, I suppose, is indeed the cruelest month. Thankfully, not too much stands between me and the end.
For Prose Forms & Theory, my final assignment is to compose an apologia--that is, a justification for my becoming a writer. While this seemed to me an easy task--easier than, say, actually writing a short story--my presumptions proved dead wrong. As usual, I stumbled with the beginning stages, and spent three days writing and deleting and re-writing and re-deleting before I finally managed to get myself going. My troubles, I finally realized, were rooted in my vain attempts to identify influences and chart a literary path between my childhood and the present. Then it dawned on me that such an avenue did not exist. And so I've written an apologia in which I divulge the ugly secrets of my past--a youth wasted under the anesthetizing spell of the television, an academic career by and large spoiled by the tragic flaw of my laziness. To say the least, working through this has been an interesting experience, a process not unlike self-performed psychotherapy.
Without hesitation, I can appraise my life and see that its great changes all came at the hands of good luck and happenstance: had it not been for Betty Moss' fleeting comment that I might like LSU, I would've never thought to apply; had Randolph Thomas not informed of the MFA's very existence, I wouldn't be living in Milledgeville, trying to write short stories. These examples, of course, are few (another that bears mentioning is that I wasn't planning on rushing a fraternity until, weeks before my college departure, my mother, assuming the contrary, took me to Stein-Mart and bought me some nice new clothes), but you get the picture. I don't know whether my chance-life is at all unique or even worth thinking about, but it struck me as a pretty odd and somewhat irritating.
Anyhow, here's the end of my apologia:
Again, there exist many reasons for my not becoming a writer. Though I will soon be armed with the requisite education and training to call myself one, my prospects are none-too-hopeful. In an article from January of 2009, the New York Times reported that the population of American fiction writers exceeds that of American fiction readers. Downturns in the economy have forced publishing houses both large and small to impose harsh limits on the number of books they print, and people all over this country still live and die by the ads and pretty faces on primetime T.V. At AWP Chicago, I found myself in the company of over 6,000 fellow writers, all of whom were anxious to make a name for themselves, perhaps less than fifty of whom that had.
So why become a writer?
My answer is simple: When I was twenty years old, I took a fiction class and read a short story by a man from a different time and a different country. Though the writer was famous, I knew nothing of his work, and had no concept of his importance. The experiences of which he had written were not ones that I could claim for myself, nor could I relate to them directly. But by the time I reached the end of his piece, I felt shooting pains in my arms and my legs and found myself reflexively muttering, “Oh my God. Oh my god.” He wrote this story because he wanted to relate something truthful about all of life and human emotion. He wrote and re-wrote this story until it was so good that fifty years later, a boy in a classroom in Baton Rouge could read it and feel a burst of emotions so new and so profound that he saw, then and there, that if he too could craft a story like this just once in his life, then his life would not be wasted.
This is why I write.