Once upon a time, I used to teach English to freshmen in college. Now, not so much. Yesterday, I got an email from a former student of mine. It was very kind. Which was very nice.
After I posted my letter to a young writer, I was sort of surprised by the reaction. Like most of what I post on this blog, it was written on the spur of the moment, with little forethought.
It certainly drew some strong reactions. Some people liked it very much. While others disliked it enough to write what amounted to hate mail. Strange how so many people can view the same thing in such drastically different ways. Or not.
Of course, some people "got" it, but some did not. In particular, Young David, to whom the letter was addressed, did not appear to "get" it, as he wrote a follow up email that was very ... unhappy. It included a stab at my writing, indicating that I, in fact, was the one who could not write, that I was a failure, a victim of capitalism, a competitive fool hell-bent on being jealous of whatever he may or may not take from me in the future.
That was not really the point. For the most part, it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek. In many ways, it was more a letter to myself than someone else. It was an over-the-top self-annihilation of a part of myself, a part of most or all of us, that is grotesque, and competitive, and, well, sort of sick.
But there was a lot of truth in it, too. That the most important thing is not to write, but to live. And some of us forget to do that, sometimes daily. I loathe the idea of squandering. Squandering one's life. Squandering one's talents. That's spite. That's failure. That's the horror, the horror.
I guess I'm sorry that some people missed the point. Because while some things were caricatured near the beginning, all the stuff that I wrote at the end was true. The part about losing everything, if you have read my blog long enough, you know is something that happened to me, and that included, at one point, my mind. And it was just this April that I was standing in a San Fernando Valley apartment with a man who was showing me his AK-47, and someone was telling me porn will never die, and a porn star was crying in front of me. And it wasn't all that long ago, really, that I was talking to the young man who had the vast majority of his body burned when he drove over an IED in Iraq, and we were joking, about him giving a stripper an implant that was stretching the skin of his skull, when he was done with it. Those are the stories that matter. The ones that live on in your head. The ones that will never be sated by words. They're beyond that.
In the end, though, the letter was to me. A reminder that golden handcuffs can be a dangerous thing. That fear is a horrible ball-gag. That writing is not enough, but sometimes living is.
Hi Susannah,
I came across your blog by chance after reading an article on [redacted] and when your name was familiar to me somehow, I recalled that you were my TA at UIC. You were such an intellectually passionate teacher and I think I still have the reader from your class. I ended up moving to SF that summer and lived there for 10 years and had no idea that you were from the Bay Area. It all makes sense now how stifling the midwest must have been for you! I grew up there so I was so delighted to live in SF at the age of 18 away from all of that repression and judgement.
I am so excited for all of your success and look forward to reading more of your writing. You definitely made real for me lots of feelings I had about racial inequality and social injustice and a love for Flannery O'Connor. Growing up in Chicago everyone just thought I was weird for being different. In the Bay Area I was "normal" for thinking outside of the box :)
Ciao,
[redacted]
