Writing is not a finite commodity

I'm feeling rather energized after finishing my zine and sending it to a few people. Say what you will about DIY media versus more established literary outlets, but there is no denying that elated feeling that comes along with finishing a piece of art and saying, fuck yeah, I did that!

So I have all of these ideas tumbling around in my head, but I'm trying to make a point to focus on them, one at a time, so I can actually get stuff done. (Don't say I never learned anything from the stack of adults-with-ADHD literature I plowed through several years ago.) And sometimes when I think about all of my ideas, and I think about all of the other writers out there, and how they all have a lot of ideas, and how we are all spending several hours a week clickety-clacking away on our keyboards in hopes of creating something that will speak to another person on the planet.

Such trains of thought always end the same way: I get completely overwhelmed and wonder why I ever bother, if I am just going to be one of those faceless, nameless clickety-clackers trying to carve out a little space for myself using nothing but cleverness and a decent vocabulary. I mean, how do you make yourself stand out? How do you differentiate yourself from so many other writers? How do you get others to take notice of you (and not for writing execrable prose or being a big fucking liar)?

(Seriously, what is it about art and writing that turns otherwise confident, capable adults into needy, whining infants? I'd like to know the answer to this, please.)

But not only is this line of thinking completely maladaptive, as my psychology-grad-student husband likes to put it, but it's also flat-out wrong. I mean, you only need look around my condo to see proof that this is ridiculous.

Check it:

I have four bookshelves, completely jammed pack full of books ranging from the Sookie Stackhouse novels to Civilization and Its Discontents by Freud. A.M. Homes shares shelf space with Diablo Cody, who sits next to Philip Pullman, who chills alongside Maxine Hong Kingston. And these are just the books I've kept!

Let's head into my bedroom - specifically my nightstand. On my nightstand sits five books: Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators by Jeff Klinkenberg, Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner, A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf, The Varieties of Scientific Experience by Carl Sagan and Girls on the Verge by Vendela Vida. Littered throughout my books are about a dozen zines I recently received from Parcell Press, and sitting on the floor next to my nightstand is a basket full of magazines.

What about my purse? My purse holds the most recent Paris Review, an issue of Cometbus and the 2008 Best American Non-Essential Reading collection. And in my bathroom? Several issues of the New Yorker, New York, Elle, Ms. and even an issue of Creative Nonfiction.

And none of this takes into consideration my browser, which in the past few days has read countless essays and articles and interviews by famous people like James Wood and about a dozen other people I've never heard of before.

Do you see where I am going with this? I read the way others breathe. The printed word is my food and water. And I like variety in my sustenance. I am not just content to eat the same tried-and-true box of Kraft Dinner night after night. I'm willing to branch out and give oxtail soup a try as well.

And I know that most of those writers (the good ones, at least), as well as a lot of non-writers, read with the same kind of passion. That's a lot of people who expect access to writing and storytelling, who consider it an essential part of life. And that means there will always been room for a writer like myself, or like yourself, to make a dent in someone else's consciousness.

Obviously this doesn't mean we can slack, like we can just toss off a poorly written short story and expect readers to fall upon it like a pack of ravenous hyenas, but if you've been writing for any period of time, you already know this. But I think it does help to keep a bit of perspective, and to remember that we writers are not fighting over a finite amount of attention. Yes, only a few of us will ever see publication in the Paris Review or have our manuscripts lovingly polished by editors at Random House, but let's not act like this is all a zero-sum game, like another's success is our failure. There has been a thirst for good, vivid writing since the cuneiform was invited. That desire will not be suddenly wiped away by the internet and video games.

All I Want Is Everything #1

If this zine had a subtitle, it would probably be "Growing Older, Getting Tougher." Because that's pretty much what it's about.

All I Want Is Everything #1 is my first zine in six years, and my first zine since I turned my whole life upside down. (It was Saturn Return, I was 27 - I hear it happens.) In it you'll find essays about the following:

- Surviving domestic violence
- A letter to La Roux's Elly Jackson, in which I call her out for victim-blaming
- The intersections between Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays and my life
- Thoughts on nostalgia for 1990s girl culture and riot grrrl
- My love of running
- Meeting one of my feminist heroes and being a total knob about it
- The fetishization of female weakness

All mixed in with a healthy dose of feminism, snark and fifty-cent SAT words.

All I Want Is Everything #1 is 56 half-size pages. If you want a copy, send me $3 via Paypal at saltonmyskin at gmail dot com, or you can email me at that address.

Some thoughts on race and "not relating"

A reader submitted a question to the ladies of Racialious, about assumptions s/he makes about the race of characters in the books s/he reads, and what role the race of the reader plays in those assumptions. It's a very interesting discussion about privilege and race, but what really sparked my train of thought was an aside about white readers who complain about books with protagonists of color and how they "can't relate" to them.

I. Hate. This. So. Much.

Such a mentality smacks of laziness to me. Oh, you can't relate to a book simply because the protagonist doesn't look like you? You can't put in the two seconds of effort necessary to locate any common ground you might share with the characters by virtue of your shared humanity? Really? REALLY?

I've never understood this myself. Even as a child, I used to read books with characters of all colors and backgrounds - particular favorites of mine where Cassie Logan in "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry" and the girl in "Island of the Blue Dolphins" - and I never once thought, "Gee, I don't really like this book because I can't relate to a teenage girl who was abandoned on an island in the Pacific Ocean for over a decade." No, instead, I read those books over and over again, until their bindings cracked and their front covers fell off and they became waterlogged and sticky from my spilled cans of Shasta. And in all of those repeated readings, I never once thought, "Self, I just cannot relate to these girls."

I mean, there were obvious differences between myself and Cassie Logan. I was a white Mormon girl raised in Utah in the 1990s, the daughter of divorced parents ensconced in a comfortably middle-class existence. She was the black daughter of sharecroppers in Mississippi in the 1930s. By the standards put forth by some of the aforementioned readers, I should have never been able to read this book, or relate to Cassie as deeply as I did. But I did.

Cassie was smart and tough, and she questioned things out loud, and she wanted to be grown-up and she refused to accept the role that had been carved out for her. Cassie was everything I wanted to be. I lived vicariously through her. I could totally relate to her sense of being plopped down in a world that didn't make a lick of sense to her, with restrictions that were unfair. Sure, I wasn't the daughter of sharecroppers, but I had my own issues, my own oppressive social structures to deal with. By the time I was old enough to read "Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry," I was already aware of divisions related to class and gender and religion in my own life. Cassie's story helped me understand that race was yet another thing that divided people.

See what I did there? I didn't obsess over the differences between myself and Cassie Logan. I didn't throw it across the room in favor of the latest Babysitter's Club book. Instead, I saw that Cassie and I had a lot in common, which helped me build an emotional attachment to her. And then that emotional attachment gave me a bridge into her world, which allowed me to put aside my own existence and to imagine what it must have been like to be a girl like her.

And that is what literature is supposed to do. It gives us a window into lives that are not like our own, and lets us see that we are not all that different from the people who live these lives. It doesn't matter what country we come from, what our skin looks like, if we are a boy or a girl, if we are rich or poor, because ultimately, we all hurt, we all get disappointed, we all feel love and we all experience joy. The common factors of our humanity are far greater than the things that divide us. We would do well to remember that, rather than insist on separating the world into People Like You and People Not Like You, because guess what? With the exception of psychopaths, all people are People Like You.

I will never read Mailer or Updike, and this is why

A series of hilarious posts at Tiger Beatdown over the past couple of months, triggered in large part by professional anti-feminist/rebellious daughter Katie "I'd know if my friends were being raped!" Roiphe and her lament over the flaccid sexuality of today's male literary stars and how they lack the virility of dudes like Norman Mailer and John Updike, has me thinking a lot about those two authors in particular. (The latest is a review of Martin Amis' "The Pregnant Widow," entitled "Fond Memories of Vagina." Ha.)

This is the thing - I have never read a word by either author, and I am not really sure I care to. I mean, sure, I am willing to grant that both guys are very good writers, or that they have at least produced some very good writing in their lives, and that for me to have a full understanding of what we are dealing with when we talk about the first generation of American Phallic Literary Stars, I should probably read at least one of their books.

But I can't bring myself to do so. Not when I have yet to read everything by Edith Wharton and Flannery O'Connor, not when "Pale Fire" remains unread, not when I'm still trying to catch up on the acclaimed novels that came out last year that are just now making it to paperback (because, sorry publishing houses, but I refuse to buy hardcover).

Maybe if the subject matter was at all of interest to me, I'd reconsider, but I have to be honest with you, if I never read or hear another word about Man and his journey to Ultimate Manhood via the Vaginal Canals of Young, Nubile Women, I can't say I would consider that much of a loss. It's a narrative I'm already pretty familiar with, and I'd daresay I've already read the apex of that kind of literature in the form of W. Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage" (which, by the way, is a fucking fantastic novel, one of my favorites, and so I am kind of loathe to lump it in with all of these books, simply because I love it so much), and besides, it's not like the world isn't saturated with that kind of conquistador-as-lover mentality anyway.

I'm ready for new narratives, narratives that are relevant to me and the world I grew up in. I wish I could find this rebuttal to Roiphe's essay, where the author talks about how the new breed of literary superstar grew up watching families dissolve as a direct result of the sexual liberation that Mailer, et. al., have embraced as the most important facet of existence. It's very true. The sexual revolution certainly freed up our society from many of the old constraints, but in the process it ushered in a new generation of latchkey kids and kids who grew up watching their parents take each other to court and kids who never really felt like they belonged in one place. So if we don't see wanton fucking as the pinnacle of the human experience, it's because we've seen the side effects. Hell, we've lived the side effects. We are the side effects.

So you'll have to forgive me if I never bother to pick up a copy "Run Rabbit." Besides, why would I do such a thing when "Infinite Jest" remains unread?