Or One Guy’s Seven-Year Journey as a Mule

I was recently asked to speak to a writing class about my book, which gave me the chance to reflect on what’s worked for me, and since I sometimes get emails asking for general advice, I thought it might be useful to share a little of my experience. I’m entirely aware that by posting this, having finished only 97% of the book, I am seriously tempting fate and derision. But this will fuel me through the last 3%. Pride’s a useful motivator.

Fill the Well
I spend a lot of time on the Internet, for work and for not-work, clicking from one shiny object to the next, and I invariably walk away from the computer feeling dazed and stupid. I can think of maybe a handful of movies that fuel me creatively. Often, the theater. The last season of Breaking Bad. But nothing fuels me like reading, and by reading I mean books. Sometimes all it takes is a page or two to fill me with the courage to return to my own imperfect, unfinished story. Do more of whatever fills your well and less of everything else. Guard the well from celebrity gossip sites, shiny objects, and Facebook barbarians.

No, Really
Another plug for books but from a crankier angle. Expecting people to read your writing when you can’t be bothered to read other people’s books is just plain rude. Read a lot, of everything. Otherwise you’ll go years operating under the delusion that everything you write is brilliant and original and destined to be turned into a four-film franchise starring Daniel Radcliffe and Meryl Streep.

Your Muse is a Flake
Waiting around for inspiration will never get you to the end of your book. Some of my best writing came only after I forced myself to sit at the computer and endure for an hour the thick, fuzzy-headed despair of having nothing in the world to say.

Don’t Wait for the Shack
I once read an interview with a well-known writer who leaves his house every morning, walks a hundred yards to a little redwood shack on the far corner of his wooded property, and spends the next eight hours undisturbed, writing and sipping tea from his lucky mug while the occasional acorn falls on the roof overhead. Oh, how I want that shack. I have no shack. I’ve been working on this book for seven years. For one year, when I had more money, I rented a private office. But I also wrote at home, in bed, at my desk, and on the couch. I wrote on my husband’s couch, on a chair passed down from his grandfather, and in the basement of his shop. I wrote in a tiny Manhattan apartment with a view of an airshaft. I wrote in three different rooms at the Columbia University library and a public library at the Jersey Shore. I wrote at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, Jumpin’ Java, Cafe Flore, and a dozen other coffee shops. I wrote on airplanes and in two different borrowed houses in Palm Springs. I wrote at every job I’ve ever had. You may have a fantasy shack, too, somewhere in your future, but what are you going to do in the meantime?

Your Portable Pal
Carry a little notebook, or your iPhone, a place to scrawl the words, ideas, and sentences that you’ll otherwise forget. No, you won’t remember.

Swallow Your Pride
I was a coward in college, afraid to commit myself to literature, and I chose instead the wildly practical major of sociology. I spent the next ten years feeling insecure about my education, and still it wasn’t until I got into Columbia’s MFA program that I began to see just how little I knew. Workshops and peer feedback can be valuable, but having someone take me through 100 books, page by page, sometimes sentence by sentence, and show me how each writer put together a story, was the single best thing I’ve done for myself as a writer. You don’t need to commit yourself to a Master’s degree. Take an extension class. Download a lecture from Yale. There’s no shame in being taught, and those who tell you otherwise are idiots.

Join a Cabal
The greatest unexpected benefit to grad school was the little group of writers from my program who landed here in the Bay Area after graduation, a group I still meet with every month, over five years later. We started out as a book club (first selection: Madame Bovary), but then one day my husband referred to the group as “your little cabal,” and it stuck. We exchange work, gossip, job leads, literary agent horror stories, and the occasional awesome news of a book deal. We also talk about Downton Abbey, Battlestar Galactica, and eat a lot of Salt and Pepper Kettle chips with french onion dip. They danced at my wedding, and I’d be lost without them. Again, you don’t need an MFA program for this. Find writers through workshops, local lit organizations, or Craigslist.

Be Accountable
Writing is a pain in the ass. The beautiful story you imagine in your head, by the time you get it on the page, is a pale monstrosity. You will want to do anything in the world but the thing you most need to do. You will wash the dishes. You will vacuum every room in your house. You will cut your toenails and then vacuum some more. Unless you are in school or are an incredibly important author with a publishing house editor waiting for your next chapter with bated breath, you’ll need to create your own deadlines. Form a cabal. Find one friend. Exchange work.

Be an Ass
Despite what the world thinks, talent only takes you so far. Only the mule-headed endure.

Everybody Hurts
I did research in the Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books division of the New York Public Library, where I went through old correspondence files from The New Yorker, and learned that the magazine rejected every single famous writer you could think of many, many times. It doesn’t matter who you are. You will be rejected. Be a mule.

Let It Brew
I have a friend, a well-respected author with three novels under his belt, who hates revision. He works by slowly moving forward, perfecting each sentence as he goes along. I can’t work that way. My first drafts are hideous. I don’t know what I think or how I feel about something until I start writing about it, and even then it takes time, sometimes a few weeks, or months, or years, till I get at the truest insight possible. I have to let each chapter sit, like a tea bag in a cup of hot water, letting it steep, stirring it around seventeen or eighteen times, doctoring it with milk and low-calorie sweetener, or, fine, yes, actual real sugar if it’s the only thing in the house, till it’s right.

It Matters
I routinely forget to follow my own suggestions, but eventually I remember. If you’re plugged into contemporary culture (and what 21st Century writer isn’t?), you will frequently fall into black despair over the future of books. Our fragmenting attention spans. The publishing industry death spiral. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills.

But listen. Writing still matters. To a lot of people. There will always be readers who want to get lost in a story, learn about other places, or step inside the skin of a total stranger. Readers willing to have their minds changed and their hearts broken. Readers quietly thrilled by beautiful language. Readers who find, within the pages of a book, a voice that articulates the things they’ve always felt but could never express. Readers who feel, at the end of a book, less alone in their fears and mistakes. I can’t list all the reasons why people read books, or why literature is important, because there’s too many of them, and most of the fun is figuring out, book by book, your own reasons. Why you need to read, and why you need to write.

Writers, or their egos, tend towards fragility. The making of art seems to require that kind of sensitivity, or oversensitivity, depending on your perspective. Certainly our significant others may wish, now and then, that our skins were just a tiny bit thicker. But it we had thick skins we might not be driven to reconcile ourselves to life through art. We suffer, suffer I tell you! And so do our gay lovers.

Part of that fragility is the occupational envy of our peers’ successes. Nothing draws out our knives quicker than a popular and successful friend. There’s the universal thrill of schadenfreude, of course. But beyond that is the simple and pervasive fear of declining resources. Accurately or not, writers operate under the assumption that there are only so many enormous book advances, grants, and medals to go around. And one little precocious Jonathan Safran Foer, snapping up the lion’s share of the literary world’s love just a year or two out of Princeton, can set our collective teeth on edge for months and years to come.

The internet is fertile ground for schadenfreude, and I myself fall prey to this fragility all the time, gleefully clicking from one snarky book review to the next, leaving the computer after these sessions feeling bloated and nauseous. But in one area of my life, the area in which I expected my skin to stretch the thinnest, I’ve somehow developed a strange case of generosity.

I’m talking about my fellow students in the MFA program at Columbia, particularly in the nonfiction genre, where I concentrated. Two years have passed since I left New York, and word of my peers’ book deals and publications keep trickling back to me, and yet I have greeted the news without that familiar fear taking root within me. Instead their success has only given me greater hope, faith almost, that my own book will somehow find a place in the world.

Much of this is due to my familiarity with the authors themselves, all of them quite lovely people. Last week I attended a book reading and signing by my buddy Dan White (no relation to Harvey Milk’s assassin, as far as I know) whose book was published last year, a book that I was lucky enough to read in early draft form in workshop. Dan’s generosity and self-deprecating humor naturally deflect writer’s envy. And he made it even harder to dislike him by bringing to the reading an element of show-and-tell, complete with his trail fanny pack, scanned copies of his crazy journal, and an annotated map of the Pacific Crest Trail, complete with little paper ticks glued to the spot in Southern California where they feasted on him and his then-girlfriend.

Of course I indulged in moments of true selfishness during his reading, imagining myself up there in his place, reading from an actual bound copy of my book, fielding questions from an attentive, bordering-on-adoring audience. Sue me.

But indulging these fantasies during the creative process is dangerous. Thinking too much about the book’s reception, rather than the craft of the book itself, can pretty much guarantee artistic failure.

So last week with the Manly Fireplug I imposed a moratorium. No more talking about the book’s future. No more speculations on how it will be received, or if any doors would open for me after its publication. I took it one step further, into reality,  insinuating that he might end up with a husband trapped in literary obscurity for the rest of his life. For some reason he stuck his ground.

I’m mulling these issues because I promised myself that I would finish a rough draft of the book by the end of the year. The first draft is utter and complete torture for me, and so abysmal in quality that I would rather upload my “Should Have Put a Ring on It” dance routine to YouTube, than show anyone my rough draft.

Plus I’m kind of difficult to deal with when I’m in first draft mode, so the Fireplug deserves a break. Luckily I’m on track to meet the deadline.

I realized recently that I’ve made countless references to the book, but I don’t know if I’ve ever actually described it. And summing up my four hundred-page labor of love/hate in a couple of pithy sentences makes my skin crawl. But I’ll say this much:

It’s a memoir about my family, spanning twenty years, from when both of my parents came out of the closet, up until my mother’s death in 2002. It follows my family as it fractures and divides and takes new shape, as each of my parents end up settling down with same-sex partners who themselves were also previously married, with kids. It describes the fall-out of these events on me, who eventually also came out, and my brother, who turned out straight, and became, in more ways than one, the black sheep. You know, basically the story of your modern all-American family.

And as I work my way, in the rough draft, through the year 2000, arguably the worst year of my life, I fall prey to all kinds of fears. That I won’t be able to write about some events with enough distance to turn them into art. That it will sound like an undigested therapy session. That it’s all one big boring cliché and that (the worst fear of all) I will write a mediocre book. Not a bad one. A mediocre one.

This neurotic energy often greets the Fireplug when he comes home from a long day at the barbershop. Which is why I like to finish writing in time to make us a decent meal, so that for a few minutes I can feel the satisfaction of a finished creation. Which means bye for now – I have a date with a steak and a bunch of arugula.

This week marks the seventh anniversary of my blog. I do like the number seven, and I can say with all sincerity that dogpoet has made my life much richer, if also more, well, complicated. And I mean that in the best possible way.

Since the anniversary always falls at the end of the year, it usually finds me in a state of reflection. Or more reflection. If that were even possible. And as another year comes to a close I feel the urge to do something with all of the questionable wisdom I’ve accumulated, besides sling drinks part-time.

I’m in the early planning stages for a private writing workshop to be held in 2009. I’ll be drawing upon my own experiences as a writer, as well as my experiences with the MFA program at Columbia University, as I design the curriculum. The workshop will focus mainly on the memoir genre, though writers wanting to work in fiction or other genres are more than welcome. All levels of experience are encouraged. Click here for more details.

If you live in the Bay Area and are interested in the workshop, send me an email. I will be working out the details as I get a sense of participants’ schedules and goals. Feel free to spread the word to anyone who might be interested.

And since it looks like I will be reading again at a public event in February, I’m compiling an email list for those who’d like to be informed of such events. You can send me an email as well. I will only share your address with some close friends in Nigeria.

Fair warning: if you come to a reading and heckle me the Manly Fireplug will cut you.  Everyone else will get birthday cake. Or virtual birthday cake. We’re in a recession.

This past summer I was fortunate enough to catch my friend Yen Tan’s new movie, Ciao, at the Castro Theater during the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival. And though I had rock-star seats, sitting with the director, Jeff, and the Manly Fireplug in the center of the packed house, we later lost Yen to the adoring crowd of film fans and media, for good reason.

It’s a wonderfully funny and bittersweet story, and if you’re in San Francisco or Berkeley you can catch the movie again during its theatrical release. Screening times and locations here, along with a listing of upcoming cities.

And as long as I’m whoring out one friend, let me do another. My buddy Dan White, who went through the Columbia MFA program with me, and with whom I had a couple of workshops, had his amazingly funny and poignant book, The Cactus Eaters: How I Lost My Mind and Almost Found Myself on the Pacific Crest Trail published recently, to much acclaim. And all of it is deserved. Imagine if Woody Allen and a reluctant Diane Keaton got lost hiking, and you’ll get close to the exuberant, neurotic energy of the book. I always looked forward to reading Dan’s workshop submissions, which should tell you something, considering all of the submissions we had to read during those two years.

He’ll be appearing at the Mission Bay Branch of the SF Public Library tomorrow, December 10th, 6:30 pm.

Last night for dinner I made black bean chili and cornbread for the first time ever, and since asparagus was on sale at the grocery store, I pan-fried some for a side. The Manly Fireplug raved about the meal while shoveling down the chili. I’m always surprised when I cook something that turns out well, since I never did much cooking before I met the Fireplug, aside from boiling some pasta. Neither of my parents cooked all that well, and so I’m teaching myself as I go along, with a couple of cookbooks for direction and more than a few mistakes under my belt. Cooking for two is far more pleasurable than cooking for one, and it satisfies something inside me, to give that to him, and to surprise myself now and then with a good meal.

I’ve been reading The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, one of those hard-to-classify books that I might never have read if I hadn’t stumbled across a profile on the author, Lewis Hyde, in the Times, and read the book’s praises by David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem, and Margaret Atwood.  Essentially the first half of the book explores a few dozen cultures, throughout history, that are gift economies rather than marketplace economies. The second half of the book explores how the creation of art parallels these cultures, and explains why art cannot be given its proper due in a culture “increasingly governed by money and overrun by commodities.” The book opens with a quote by Joseph Conrad, which summarizes his argument:

“The artist appeals to that part of our being…which is a gift and not an acquisition – and, therefore, more permanently enduring.”

He uses Walt Whitman, along with Ezra Pound, as examples of artists who viewed their own creations as gifts to a community larger than themselves. And this quote, which also draws from some of Whitman’s diaries, moved me:

“There is a spiritual path in which the soul ascends in isolation, abandoning all creatures. But this was not the path for Whitman, so hungry for affection and so present in his body. As he grew older Whitman did in fact find a form for his ‘adhesive nature:’ he managed a series of long-lasting, basically paternal relationships with younger men, Doyle being one of them. But to judge from his letters, he wanted more. He wanted to ‘work and live together’ with a man; he wanted to ‘get a good room or two in some quiet place…and…live together.’ He never got it. When he presents himself to the world as ‘like some perfect tree,’ we will be right, therefore, to feel a touch of perfection’s loneliness.”

By reading this I am made more aware of my good fortune, that I have found such a companion. The Fireplug’s favorite story of mine is The Danger of a Twelve-Year Old Girl, which makes sense because the story is pretty much all about him, and since even the Fireplug admits that he can be a tad self-centered. When I reread the story now, however, I am struck by something: that we no longer “teeter at the brink of break-up on a weekly basis.” Something over time has changed, the Manly Fireplug has we both have stopped resisting, and we have settled into something far more comforting.

Even before Prop 8 we had agreed on a long slow engagement, as we still don’t even live together. The insanity of San Francisco real estate throws up a minor obstacle to that goal, though we are headed in that direction, towards that room or two in a quiet place, or at least in one of those sleepy, far-flung, less expensive neighborhoods.

And after we’ve moved in together and measured again our happiness, then we can plan a wedding, which I hope, by that time, will be legal. Obviously I’m driven by a selfish motivation to fight for our civil rights, for how much sweeter will that wedding be, knowing that we in some small part, along with our friends, made it happen?

But my own wedding plans aren’t the sole motivation. I want to fight for something that we can give to each other, and to those who will come after us. I guess it’s as close to a reason I have for keeping this blog for so long. It’s not self-expression I’m after, so much as a desire to give something to others, to give back to the brotherhood that came before me and paved the way, to hopefully make others feel a little less lonely. A lofty ambition, sure, but false modesty won’t do.

I’ll be attending that Town Hall meeting tonight on Marriage Equality and will post an update tomorrow with notes from the discussion. The Fireplug, who works late tonight, will eat leftovers.

The more I’ve worked on the memoir, the less energy I’ve put into this blog. Which makes sense to me. Less clear is why I’ve kept the blog sputtering along on a quarter tank of gas for the last couple of years.

I suppose it’s a combination of motives: stubbornness, of course. Optimism that I might find within myself more energy than I’ve shown. And, worst of all, my grudging acceptance of the conventional wisdom that today all writers (or all artists, or pundits, or fourth-graders) need to maintain a “web presence,” a marketing tool, an idea that wasn’t around over six years ago, when I started this thing.

Back then different motives drove me: the need to start writing again after a long dry spell, the need to document the last couple months of my mother’s life, the desire for approval, and the yearning to connect to what used to feel like an underground community of freaks.

Around the time that people started throwing up blogs featuring nothing but photos of half-naked boys, blogging went from something I loved to do, to something I felt obligated to do. A total snob I sometimes am. Unwilling to pull the plug, however, I need a different motivation.

Over Christmas, in the long lazy hours at my father’s Palm Springs condo, I picked up a copy of Newsweek with a cover story on Amazon’s Kindle– the new digital “reading device.” I belong to the camp that can’t imagine an expensive piece of plastic holding the same allure as a bound book. But I can acknowledge that times change.

But the section of the article that most disturbed me was about the ways in which technology could, or would, change the very nature of reading and writing. The article quoted a guy who heads the Institute for the Future of the Book (paging George Orwell…):

Stein sees larger implications for authors—some of them sobering for traditionalists. “Here’s what I don’t know,” he says. “What happens to the idea of a writer going off to a quiet place, ingesting information and synthesizing that into 300 pages of content that’s uniquely his?” His implication is that that intricate process may go the way of the leather bookmark, as the notion of author as authoritarian figure gives way to a Web 2.0 wisdom-of-the-crowds process. “The idea of authorship will change and become more of a process than a product,” says Ben Vershbow, associate director of the institute.

This is already happening on the Web. Instead of retreating to a cork-lined room to do their work, authors like Chris Anderson, John Battelle (“The Search”) and NYU professor Mitchell Stephens (a book about religious belief, in progress) have written their books with the benefit of feedback and contributions from a community centered on their blogs.

“The possibility of interaction will redefine authorship,” says Peter Brantley, executive director of the Digital Library Federation, an association of libraries and institutions. Unlike some writing-in-public advocates, he doesn’t spare the novelists. “Michael Chabon will have to rethink how he writes for this medium,” he says. Brantley envisions wiki-style collaborations where the author, instead of being the sole authority, is a “superuser,” the lead wolf of a creative pack.

An-ever updated book, written by a thousand keyboards. I couldn’t help imagine picking up a copy of Lolita, only to see Nabokov pecked to death by a thousand earnest voices. Not to sound too dramatic (too late, I know) but what a fucking loss that would be.

When I read a book I want to dive down into a world, or a consciousness, and listen to just one voice tell a story. I want to absorb just one person’s insights. I want to stay, listening to that story, and that voice, without interruption, for more than two minutes at a time. The thought of that one voice interrupted by a thousand others disturbs me to no end. But I’m not sure I buy that my preference for one author, and my distrust in the “wisdom of the crowd” means that I’m somehow against democracy.

I suppose this is why I prefer a nice long dinner with one or two friends over the chatter of a cocktail party. A good conversation with one friend makes me inordinately happy; it pulls me out of the gloom of my personal obsessions, the abandoned carnival of my mind, and briefly restores my faith in humanity. As in books, the more time I spend with one person, the better I understand them, and selfishly, myself.

In the month since I turned in my thesis, I’ve lost several days surfing the web, emerging at one or two a.m. feeling irritated and disgruntled. Certain things, like the internet, Playstation 3, and a tub of pudding, feel good in the moment. But they never feel good at the end of the day.

Unlike Philip Roth, who apparently doesn’t own a television, and spends his hours, when not writing, reading and rereading the classics of Literature, writers of my generation grew up with television and the internet. Some of them seem able to balance the twin pulls of literature and popular culture remarkably well. But I’m no good at it. Popular culture, so shiny and bright and sweet, swallows me whole and spits me out later with nothing to show for it but a more well-developed case of cynicism. Books feed me more, but they require more of me, too.

This isn’t so much a declaration of a new motivation for blogging, so much as a reminder to myself of what I’ve been trying to do all along. I don’t want to offer only hyperlinks and jpegs of naked rugby players. Not that I have anything against naked rugby players; I’m sure they’re very nice people, and if you sat down with them over coffee you might glimpse the richness of their inner lives.

But I guess I want to strive for the feel of literature conveyed through this form of pop culture. I’d like to try and offer one voice, one consciousness – flawed, grouchy, and a little too earnest – and hope that every once in a while somebody can relate, and maybe recognize themselves. I guess I want to give back to those writers who kept me company, and to provide a place where other people might leave feeling a little less alone in the world. That, interspersed of course with photos of Manly Fireplugs and my adorable puppy. Too much self-seriousness leads to bloating, and drives people to poke you with sharp sticks.

I swear I am working on a real post for you. In the meantime, here are a couple of updates:

- Last week the Manly Fireplug gave me a hickey. And I also discovered that I like gingerbread lattes. Does that make me trashy?

- Going to see Doubt tonight with God. Cherry Jones will be in da house. Since I missed seeing her, and the show, in NYC, this pleases me to no end.

- K.M. Soehnlein, Horehound Stillpoint, Mike McGinty, Tom Dolby, and myself will be reading from the anthology and signing copies, next Monday, November 27th. A Different Light Bookstore, 489 Castro St, San Francisco. 7 pm. Come on down and say howdy.

In an email to a friend, Edmund White, who read from his new memoir here at school the other day, called me “studly.”

My work here is done.

Thirteen books down, twenty-seven to go.

Caught Patti Smith at Columbia with Derrick and Jennie. Patti spat on the stage of Miller Theater, about two feet from where David Remnick interviewed Joan Didion. Hot.

Best buddy Brian visited from Los Angeles. He took this picture:

I’m all, like, get me the fuck out of New York before I turn into one of these.

Over a nice pasta dinner and, later, a chocolate eclair at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, I think I sweet-talked him into considering a move back “home,” as I’m now calling it. I’m all about getting mi familia set up on the West Coast again, where we can age gracefully together, renting male escorts for each other’s retirement parties and breaking our hips on the hills of San Francisco.

What else?

I read Proust during the blizzard, er the Blizzard of ’06. I’m sorry, y’all, but a blizzard ain’t a blizzard when you don’t have a car, a driveway, or a sidewalk to shovel. My feet got wet crossing Broadway, but that’s all I can say. Between that and sitting in overheated, drafty classrooms with a bunch of coughing, wheezing Ivy Leaguers who can’t bear to take a sick day or two, and it’s caught up to me. So I gave myself permission to finish season four of 24. I know I’m coming to it rather late, but did anyone else get the creeps watching everyone on the show gradually turn into Dick Cheney? I thought they were going to take the lawyer from “Amnesty Global” out back and use him and the Secretary of Defense’s gay son for target practice.

Should be obvious by now; there comes a moment in every semester when my gym routine falls away, I catch the flu, and I turn into an insecure bitch. Or I reveal the insecure bitch, depending on your level of optimism. I’m burnt out, I’m sick of workshop, sick of turning in first drafts, sick of being critiqued. I feel like everything’s about six inches away from my face, and of the millions of words I’ve consumed in the last two years, my current favorite is retreat.

At one point in Proust’s Swann’s Way, the character M. Legrandin corners little Marcel and says, “I have every useless thing in the world in my house there. The only thing wanting is the necessary thing, a great patch of open blue sky like this. Always try to keep a patch of sky above your life, little boy. You have a soul in you of rare quality, an artist’s nature; never let it starve for lack of what it needs.”

The great thing about books is that you can always find what you need in them; no matter what you want, there’s something in there that’ll fit.

I got my carrot on a stick, though. Columbia sent me an email last week, asking if I would be renewing my lease at the end of May. I wrote back, “no.”

My first paying gig in New York started this semester: I was awarded a fellowship through school to act as a research assistant to a local writer, who’s working on a biography of the Southern writer Flannery O’Connor, she of the lupus and peacocks. The biographer himself was recently named by a local magazine one of New York’s “Fifty Most Beautiful People.” Rough, right? Yeah, keep feeling sorry for me.

I had one of those rare opportunities, the kind of errand that I suppose only a certain segment of the population would find thrilling. He asked me to go down to the Rare Manuscripts and Archives room at the main library, on 42nd Street, to check out some files on Flannery, and to write up a description of a certain document that he would like to discuss in a speech he’ll be giving soon at a conference on FOC (as I now call her. I’m like, all down with the biographer shorthand lingo. Yeah, step back.)

Access to this manuscript room is restricted; I had to bring two forms of identification down to the library, and then apply for two further forms of ID. Then I walked down the long middle aisle of the beautiful main reading room, to a little door at the end of the corridor, where I flashed my ID to get buzzed through the door. I had already followed the rules, and checked my coat, bag, and ink pens downstairs (only pencils allowed in the room.) Inside, I had to sign in, and check out, one at a time, boxes of files that I had paged and reserved in advance through email. The dim room was quiet, lined with two floors of glass-enclosed bookshelves, and a few dusty scholarly types bent over long desks bathed in lamp light, poring over brittle pages of manuscripts, handbills, and letters.

I chose a desk and settled in. Part of my research took me through some files from the offices of The New Yorker: mainly correspondence between editors and various authors about publication. Each box contained several folders, each folder labeled with a different author’s name, all arranged alphabetically.

Just before O’Connor was “Nabokov.” Uh, yeah, as in Vladimir Nabokov, as in Lolita, one of the greatest books ever written. As if I could resist poking through THAT folder. And inside was personal typewritten correspondence, from the fifties, between Nabokov and his editor, Katherine White, who was E.B. White’s wife. Along with various business correspondence, (“enclosed please find a check for your last story”) were actual rejection letters. Yes, my friends, Vladimir Nabokov was rejected from The New Yorker. Several times. In fact every folder I glanced through contained piles of rejection letters addressed to various authors, some more famous than others. Flannery herself had all four of the stories she sent to the magazine rejected. This is the kind of information I want to share with my fellow writers, as a twisted kind of encouragement.

Alright, maybe this isn’t such a turn-on to some of you. But then again, you don’t come here for pictures of shirtless twinks. Or at least I hope you don’t, because it would be a continual disappointment for you if you did. But the afternoon made me a bit euphoric, holding these pages in my hot little hands. Most thrilling to me were Nabokov’s little handwritten signatures: a single flourished “V”, with a small sketch of a butterfly (he had a thing about butterflies.) I think I was bitten with the biographer’s bug there. It was, for me, a quintessential New York moment, sitting in a remote corner of the main library, a room steeped in history and tradition, poring over documents that were decades old from authors whose books were on my own shelves back home. It was one of those moments that makes me a little wistful when I think about moving away, though lord knows there are manuscript collections at every university in the country.

Later, poking through some files in the collection of Yaddo, an artist colony where Flannery stayed while working on her first book, I came across some of her correspondence with Yaddo’s director. Many of the letters were written years after Flannery’s stay, as they became closer friends. In one letter Flannery describes current events in her small Georgia town: “Lately we have been treated to some parades by the Ku Klux Klan. They are all excited now about electing themselves a governor for the state. It’s too hot to burn a fiery cross, so they bring a portable one made with red electric light bulbs.”

Later, shortly before her death at the age of 39, she writes in a fragment of a letter about her declining health, and her need to keep writing: “Something in me dies when I can’t work.”

I scratched this down on a piece of paper with the pencil they’d loaned me, thinking, girl, I know what you mean.