“I have long felt the need of someone to take hold where I begin to fall down. I know of course that no one can breathe the breath of life into a dead thing, but I have more favorable reviews, letters, etc. on all my work than most writers collect in a lifetime, yet something has been lacking. Either through laziness, lack of technique, skill or whatnot, I’m aways failing by a hair.”

These were the words of Jay Sigmund, a successful Grand Rapids, Iowa, insurance executive by day—and poet and writer in his spare time. Sigmund was explaining his writing struggles in one of several letters he mailed to Betty Smith in 1936-1937. Smith would become famous for her bestselling novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943.

But at the time, Smith was a Yale Drama School-educated, struggling playwright, and single mother of two, living in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where the Works Projects Administration had assigned her to work as a play reader for the Federal Theatre Project. Both writers were in difficult stretches of their lives—yet holding fast to their writing ambitions; both would gain substantially from the connection they forged.

There was good reason for Sigmund to feel comfortable revealing his insecurities to Smith, for she had disclosed her own rejections and jilted dreams: “Like you, I have been disappointed so many times, as far as writing is concerned” Smith wrote to Sigmund, “So many times, has a book, or a play come right up to the verge of success and then dropped through the vagaries of producer or publisher. So I shall hope for everything… and expect nothing. I have found this to be a good working philosophy.”

In the same letter, in place of a curriculum vitae, she recounted the major chapters of her life: her education and jobs­­­—even an explanation of her husband’s livelihood. In the next paragraph, Smith added, “I no longer have a husband. The above material was given so that there would be no break in the, I suppose, story of my life.”

These facts of her life included financial struggles. The primary caregiver and provider for her daughters, Smith was constantly seeking paid work. She was upfront with Sigmund about her methods: “I earn perhaps five hundred dollars a year by a six week’s concerted drive of writing for the pulp magazines, mostly confession and love story magazines. I only do this when I need money terribly.” For the same reason, Smith had placed an advertisement in Writer’s Digest announcing her editing services.

Sigmund had seen the ad, and it had rekindled his hope in a writing dream. He’d already realized a few of his writing dreams, having published his poetry and some short fiction, both of which caught the attention of famous writers, including Carl Sandburg and Sherwood Anderson. But with Smith, Sigmund ventured into new territory: playwriting.

Their initial correspondence has the fumbling feeling of first dates. “I saw your little ad in the Writer’s Digest,” Sigmund wrote in his first letter. “I do not know whether you will be interested any in me or whether you have something that will interest me but as a starting place I am submitting three one-act play manuscripts so that you can judge whether or not there is any meeting of minds of the service you have to offer.”

Practical and frank in her correspondence, Smith wasn’t one to waste her time or money. “I received your three plays by mail and what is it you wish me to do with them?” she wrote to Sigmund. Explaining her menu of services and fees, Smith told him, “I shall not do anything with your plays until I hear from you. Let me know whether you want them criticized or returned and if the latter, please send postage.”

Sigmund mailed his $2.00 along with his request for which of the plays he wanted Smith to read.

Surprising herself and Sigmund, Smith enjoyed his script more than she expected. It was a “natural comedy,” Smith assured Sigmund. She explained that “the play has its faults but they are so minor, merely little odds and ends of technique. The main thing; the thing that cannot be taught is there.” Smith made Sigmund an unusual offer “which might not meet your approval.” What she really wanted, she wrote, was to collaborate with him, “that is to take your play and re-write it as co-author rather than hired writer.” Smith believed that after revising his draft, she could sell it by drawing on her playwriting connections. They would share the proceeds, fifty-fifty.

The offer delighted Sigmund. What had felt like a dead-end in playwriting, now seemed like it just might sail through. In his response, typed on his Cedar Rapids Life Insurance Company stationary, Sigmund disclosed more about his situation: “You may guess that my role has been a rather lonely one. From the letterhead you can see that I am a business man, but I have been writing poetry and short stories for years and have published several volumes of each.”

Sigmund’s life was not actually lonely in the conventional way. That is to say that he led an entirely conventional life: married with children and a profession in which he excelled. Sigmund was fully engaged in the civic and cultural life of Cedar Rapids; he was a friend to painter Grant Wood and to poet Paul Engle, who would establish the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. But Sigmund had difficulty when he reached the revising stage of a piece. And until Smith’s services, Sigmund had not known where to find the support he needed.

Perhaps his relationship with Smith was helped by its epistolary nature. Sigmund never had to watch the expression on Smith’s face as she read his work or as she told him her feelings about his writing. Sigmund felt free within the confessional of their correspondence to reveal, for instance, that “If I had a little more faith in my work and would get a little more wrought up over failure it would probably be a good thing, but I’ve had so much joy in my work that nothing else mattered much.” Now, Sigmund admitted to Smith, he was more interested in publication, because he was beginning to think about “permanent preservation” for some of his writings. With Smith’s co-authorship, Sigmund was able to sell a few of his plays.

Less than six months later, Sigmund would accidentally kill himself during a hunting trip.

Sigmund’s son wrote to Betty after his father’s death, not realizing it would be “the hardest letter which I should be called on to write,” for Smith was “so very kind to my father, and helped him so much in his hobby of writing.” Sigmund Jr. asked Smith, “Can you realize the importance which he placed in your kind judgment, and also the fine spirit of cooperation which you lent to make his writing life easier?” The “fine spirit of cooperation” is not usually what writers are known for contributing to the world, but it likely made a big difference in the lives of these two writers.

Sigmund and Smith never met in-person. But their exchanges benefited both writers: Smith revised Sigmund’s plays and helped him sell a few; Smith received much-needed income. Her confidence was bolstered, too. Here was a male writer, a decade older than Smith, who had already achieved success in other genres, trying to find his way in playwriting. Both writers were a little less lonely for the correspondence. Both received some of the feedback for which they hungered, but was so difficult to find.

A few years after Sigmund’s death, Smith began drafting A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, the novel which ultimately brought Smith fortune and fame and allowed her to establish herself as a writer. Although she was proud of having supported her daughters and herself through her writing even before she sold the novel, Smith had spent those years struggling. “I’d be so glad to concentrate all my abilities, experiences and education on one thing,” she explained to Sigmund in 1937 of her desire to focus on one major writing project “I work hard at even these odds and ends and it would be nice work hard for some one purpose.”

In her late forties as her first novel was about to be published, Smith seemed to be looking out onto the horizon of possibilities. Playwrighting had been the great dream of Smith’s life for so long—and she had been relatively successful, at least in terms of selling plays and winning prizes. But the money was not sufficient to keep her from feeling like she was always scrambling for work. Novels seemed to offer a more secure path. They would remain her primary genre, with three more following A Tree Grows.

When publication of A Tree Grows was imminent, but her publishers were contemplating a delay, Smith urged them to move as quickly as possible and to enter her novel in the appropriate prizes. “With so many good men writers tied up in in the War,” Smith pointed out, “I’d never again have so good a chance in competition.” Timing was crucial. Smith was determined not to lose her chance. As she explained to Harper & Row: “I’d like to have the beginnings of an established place in American novel writing so that I could sail on or I’d like to know definitely otherwise so that I could then console myself with a four hundred dollar a week movie job.” Hollywood was calling. But Smith viewed film writing jobs as a second choice.

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn was a way for Smith to finally declare herself a particular kind of writer: a novelist. But it wasn’t only that. It was her chance to make something of herself after so many years of feeling she was not fully succeeding. A few years earlier, in Jay Sigmund, Smith had caught a reflection of herself, and it wasn’t entirely flattering: a middle-aged writer still trying to really make it. Sigmund had written to her that he knew what it felt like to be a writer always failing by a hair. And Smith had understood him. But she did not want to live there anymore. And the possibility of sailing on into her future as a novelist was now so close at hand, she could practically touch it. Having helped another writer up, it was easier to believe she could lift herself up, too.

From earliest memory, I knew that my aunt worked in book publishing. As an editor of children’s books at a large, corporate publisher, she would send me boxes upon boxes of cast-offs that she’d find around the office. Even before I had learned how to read, I would thumb through these books in my solitude—as the only child of an unhappy couple, left to entertain myself in our house in the woods on a hill, without neighbors or cable television, before video game consoles, computers, and the internet entered the home.

My aunt was one of my first idols. She lived and worked in Manhattan—her apartment and office both crowded by long shelves and tall piles of books: books on every table, books under every table, books beside the bed, books on top of the bed. She’d even written the foreword to a leather-bound, gilt-edged, woodcut-illustrated edition of Wuthering Heights, which takes pride of place on my bookshelf to this day.

Since infancy, I’ve looked to my aunt as the embodiment of urbane sophistication and literary savvy; instinctively, I attempted to emulate her. By the age of ten, I’d decided that someday I’d move to New York City—to edit books and to write my own. My aunt warned me that the path may be harrowing. Precocious and foolhardy, I convinced myself that I could do both.

I moved to Brooklyn in 2008, at the dawn of the so-called Great Recession, which irrevocably strained, among so many aspects of American life, both the vitality of the publishing industry and the cost of New York City housing. For the next ten years, I’d work in entry-level positions at small, independent book publishers, while training in the art of making supplemental income—freelancing on the weekends, teaching English comp at night, selling my books to secondhand bookstores—in fact, when I was let go from a publishing position, I took the cardboard boxes of cast-offs that my aunt had sent to my office (instead of my apartment, where I didn’t have room for them), brought them in a taxi to the Strand, and sold the lot for $600, which was my monthly rent at the time.

Over these past sixteen years, I’ve moved six times—outpriced from one apartment to the next. Once, when I asked for a salary adjustment to compensate for a rent increase, I was told that raises were awarded for merit, not necessity; I hadn’t contributed enough to the company’s revenue to merit a raise, but if I needed to find more affordable housing, I should look in New Jersey. Going forward, I couldn’t help but view my contributions to a company’s revenue as the most significant indicator of my value.

From the start, I’ve wrestled with a great amount of guilt about cultivating a career as a writer while working for book publishers. I worry that the time and energy I invest in my writing is inadvertently stolen from my employer and their books. In another publishing position, with the capacity to acquire projects, I felt constant pressure to spend my time and energy both inside and outside the office in pursuit of the company’s next bestseller—not an unreasonable expectation, but not an easy one for me to accept. I worried that my writing was a fanciful distraction—and that publishing it was a conflict of interest.

I’ll admit, I have stolen time and diverted my energy intentionally over the years—listening to certain musicians at my desk as I research for the essays about them, taking notes in Microsoft Outlook emails, editing drafts of Word docs with track changes turned on—so I appeared to be on the job while on the clock. Vainly, I sensed some resentment, if not hostility, from my colleagues toward my personal writing and publishing endeavors, though it’s also entirely possible that I projected my insecurity onto my colleagues, as I faced rejection after rejection and feared that I was an imposter. At the same time, I discovered that I didn’t have the knack for the role of acquiring editor and considered quitting the industry altogether.

Then, I realized it was the managing editorial position that was best-suited to my obsessive-compulsive habits of checking, finding, and fixing mistakes—dating back to the second grade, when my classmates would ask me to spell-check their homework. Now, I edit my way through the day with a mental red pencil, catching typesetting errors on all manner of printed material—subway ads, restaurant menus, the labels on household products.

At the end of the workday, for the most part, I’m able to either complete my tasks or leave them at the office for tomorrow. Where the acquiring editorial role requires the editor to stand front and center in the production of the company’s books, the role of managing editor keeps me behind the scenes—alleviating but not eliminating my guilt.

Because, finally, stacks of my first book—a collection of essays about some of my favorite female singers—are beside me, freshly printed finished copies in a cardboard box. And I remain worried that the time and energy I’ll continue to invest in this book will continue to detract from my contributions to my various employers.

Today, I’m a full-time managing editor and an adjunct English professor, with a steady stream of weekend freelancing and a tote bag of unwanted books ready to haul to the Strand. As the publishing industry recovers from the economic fallouts of the COVID pandemic, and as job security in general grows more precarious than ever, I’ve accepted the possibility that, for the foreseeable future, I’ll need to juggle several jobs in order to keep from living paycheck to paycheck.

Having witnessed my aunt’s success in corporate publishing throughout the 90s, and having watched well-paid editors played on films and TV shows, I hadn’t imagined my path toward a substantial income would be such an uphill shuffle—which is nothing if not a labor of immense love. And as for my book, it’s too incredible to believe that it exists; I can hardly bear to hold it in my hands.

Writing these words, I’m sitting in the living room of my childhood home, about five feet from the shelves that long ago contained those hallowed books from my aunt. In this exact spot, even before I had learned how to spell and write, I would scribble on blank paper with Magic Markers and staple the pages together—always, this desire, this drive to make books.

Now, these shelves contain what’s left of my mother’s CD collection, which she has winnowed in preparation to sell the house and move to an apartment after thirty-seven years here. Still there, after all these years: my mother’s Joni Mitchell CDs. Near the bookshelf, next to the couch, a small Bose CD player waits on an end table. I pick up Blue—the very copy that accompanied me through the bluest hours of my youth. I put it on.

__________________________________

I Sing to Use the Waiting: A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am by Zachary Pace is available from Two Dollar Radio.

It was the fall of 2012 when I started to forget how to play the drums.

This is neither figuration nor exaggeration; I actually, bodily, began to forget. Like a character in a folktale, I was fast losing wisdom to foolishness.

My band was on tour in Europe when the forgetting, which felt at once gradual and sudden, began. We’d take to the stage and greet the crowd like always. But then, whether in Prague or Paris or Berlin or Krakow, I would take my seat behind my forest of drums, suddenly cowering, like what I faced was a mob of hulking and sinister strangers, not a musical instrument. The sticks, once mostly reliable tools, felt bulbous and unfamiliar in my hands.

This great forgetting didn’t come out of nowhere. My connection to the drums had already been tenuous. I’d taught myself to play at twenty-six for the express purpose of joining a band my two best friends were forming. Even before I lost all of my wisdom, the bad postural habits of adulthood prevented me from truly playing loosely or feeling the rebound of the stick on the drum head. More often than not, playing through a single show required the concentration of a long highway drive while sleepy.

But this. This was different.

Even as the drumming was leaving me, other things had been leaving me, too. As we neared the end of the European tour, I began to notice how truly unwell I was. I, a person for whom forgetting to eat has always been a laughable concept, was skipping entire meals, shedding clothing sizes against my will.

I was walking around in a kind of half-gray, hazy and haunted by questions that wouldn’t stop throwing themselves at me. Is this really what you’re supposed to be doing? Do you really think you will ever be good enough at this? Do you even remember what you love? Are you remotely happy? I had spent so much time over the last near-decade trying to be something I wasn’t quite able to be, that I’d fully forgotten who I actually was. I was no longer present in my friendships, not with my bandmates nor with most of the other people in my life. Without my noticing it, I’d become something of a shell, populated only by my anxieties and doubts, the ones multiplying so quickly by the day that before long, they’d replaced whatever else had preceded them.

When we returned home from Europe, I made the difficult decision to leave the band that had been my life for so long. Or more accurately, my body—the shrinking, forgetful, and shuddery mass it had become—had made the decision for me. I had taken my place in the world but my place in the world didn’t want me anymore and my body knew this with a certainty my brain did not possess.

*

Far from fixing what was wrong, though, leaving the thing that had been the material of my life for so many years left a chasm where almost everything else should be.

For weeks, I stayed inside. I avoided people. I cried, stared at the walls, cried some more. Even though I had accomplished something extraordinary—becoming a drummer in my twenties! Touring and recording with an incredible band made up of people I loved and admired!—I was inconsolable. Not only because the thing I’d irrevocably lost was time. But because, it felt, the thing I’d irrevocably lost was myself.

*

I moved from New York to Washington, DC, where my then-partner lived, in an attempt to start over. To try life again. New York had been unforgiving, I told people, and I needed a soft new place to land. But what I thought might feel like a new start felt more like a violent interruption. Here, in my mid-thirties, I’d abandoned everything I’d built. I was stunted, stuck; bereft. I was in a new town where I knew barely anyone and I no longer understood what I, in the most existential sense, was here for. As a beginning of any kind, it felt farcical. It was much more like an ending, or, at the very best, a sagging middle.

So instead of setting about the business of creating something new from my pile of ashes, I started to experience anxiety that was at once acute and profound. At first, a generalized sense that nothing was quite right, but then an increasingly frequent torrent of intrusive thoughts. Violent thoughts, bad thoughts, but perhaps most sinister of all, the kinds of thoughts that called my very reality into question.

Do you even know what love feels like? said the thoughts. How do you know you’re truly in love? I started to look at my romantic partners sideways, suspicious I’d been duped into something false. Have you ever had an original thought in your life? Do you possess even a shred of integrity? I began to question the most elemental parts of my personhood. Who I spent time with, what I prioritized, even what I did with any given hour of my day. The thoughts, damaging in every kind of way imaginable, were the most damaging in how they began to erode any self-trust I had left.

*

Despite my relatively long foray into percussion, the thing I had actually always been best at was writing. I’d been a distractible kid and a susceptible teenager, excited about culinary school and stage acting and anthropology and visual art and book-making and, very briefly, even the rabbinate. But writing was the thing I’d always come back to. It was something I’d always loved, but even dearer to me: It was something at which I was extremely competent, and sometimes even good. And for me, competency felt rare and precious. Focus, even rarer. I took it where I could.

I’d spent my childhood reading and spinning yarns, and my teenage years writing my angst into bad poems, and my college years writing my most repressed desires into slightly better poems, and my twenties writing lyric essays that were subversive takes on Jewish liturgy and homages to Craigslist missed connections. When I took up the drums, I’d stopped writing altogether. This had never been intentional; it was just something that had fallen away. There had no longer been any time.

So when I decided, in 2014, at a humbled and severely frayed thirty-four years old, to enroll in an online writing class to see if there was anything I still knew how to do at all, I was worried. Most everything else had stripped itself from me. There was a decent chance my ability to write had, too.

In that class—a class called Sex, Death, and Memoir with Lidia Yuknavitch—I did manage to write, and not badly, either. You have range, wrote Lidia in response to something I submitted. I hope you stand up in it. How, I wondered, could I stand up in it? Range, I could do. But the standing up? This seemed harder.

In DC, I had finally, tentatively begun to make friends, but the intrusive thoughts hadn’t stopped ravaging me from the inside out. I had been in talk therapy, but it wasn’t enough. The thing I craved, raw and exhausted from wrestling with my own brain, was for someone to get inside my body and scoop it all out of me.

In an effort to approximate a global outscooping, I tried even more kinds of therapy with more kinds of therapists. Psychology Today became my Tinder, as I became ever more intimate with its catalog. Hypnotherapy, Energy Healing, Somatic Therapy, EMDR, CBT.

Here is something most writers probably inherently understand at some point, but that no one explicitly tells you: A requirement of writing well is the capacity to trust yourself. Perhaps not wholly, and perhaps not even very much at all. But in order to successfully write a story, you need to possess enough self-trust to believe yourself capable of concocting a universe of characters and situations from nothing, or perhaps from a very small seed. And then, enough to govern and navigate them with a decisive pen, leading them toward an ending, or to a next chapter, or toward or away from one another.

At a writing conference a few years ago, I heard a friend give a talk where they mentioned that the Latin root of the word decide means to kill. I had never heard this before, and I couldn’t stop turning it over in my brain—not then, and not since. It felt so extreme. And also, as someone who had always been indecisive, it resonated. To choose one path was absolutely to foreclose all the others. It was all very Sliding Doors. It was also, unequivocally, a kind of violence.

Deciding had always been difficult for me. But now, in my compromised and doubt-ridden state, the prospect of deciding anything was nearly impossible. I could hardly tell what a feeling was, could barely distinguish an original thought from its sinister counterpart. Who was I to believe myself capable of generating material on the page? Of making the kinds of decisions good fiction requires of its creator?

*

I’d found a therapist I liked well enough who understood my predicament. A profound loss of self-trust, she understood, was losing the very ground you’d stood on. There was nowhere to begin. I was operating from that great chasm. My starting place was just the bleak chaos of unknowing.

So she gave me homework. Forget big decisions, she said. Forget even small ones. Instead, she gave me a series of questions and told me to ask them to myself nightly, and to answer them, too. It will feel silly, she said. But it won’t be.

I skimmed the questions:

Is my bed comfortable?
Am I warm enough under my blankets?
Does the pillow support my head?

That night, I gave it a try. My therapist was not wrong: this felt ridiculous, giving voice to the smallness to which I’d been reduced. But I was desperate. I did it anyway.

“Is the bed comfortable?” I asked my dark bedroom. I heard the quality of my own voice, so small and pleading, it sounded as though it expected someone or something to answer back.

I lay very still in the soft dark. My mattress, a Craigslist purchase from a few years back, was actually shockingly comfortable. I had no complaints. It held my body just so, firm and bouncy with just enough give.

“It is,” I said to the dark. “The bed is comfortable.”

I don’t remember if I laughed or if I was simply overcome by the desire to laugh. The silly little therapy homework question had yielded a definitive answer. And answers were on the edge of extinction. I felt an immense sort of relief, just knowing what to say back to the dark.

And on we went, me and the quiet night.

“Am I warm enough?”

I wasn’t quite, so I went to get an extra blanket.

“Does the pillow support my head?”

It did. It really did.

I slept that night, a deep sleep, certain of so little, but certain, at least, of those three things.

*

Life was still painfully constricted. It took me a long time to recover from this period of self-loss. Arguably, I am still recovering. Arguably, I always will be. Certainty is perhaps overrated. It is also, for me, nearly impossible to come by, so I take it where I can. Trust your gut, people sometimes say, and it is only now, in my mid-forties, that I believe I even have such a thing.

But one of the first places I felt safe to experiment back then, raw and ripped of all of my clarity, was in writing fiction. In fiction, the stakes were low. I could steer the character down one path, foreclosing all other options. If it went badly for my character, or if it felt wrong, that was okay. No one would be hurt. Nothing lost. Words and blank word processing pages were abundant. Infinite, even. My character and I could try again.

Not unlike my pillow homework, there was an immense kind of power, I found, in making decisions on the page. Writing forced me to perform a kind of authority I may not have had, but that I needed to bring to my drafts regardless.

As I began to get stronger both off the page and on, I realized that the work I’d been doing to fortify my existential core had also begun to make me a nimbler writer. Making choices—whether for my characters or for myself—was not so rigidly binary that one path would foreclose all of the others. I’d had to integrate the understanding that more than one thing could be true at once. After all, an either/or way of thinking had begun to erase me entirely. Both/and, I would say to myself. Both/and.

I started to understand that the choices I could make on the page were infinite, and as absolutely terrifying as this was, it was also kind of freeing. Both because I could always change my mind, but also because there weren’t really wrong decisions in writing stories. I had become so distanced from my own desires and impulses, that I’d had to re-learn how to make even the most simple decisions.

But by really intentionally practicing this, and in consequently seeing writing stories as a series of tiny decisions, this kind of decision-making became sort of exciting to me. The idea that I got to choose and could be guaranteed that the results of my choice would be neither binding nor catastrophic. I got more and more confident as a person, and began to make more interesting and nuanced decisions as a writer. My characters got to be complicated instead of just stuck. So did I.

To this day, when I face decisions on the page, it can intimidate. It’s still a commitment, and commitment still scares me. Sometimes I make a decision about a story less because I’m certain it’s correct and more because some kind of decision needs to be made. A story or a novel can spend most of its time in gray areas, but even then, a character needs to call her mother or to not call her mother. The weather needs to stay beautiful, or it needs to start pouring.

A story, after all, is made up of millions of tiny little decisions, and so few of us are certain of anything. Sometimes, a decision is simply a good guess. And sometimes, it’s just leaning toward curiosity—if I open this door or this window, what will I find behind it? Sometimes, it’s just asking a simple question of the night or of the page and listening closely for some kind of answer.

__________________________________

City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter is available from Grove Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic.

Every few years I write a book. As penance for my past snark about aging writers using decades-old photos, I always update the author photo. For the first three books, it was fine—a lark, even!—but I was in my thirties then. I took longer to publish my fourth novel, and now, squinting into the setting sun of my forties, I’m being photographed more than ever. (I realize this makes it sound as if the paparazzi are after me, which they are not. I am being photographed by myself and by friends who would prefer to be doing something else). It’s a different experience this time around.

The central struggle of seeing your face in a photo only grows more acute with age: until confronted with endless documentation, I was free to assume the face I present to the world looks a lot like it did at 21. I suppose people who are photographed for a living must confront this chasm between belief and reality sooner than the rest of us, who bury the suspicion deep inside ourselves, where we keep the details of bombed job interviews and that time we mispronounced a common word in front of Colson Whitehead. Imagine!

Long ago, when cameras were not ubiquitous, one could go through life without ever confronting one’s wonky eye or thinning bangs. Free of constant self-documentation, people just went about their days, contentedly churning butter or fleeing dinosaurs or voting for Coolidge or however daily life looked in the distant past.

But ours is not that time. Even someone who cringes at selfies, which I do, has to get in the game for professional or social reasons. And so I have reluctantly learned a few things about being photographed—for social media, a big event, or professional headshots—particularly as a middle-aged woman with some useful delusions to maintain.

Please note that I am not telling you to commandeer the lighting at baby showers or skitter away from cameras on bad hair days. Crappy photos of wonderful moments exist, and there is no reason to day-drink over it. But if you must be immortalized, a few strategies may help avoid despair.

1. Wear more make-up than you think you should. The camera washes out a smoky eye to natural and a rosy cheek to pallid. Wear a good foundation; you’ll be glad for the even canvas. Use eyebrow pencil. Feel free to have a professional do this if it’s not your bailiwick. If you’ll be looking at these pictures for years, it’s worth it. Take a selfie or two before you leave the makeup chair and make adjustments.

2. Hair moves around a lot—mine is prone to a half-squashed donut vibe— so you have to give it a little last-minute attention. Bring a brush, give your curls a shake, but resist the urge to flip it saucily for the camera. I ask a bystander if my hair is doing something bizarre and hope for the best.

3. No one can overcome bad lighting. I once looked in the mirror in one light and felt totally fabulous. Moments later, I was photographed in a place lit like an orange morgue. Everyone looked polished and gorgeous in person and pouchy, spotted, wrinkled and grizzled in the photos. You can’t always control lighting, though, so do your best to avoid harsh overhead light and know when to destroy the evidence.

4. If you’re not a veteran of Botox or peels or facials, approach with caution. You don’t want to show up resembling Cruella DeVille with scarlet fever. Shit has to settle, is all I’ll say.

5. When positioned in the front row of a group photo, a cheerleaderish urge to crouch will steal over you. The crouch is an attempt to be gracious and not to block the faces of the people behind you, who are usually me because I elbowed aside an old woman so I could get the hell out of the front row. The problem here lies entirely with the photographer. The only humane way to photograph a multi-row group fronted by crouchers is from the waist up. To capture human beings from a perspective that includes a full-body view of several accomplished grown women crouching protectively over nothing is an act of aggression and possibly sociopathy. You know goddamn well what we’re doing when we crouch, camera-wielders. Zoom in.

6. Speaking of zooming in, when you’re enlisting someone else to take a picture, specify the frame, as in chirping merrily, “Just a head and shoulders shot!” Not long ago I had someone take a picture of me and an old friend at a reading for Instagram. It started off great, tightly framed around our smiling faces and shiny blowouts, but then the photographer took a step backward. Then several more. Our arms still slung chummily over each other’s shoulders, my friend and I emitted low simultaneous growls, like dogs sensing erratic behavior in their midst. Later, the photos displeased us.

7. Husbands are particular offenders. Just recently mine took a photo of me from an angle I would describe as “hostile,” in which my white-clad thigh resembled a grand, expansive vista, like the Badlands. Later, another male friend took a selfie of us together from an expert downward angle, and when I asked how he knew to do so, he said, “From my wife berating me.” So, they can be taught.

8. There will come a day when you are tempted to buy a peasant blouse. If you are a willowy ingenue whose sticklike limbs poke delicately out from yards of fabric, feel free to be photographed in that blouse, secure in the knowledge that all will be well. If you are a normal-sized person like me, whose very bones fail at being sticklike, do not give in to this desire. I have tried playing off a treasured flowy blouse with tight jeans, or shoving the bunched extra fabric into the back of my waistband. Both failed. I should have solved the conundrum by accepting the truth: Yes, I love to prance around in a peasant blouse like I’m beating a tambourine in a sunlit meadow, but in reality, this is not a look that makes anyone say, “She is much less delusional than I thought.”

9. Similarly: know your angles. For years I tried to rock a lifted chin and imperious downward glance, under the delusion that I was highlighting my cheekbones and jawline. But I don’t have the slanted sharp jawline and huge doe eyes that might make that angle work; I have a round face and human-sized eyes and this angle made me look supercilious and marshmallowy. After ten years, I finally retired it.

10. (Deep down, I still think: maybe someday.)

11. Maybe don’t flatten your arms against your torso. I put my hands on my hips where possible, but, failing that, I’ll just elbow out a couple inches of space, because it makes my arms look less like Dutch baby pancakes and more like my actual arms.

12. Straight-on angles are tough. I learned this from a very talented professional named Nick Wilkes, who has, perhaps unwillingly, developed a sideline as my city’s writer-photographer of choice. Put one foot forward, he’d correct me, as I lurched monstrously toward the lens with both feet cemented side by side. He’d have me turn my shoulders one way and my hips the other, and it felt psychotic but in the resulting pictures, it looked dynamic and interesting, focusing attention on my face.

That’s the goal, right? We want to look like ourselves, the best version of ourselves. There is some self-acceptance involved in realizing who that self really is. And look, I am all too aware that the bedrock here is a desire to appear youthful and thin, and that this is a problematic desire born of the toxicity of unrealistic expectations.

If I can find a way to unwire the patriarchy from my brain, I’ll write about that too. In the meantime, I’ll settle for a few photos in which I look not eerily perfect, not 22, but… myself. We all deserve a photo of ourselves on a momentous day, one we can look at and think, Yes, that was me then.

Imposter syndrome is the fear of being found out as a fraud, as a poser. Others may see you as over achieving and successful—two hopelessly intertwined notions, at least in contemporary American life—but you don’t see yourself that way. Imposter syndrome is largely internal. Interloping, on the other hand, is relational—a group lets you know you don’t belong. It’s not only that you know you’re an intruder; others know it too. Recently I realized I’m an interloper and not an imposter.

In the 90s, I moved to New York to be a writer. I wrote a bad manuscript about a farming family in eastern North Carolina, where I grew up. I was so boldly dumb to the ways of the world that I sent it to Russell and Volkening because I’d read “Author and Agent,” about Eudora Welty and her agent, Diarmuid Russell, who won her over with his “benevolent parasite” pitch.

Surprisingly, I got an agent, and she generously shopped my manuscript. She gave the typewritten rejections to me in a bundle. One of the first began: “Dear X, please don’t send me novels about rural people. It embarrasses me.” I’m still wondering about that misused pronoun. For me, that “it” is all: shame, class, power.

I didn’t write again for years, not another novel anyway. I’ve always been more of a continuous keeper of notebooks than a steady story writer, but I was also stung by the idea that the rural and working class people I’d grown up among were not worthy of the proud middle class prose of the 90’s novel.

Things have changed since then, but we have different problems on the same theme. Interlopers sometimes appear as characters in novels; they also write them. This is part of the argument against appropriation, and the intricate, complicated dance of writing about people who don’t look like you. The consensus so far seems to be it’s okay to do it, but not to do it badly. An author’s intentions may be better than the execution. Readers will decide, which is both fair and fraught.

There’s always the danger that where some see unflinching honesty, others will see the author as the worst sort of traitor, one who exploits their personal history to belong, the interloper turned insider. I was reminded of this recently when talking with a French friend about Annie Ernaux. My friend said she finds Ernaux mean, cruel even, and when I said weakly that Ernaux ruthlessly probes her own shame, my friend said, sharply, yes, but she takes on the voice of the oppressor.

How not to be the voice of the oppressor. I brood on that, as I, like Ernaux, “moved class” to become a writer. Moving class meant years of feeling that I had lost a language and failed to find a new one. I was both Eliza Doolittle and my own Henry Higgins. There were long stretches when I believed it was not my place to write about the place where I was from. We were insignificant; we were without dignity; we were “embarrassing.”

It was one wrong to be from rural people, and another to try to write about them in literary fiction, where they didn’t belong and could be neither quoted nor described. For years I thought I could not write about the place I know best because it felt impossible to put plainspoken people in the bourgeois prose of the American novel. Beyond that, to do it badly would be not only personal failure but social injustice.

It was the double interloper problem: that of intruding in a literary world that rejected my milieu, and that of writing about a world I no longer belonged to. Gradually, gropingly, I began to confront my own point of view. My attachment to my own mediocrity was only ego, and a flimsy defense against failure. Through reading I came to think about writing differently: It doesn’t matter if you’re worthy of doing it. It matters that it’s worthy of doing.

As I acquired language I was growing up in a conservative country church that taught me the Bible is the literal word of God. Though I haven’t believed this since I was a child, the King James language of Ecclesiastes plays my soul like a tuning fork. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. The deep, deep effect these passages have, detached from belief, shape my central fear, that, for me, language, literature, life are more an emotional than an intellectual endeavor.

I tell myself if I write unselfconsciously I will come closer to the directness and authority of authors I love, like Natalia Ginzburg. She suffered and felt exiled when she tried to do anything other than write stories, “invented things or things which I can remember from my own life, but in any case stories, things that are concerned only with memory and imagination and have nothing to do with erudition.”

Despite knowing “nothing about the value” of what she wrote, she was free in her work: “I am like someone who is in her own country, walking along streets that she has known since she was a child.” That gets at the doubleness of writing for me: I’m most free when I’m absorbed in writing. I’m most anxious and doubtful about releasing words into the world. It’s the looming fear of interloping, of some faceless editor deciding that worthy writing, like worthy thinking, only happens in certain zip codes.

In Christa Wolf’s The Reader and the Writer, she admonishes: “The writer we are talking about does not, therefore, let himself be pushed into the position of an outsider, a position about which almost all bourgeois writers complain, notwithstanding his peculiar way of life.” Ah, two hurts there. The writer as complainer wearing his outsider status as a bourgeois badge of honor. In this way she tells me interloping is beside the point. Elsewhere she gets to the heart of things beautifully succinctly. “The question is, have we the courage to want what prose can do.”

I want to have the courage to want what prose can do. So I choose a language, a diction, a syntax, by which I mean an ethics, and write toward what I want to know through a place that I know well. It’s worth doing. Because writing is a vocation, as Natalia Ginzburg says, “which also feeds on terrible things, it swallows the best and the worst in our lives and our evil feelings flow in its blood just as much as our benevolent feelings. It feeds itself, and grows within us.” Writing is my vocation. It doesn’t embarrass me.

__________________________________

Inside the Wolf by Amy Rowland is available from Algonquin Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

On a summer night twenty-nine years ago Mark, my then boyfriend and now husband, and I were in our second-floor apartment. Mark was ironing a week’s worth of dress shirts for his job as a clinical psychologist at a well-known psychiatric hospital. The windows were open, and the shades were up. A cheap portable radio on the counter was tuned to the Red Sox game, and I was boiling pasta for dinner, occasionally shuffling across the kitchen to give Mark a kiss. It could have been a scene from a romantic indie film, but it was the start of our horror story.

The next day Mark called me between patients. His typically confident tone had a tremor. “Before I say anything,” he told me, “I want you to shut the windows.”

When I came back to the phone—landline days—Mark said, “One of my patients was spying on us last night. She was listening from the yard.”

“What?”

“She said it made her cry that I did my own ironing, and she wishes that she and I could go to a baseball game together sometime. She wanted to know what you were making for dinner, and did I ever cook?”

So began a four-year stalking ordeal. It was also the day the idea for a novel took root in my consciousness. I didn’t want to fictionalize the sad case of this woman whose mental health issues led her to feel proprietary toward my husband’s home life. The idea that came to me was dangerous in a different way: What would happen if a psychologist were visited by a patient who knew something about him that she shouldn’t have known? Not just that he was a diligent ironer and liked the Red Sox, but something damaging from his past.

Almost three decades later, my debut novel, Wednesdays at One, is about to be published. It’s the story of a clinical psychologist, Gregory Weber, and a mysterious female client, Mira, who appears unscheduled in his office each week and wants to talk about his past, not hers. With each session, Gregory grows increasingly obsessed with discovering what Mira knows and why she’s there. When he can no longer maintain professional boundaries Gregory succumbs to Mira’s probing, putting everything that matters in his life at risk.

As someone who has published a memoir and respects the constraints of the creative nonfiction genre, I found novel writing liberating, as in Really? I can make up anything? But I also found myself—as fiction writers do—mining my own past experiences for my characters’ emotional cores. I am a writer married to a psychologist, publishing a psychological suspense novel about a psychologist. My book is not autofiction: Gregory is ponderous and quietly shame-filled and nothing like my husband Mark, who is ebullient, open, and relatively (I hope) guilt-free. Yet my life with my therapist husband informed my ability to create a credible fictional therapist.

For example, Gregory shares broad details of his professional life with his wife, Olivia, just as Mark talks to me about hypochondria, antisocial personality disorder, sex addiction, and paranoia. On nights when I can’t settle, I’ll often ask him to “bore me to sleep.” In a droning voice, Mark patiently details hypothetical treatment plans for various diagnoses. “We might do exposure therapy plus response prevention,” he’ll say in a robotic whisper. “When someone has germ-based OCD and wants to wash their hands all the time, I make them touch a doorknob or the bottom of their shoe then not allow them to wash.” In lieu of pillow talk, I have learned the nuances of cognitive behavioral therapy, which focuses on coping skills.

I used to joke that if Mark ever missed work, I could pinch hit for him, but in the pandemic-isolated summer of 2020, I found a more appropriate use for my pillow-talk understanding of CBT: fodder for my writing. Starved of movies, summer BBQs, and in-person fun, I created the puzzle of my guilt-ridden protagonist. I gave him a wife, Olivia—a wannabe writer who felt deeply curious about her husband’s career. I gave them two kids—a son and a daughter just like Mark and I have. And I set them in a house about two miles from our actual home in a prosperous Boston suburb. Outside of my own family living together in isolation that summer, the Webers were the only other people I spent any quality time with.

As I began writing, something unusual happened: As opposed to the struggle I typically feel when beginning a creative project, this one was easy. Not because these characters resembled my own family—the similarities stopped at their personalities—but as I told Mark, “It’s like this story already exists in the world.” After all, the idea of the mysteriously disruptive patient had been germinating in my subconscious for decades. When a writer friend expressed surprise that I was being so productive in the middle of the pandemic, I told her, “It’s like I’m downloading this book from somewhere in the universe.”

I’d heard other writers and artists describe the creative process in a similar way, but it never made sense to me. Carlos Santana claims that he channels his music from God. My experience wasn’t that, but it wasn’t not that either. It felt like a gift from a benign energetic presence, and instead of questioning it, I welcomed the story as it came to me each day.

When I finished a draft in August 2020, I had another unusual feeling: joyful certainty. It was similar to that coup de foudre sense you get when meeting a person who you absolutely know will be significant in your life. I had it with Mark. I had it with many of my now closest friends. And I had it with this book. After a previous failed attempt to publish a novel, I was certain this one would hit.

In October of 2021, I received an offer of publication from the first editor who read Wednesdays at One. As I had always believed it would, my novel had found an excellent home. But what unfolded next would stretch the limits of my belief. Completely fictionalized events in my book, as I had written them, would begin to play out in my life, and not necessarily in good ways.

It began in November 2021 when Mark’s father—relatively healthy at 82—would get sick and be put on a ventilator, almost exactly as Gregory’s father does in the novel. My husband, who always had a complicated relationship with his own father, would start to have healing family conversations in the coming weeks, again, not unlike my protagonist. There was even a moment in December when I was working on the revision for my book—researching ventilators for a hospital scene—while Mark was in the next room talking to his father’s nurse about the prognosis for being on a ventilator.

The next thing that happened felt more personal and trickier to parse. Like Gregory’s wife, Olivia, I began to feel disconnected from my husband. In our marriage, Mark and I tried to solve our arguments swiftly and respectfully, but no amount of processing my feelings with him could keep me from wobbling. I felt like we were both holding something back from each other, and–like Gregory and Olivia—it turns out we were. We spent our 25^th anniversary in such a state of disconnection that I didn’t recognize the couple we’d become. As I sat at a restaurant in a silky white dress, unable to stop myself from crying—exactly as Olivia does in an anniversary scene—I left the restaurant wondering: had that really just happened or was my creative mind fooling me? Did my art just curse my life because I had willed it into being?

In Big Magic, her book about the creative process, Elizabeth Gilbert unapologetically uses words like “fairy dust” and “wizardry” when describing how ideas are birthed into books. She writes, “When I refer to magic here, I mean it literally. I am referring to the supernatural, the mystical, the inexplicable, the surreal, the divine, the transcendent, the otherworldly. Because I believe creativity is a force of enchantment—not entirely human in its origins.”

My previous book, Trove: A Woman’s Search for Truth and Buried Treasure, puts forth the idea that signs appear all around us, and if we trust them, welcome them in, and believe they have things to show us, then they just might lead to treasure. In that book, I relay the story of how, after years of living without any communication on opposite sides of the Atlantic, Mark, who was my college love, and I reconnected through my chance encounter with one of his therapy clients. When people without any woo woo tendencies hear the details of our unlikely love story, they use words like fate, magic, and destiny to explain something that defies explanation.

I have always been fascinated by the mystical, the supernatural, and the wonders of the unseeable world that science often dismisses. And when something magical comes to pass, I often say exactly what Gregory says when he first sees his wife, Olivia and catches her staring back at him: “It felt less like coincidence and more like confirmation.” I live in the land of woo woo, which, if a bit silly, isn’t a derogatory term for me.

I can list at least five fictional moments from my book that manifested in the real world. To say more would spoil the story. And while I’m not claiming to possess psychic powers, we writers are sensitive creatures who spend our days—antennae out—gathering information to use in our work. When creating our character’s trajectories, we often delve into our surroundings and personal histories for inspiration. Perhaps while peering closely at what might be a character’s future, we sometimes are given a glimpse of our own.

After writing Wednesdays at One, I felt the strangeness of my fiction redrawing my own life, as if the filtration of experience and ideas flowed in both directions. I recently got to hold an Advance Reader Copy, and now that the fiction exists in a three-dimensional form, and I can put it down on a table or into someone else’s hands, it at last feels separate from my being. But it is unmistakably generated from the DNA of my life, and the kernels of experience that gave it life.

I imagine I will always have a certain curiosity about the fictional events in my novel that found their way into my reality—that strange transference between art and life. And while my detachment from my husband eventually resolved with some good, hard conversations, I’m still not sure how it related to my book, only that it did. Maybe it’s enough to recognize that all of our stories—real and imagined—are connected in mysterious ways that no person or piece of writing can possibly explain.

___________________________________________

Wednesdays at One by Sandra A. Miller is available now via Zibby Books.

When I was hired for a tenure-track English professor position, a colleague said to me, “You’ll never write another word.” I was slightly offended, since I had at that point been writing professionally for almost thirty years. Teaching was a third career for me, after journalism and television writing, and one that seemed a good fit for a professional writer turning her hand to novels. Fridays off, summers off—what could go wrong?

I soon understood what he meant. Teaching composition and critical thinking to a hundred students each semester is an all-consuming endeavor. The student body at our rural California community college is an eclectic mix: in any given classroom, I had students still in high school getting college credit, veterans back from Iraq and Afghanistan transitioning to civilian life, foster youth living on their own for the first time, parents of small children working a full time job, parents of small children working two full time jobs, second language learners, and full-time 4.0 students preparing to transfer to places like Berkeley and UCLA.

The first year was overwhelming as I struggled to support and prepare all of them to excel in academic writing, but more pointedly, to put themselves, their ideas, their hopes, their insights, into words on the page—with a properly formatted Works Cited page, of course. Each student was required by our course outline to produce 6,000 words in formal essays. That meant about four shorter writing assignments in and out of class each week to prepare them for those longer essays.

On average, and with no teaching assistant, I was reading about a million words of student writing each semester, much of which was far from coherent and required clear, helpful feedback to get there. Forget Fridays off—I was working eighteen hours a day, seven days a week, and still falling behind. And the stakes were so much higher than I had imagined; these students were not just names in a gradebook—they were people, most of them living below the poverty line, who desperately needed to know what I was teaching them.

But huge obstacles kept coming between us—their kids were sick, they got evicted, their parents got deported, they had to work a last-minute double shift, they had undiagnosed dyslexia/depression/bipolar disorder. I quickly realized they were not in any way less intelligent or less motivated than the people I went to school with at Harvard. They just had less money.

The careers they were aiming towards were things our community really needed: nurses, teachers, firefighters, farmers. If I could just help them get there, the world actually would be a better place. When choosing between another Sunday spent grading or spent writing, I started asking myself whether any piece of fiction I composed would really have the same impact as helping others find their voices and change their lives.

At that time, I was working on my third novel, which had dual protagonists and was set in Italy in 1956. It required careful research and total focus. As my first semester teaching full time built to a climactic Mt. Everest of ungraded essays, I had panicked conversations with a grad school pal, a veteran teacher and writer. He asked, “Are you spending more time grading their work than they spent writing it?” Yes. “Are you giving them more feedback than they can take in?” Yes. “Are you working on your novel?” No.

Somehow, I managed to claw my way through the semester, finish the novel, and survive—barely. Over the eight years since then I have helped about two thousand people write with purpose, support their arguments with documented research, and objectively analyze the arguments of others. Besides freshman comp and critical thinking, I’ve taught Women in Lit, World Lit (or as I call it, “Two Hundred Countries, Four Thousand Years”), and one semester of Creative Writing. I still have no teaching assistant, and I read every word my students write (though admittedly I do skim some assignments).

What’s also important is that I have finished and sold two more novels to a major publisher, and have a third underway. I finally managed to find the balance between teaching and writing that allows me to do my best work in both careers.  What’s my secret? Being willing to sacrifice things other than my writing (or being a good teacher). I don’t travel as much as I used to: I stay home and work. I don’t allow myself much goofing off time.

I’m often really tired at the end of the day and so I’m not up on the latest shows or podcasts (or, sadly, books). I never clean my house (spiders’ paradise, tumbleweeds of dog hair). Errands come after writing and grading, if they get done at all (“Sorry—I have cheese but I’m out of crackers.”). I’m single, and I’m not sure whether that was a choice or the side effect of no free time (or maybe the state of my car scared them off). Within the limits of the hours available, I try to be a good friend and a good pet owner. I try (mostly unsuccessfully) to exercise.

But… the good moments make the sacrifices feel worth it. At the end of the semester I get notes from students telling me how I changed their lives. Sounds cliched, and yet it never gets old. I tell them their writing matters (even in the age of Chat GPT), and I mean it. That means my own writing matters, too. This week I have a novel coming out—it was five years in the making and at one point my publisher asked me to move it back a hundred years in time. I agreed, and I’m very proud of the finished product.

It’s an optimistic story of a young woman making her way in the world with moxie and brio, except the world she’s living in is Mussolini’s Italy on its way to war. In writing her story, I tried to calm my own fears about the world we’re living in now, and I looked to the words of women from the past to help me. Just the kind of thing I encourage my students to do.

If you are a writer contemplating teaching, or a teacher contemplating writing, please don’t think the two are mutually exclusive. If you’re doing both and feeling overwhelmed, hang in there. My colleague was well-meaning but wrong; you can teach and write. You need to recognize the value in both, and accept that you probably won’t excel in both on the same day. And there are other things you won’t excel in at all—but you will raise some champion spiders and some really enormous dust bunnies.

__________________________

Sally Brady’s Italian Adventure by Christina Lynch is available from St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan, Inc.

Sometime halfway through the year 2021, my friend Lee Stringer—arguably the most important formerly homeless American writer since Jack London—told me he’d gotten a diagnosis of something called smoldering myeloma.

Smoldering is some word. Lee and I passed it back and forth between us like a football. It meant he didn’t yet have what he was diagnosed with—but would soon. Smoldering meant the fire inside Lee’s bone marrow was already burning. Eventually you can get bizarre looking cancerous tumors that jut out of you in the shape of coat hangers. You get to die fast, or you can live for a long time with the disease—though it cannot be cured. Lee still felt pretty good, and in any case the doctors still weren’t sure what Lee had.

A month or two later, I’m in knee-deep surf off the Spanish island of Minorca with my youngest child talking to two oncologists, a husband and wife, from England. Oh, so you’re cancer specialists, I say. So I have a friend who has just been diagnosed with smoldering myeloma. What can you tell me?

_________________________________

To help support Lee, feel free to contribute if you wish and at whatever level feels comfortable: GoFundMe.

_________________________________

They tell me this: You don’t want your friend to be treated by the doc around the corner. They’ll all say they can do it, but they can’t. You’ve got to get him to the top place in the US for multiple myeloma, and that’s UAMS at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock. We know because they just hired our best multiple myeloma guy.

I came home with this little treasure chest of information and called UAMS. But Lee didn’t have a passport or New York State identification right then and it was too far to drive.

In December, finally, we set out. By then, Lee was not feeling so great. At every security point, it took an extra half-hour to get him through without proper identification. Pretty soon I was pushing him in a wheelchair, and by the time we got to Little Rock we were both exhausted. Lee had made friends, though, with almost every person we met. The sheer life force in Lee was undiminished.

That was Monday, December 13th, 2021. The tests on Lee filled all of Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I accompanied him on the first day, then worked from our shared hotel room on the second and third days. On Friday morning, we packed our suitcases and returned to the hospital one last time to see the oncologist. All the nurses and receptionists knew Lee by then, some had ordered one or another of his books, and asked him to sign it for them. There was a lot pride showing in having Lee on their floor or in their ward.

The oncologist said, as he pored over the results of all Lee’s tests: If you go home, you’ll be dead in four to six weeks. If you allow me to admit you and start you right away on a regimen of five different chemotherapies, and you respond well to the treatment, you might yet still have a full and productive life ahead of you.

Lee stayed, and I flew back east alone. That was a year and a half ago. He responded beautifully to the chemo. He was able to return home in the middle of January 2022, and to continue treatment locally through Sloan Kettering’s outpatient service in White Plains. Today he’s got two book projects going, is able to walk short distances without getting short of breath, and has (all but) stopped smoking.

*

June 2023 is the 25th anniversary of the publication Grand Central Winter: Stories from the Street, Lee’s first book, a near masterpiece that appeared at the end of June 1998, with an introduction by Kurt Vonnegut.

It’s his memoir of life on the street from the mid-‘80s to the mid-‘90s, the go-go years when Wall Street was spinning in a mergers & acquisitions frenzy and that same take-no-prisoners, fast-lane attitude was mirrored on the streets of New York City, fueled by crack cocaine.

Lee was a kind of vagabond prince of the homeless life in those years. He writes about the marginalized people that were his friends, many with substance abuse and mental health issues, some selling their bodies, others with a stint in prison on their resumes. The way Lee tells it, they are living full lives. You want to invite them over to dinner to get to know them better. They aren’t scary, just fellow human beings.

*

I’m a writer, book editor and book publisher, the first by choice, the second and third by destiny for lack of a better word. Back in 1995, I found myself on the #1 train headed south. I’d just bought a copy of Street News for a dollar from a guy on the train with a stack of them. The train got stuck between stations for about 25 minutes. And me with nothing else to read. So I read that issue of Street News cover to cover.

“Bye-Bye” Street News was the headline, with a picture of a guy (it turns out it was Lee) with a gun to his head. About half the contents seemed to be written by that same guy, someone named Lee Stringer—everything from his “Tales from the Rails” column, to an Ann Landers style advice section called “Ask Homey.”

I liked the writing style. So when I finally got to my office I called the newspaper’s editor at the time, Janet Wickenhaver. Was the paper really closing? Was there some way we could help? Tell me about this Lee Stringer guy.

Fast forward a couple of weeks. Lee and I are enjoying lunch at Souen on 13th Street near Union Square. A few days later he’s under contract for a book. I didn’t know he was using crack.

Some months later, I’m visiting Lee at the Street News offices, near 43rd Street and 9th Avenue. Lee is now the editor and is also sleeping there discreetly under his desk nights, a step up from living under Grand Central Station as he’d done in the late ‘80s.

During my visit to the Street News office, he introduces me to some of the people he would be writing about in the book. I thought they seemed nice. No, no, no, he would tell me later. He had brought me to meet them so that I would tell him to stay away from them. He was beginning to realize that in order to write his book, he was going to have to turn his life around and distance himself from people who were using.

Then I got a call from his friend Indio, who would himself become editor of Street News after Lee. Lee had asked him to call me to tell me that Lee had gone into a treatment program. I said to myself, There will be no book now.

But I was wrong. After two consecutive six-month stints at Project Renewal, Lee reappeared like an elemental force of nature, a tornado, no longer a crack user, but still a free man. He’d been right: In order to write about crack and his life on the street he had needed to get off the street and off crack.

Writing a book can save you sometimes, but it’s hard to do, and in Lee’s case it was doubly hard. He had to find his strength before he would get the fuel that would strengthen him, like someone who needs to win a war before he is given the arms with which to fight. Truly amazing.

So, all out of order, these are some chapters in Lee’s life as a writer. We’re at the beginning of a new chapter, and for this one Lee needs our help.

______________________

To help support Lee, feel free to contribute if you wish and at whatever level feels comfortable: GoFundMe.

I was stunned when my first short story was published. It was one of four stories selected for the Chicago Tribune’s Nelson Algren Award in 1993; I was 34. The paper flew me and my wife from San Francisco to Chicago for a grand literary banquet; we were seated at the front table next to E. Annie Proulx (there for the Heartland Prize) and Wayne C. Boothe, whose The Rhetoric of Fiction sat on my desk back home with a bookmark in the section about unreliable narrators—my go-to P.O.V. As a newbie to author table-talk, I fretted over the knot in my tie and kept my mutterings to food topics.

Ms. Proulx was also quiet at the table, but generous later when she showed my work to her Park Avenue agent, who seemed to represent half the Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling world, and who then took on my hastily drafted first novel. All this in eight months, during which I was unable to sleep, write, or talk to anyone about anything other than My Book.

But no one picked up My Book. When my Park Avenue agent, who had a voice like silk, and who’d always been gracious and honest with me, said, “I’m kind of out of ideas,” it took me a very long time to realize: Me, too. I was stunned again. I drifted into a decision to pull back and find a reliable job to cover my half of the rent while San Francisco lurched into the dot-com boom.

My third attempt at a novel, Outer Sunset, will be published by University of Iowa Press on May 15, 2023. I’ll be 64. Much of it was written on once-a-week “writers’ nights” at the library, which my wife and I scheduled around raising kids and workaday life. After so many years, this novel feels earned: the book deal came after countless drafts, queries to 200-plus agents, and as many rejections (minus one). I think I know what I’m doing now. All the same, this new round of good fortune can feel overwhelming sometimes. Too much.

Despite a full adulthood of changes, I often feel as shaken and off-balance as my 34-year-old wannabe-writer self once did. I’m not sleeping well; my edges are worn, my focus thinning. And that younger guy keeps popping up, looking lost and anxious all over again, tapping me on the shoulder as if I am now supposed to help him, somehow. Like he needs my reassurance: Yes, you’re making the right choice.

It’s exhausting, so close to launch. What to do? To get on the same page, I interviewed him.

Me Now (“Now”): Let’s start by acknowledging that, since your first novel has fallen through, despite the prize and all, you’ve chosen to seek professional counseling. For the first time in your life. From my side of things—30 years ahead of you—I can reassure you there: Good decision! It’s always good to talk to someone.

Younger Me (“Younger”): Duh.

Now: But why do you say it’s “all over”—that you’ve already “failed”? Why not see if another agent has different ideas? Worked for me.

Younger: Don’t you recall these rejection letters? The senior editor who says he’s sorry, but would love to be there when I finally give my “stylistic horse full rein”? Or the other one, who’s looking forward to when I “harness” all my “considerable potential”? I’m not sure what to do with this sort of feedback, but I do think it’s safe to assume the Park Avenue agent knows what she’s talking about—that she did her best, and that my novel simply isn’t good enough.

Now: You’ll say that about your work for years to come, you know—that it’s “not good enough.”

Younger: Oh. Really.

Now: It sounds like you’re growing kind of cozy with these rejections. Like you enjoy how high-caliber and contradictory they sound. I see you’re tempted to work in that “I’m just a first-gen college farm boy” thing, too.

Younger: I’m figuring that part out. But what I am certain of is: I tried my best with this failed novel. And I don’t think it’s unreasonable to explore the possibility that “my best” isn’t good enough to hop over the wall. Happens to people every day. Maybe I had too much good luck all at once.

Now: You sound cynical! Do you really think your story won the Algren—out of thousands of entries—and Proulx’s attention and the agent’s support because of luck alone?

Younger: I have my doubts. A first-person story with an old white male wannabe writer speaking as an unreliable narrator, martini in hand: That’s not such a hard sell.

Now: You may be surprised, one day.

Younger: Well, that’s the bogeyman in my mirror. What can I say.

Now: What do you hope to change in counseling, then? Aside from getting some rest?

Younger: A new story, maybe? I met this certified counselor, Dorothy, in a spirituality workshop. We’re learning to do centering prayer—like in Franny and Zooey—where you sit still, stifle your inner chatter, and listen. I’ve been trying for months and getting nowhere, for obvious reasons. But Dorothy’s got it. She’s old—like 50!—but she still rides her bike around the city and backpacks alone in the Sierras. Looking into her eyes is like looking down a well. She creates peace when she speaks. And, best of all—she works cheap! I can even do this through the Employee Assistance Program at work.

Now: But you haven’t said what you hope to change. Have you considered whether you might be doing this for diversion? Simple avoidance? I’m asking because I remember how you procrastinate by insisting on perfect conditions before writing, like the special chair, coffee just hot enough, all the neighbors quiet…

Younger: I didn’t say I plan to stop writing. I’m not going to counseling to run away from writing.

Now: What if writing is the thing you’re using to divert yourself from even bigger issues, stuff you might dig up during counseling? Family messes, for instance?

Younger: What if? We’ll see. At least I’m taking steps, instead of sitting around talking to myself.

Now: What if what you’re really, secretly hoping to do is make lightning strike twice? Hoping that this high-stakes year you’ve just lived through—this drama—might happen all over again, but that this time you’ll know exactly how to master it and make things go the way you want?

Younger: I’m not thinking that clearly. It’s possible. I don’t have the crutch of hindsight you do. But your attitude—the control—doesn’t sound right.

Now: What if it’s simply envy you’re struggling with? Because I can tell you: You’ll be seeing a lot of friends and fellow writers do quite well for themselves in the years ahead. Those other Algren winners, for example—they’re all going to sell their novels, and two will be NYT bestsellers, and one of those will also win the National Book Award and get on Oprah—all before you ever get another story in print.

Sure, you can tell yourself that these writers live in New York and work in publishing or they’re Ivy-Leaguers or they’re more sophisticated than you, but you’ve met them and you like them and you’ll always know in your heart that their success was worked hard for and earned. Don’t you worry about carrying a little chip on your shoulder, dismissing people who “make it” as sellouts? Aren’t you afraid this might poison your writing? Your love of books?

Younger: [Long pause.] Well—I sure do hope not. At all costs I want to avoid becoming a caricature of the bitter, drunken, failed writer and father. But I guess feelings like that might arise, sometimes. Add that to the list of stuff I’ll work through with Dorothy: Learning how to not become an angry old fuck.

Now: Easy now.

Younger: You started this.

Now: I’m asking what your hopes are, in this moment of self-defined “crisis.” Not what you want to avoid.

Younger: My hopes for counseling?

Now: That, and for letting go of your first novel. What’s the goal?

Younger: And just so I’m clear on why you’re asking me to get all “strategic” about life here: You’re pretending you don’t already know where my choice to stop and take stock will lead?

Now: I may not fully understand the moment you’re in, just as I didn’t fully understand it 30 years ago. If I had, it’s doubtful we’d be talking now. Today, in addition to feeling shaken, I also feel foolish to still have doubts about the value of my writing, the integrity of my public face, and about how far I’m willing to go this time around to promote my work to reach as many readers as possible.

I even doubt the value of literary fiction in the face of how fast the world’s falling apart. You won’t believe how thoroughly that World Wide Web will transform culture; how transactional, quantifiable, and stark all those yes/no software “choices” will make every interaction; or how easy it will be for bad, powerful people to lie convincingly, instantly, on a global scale (and in 3D!); and how strong, nimble, and clever you’ll need to be to keep up, stay true, and follow your heart. Hell, even just to know your heart. And then teach your kids?!

Looking back at you, as you and your wife begin to raise babies, and crank up your careers, and tend to your aging parents, and make and lose friends, and move, move, move—I guess, from my side, I’m seeing you as more alive and in touch with your heart, right in the middle of this “failure,” than I am now. Or may ever be again.

Younger: You don’t know for sure what you may have given up at my age, or why.

Now: I know I’ve done the best I could for all my people. I’ve successfully dodged most of the hangdog, wannabe life—which may be the main outcome of the self-examination you’re doing now—but no, I’m still not 100% certain about all the choices I’ve made. Hence this brief interview.

Younger: You surprise me. The percentage.

Now: I’m asking you—my younger, more energetic, hopeful, less-heartbroken, and better-rested (you are, believe me) self: Why am I off-center? What can I do about it?

Younger: I could ask you a question.

Now: If you do, we go into it knowing that unavoidably ends this conversation. Game over.

Younger: Or—maybe I’ll ask, but you don’t answer. Not here.

Now: Shoot.

Younger: Because what you’re describing doesn’t sound like your everyday fear of penury, pain, or death.

Now: There’s always that. But no—not the same thing.

Younger: And, if I hear you right, you’re certain it’s been triggered by the fact that you’re finally publishing a novel.

Now: Exactly.

Younger: So, my question would be: Why do you think you don’t know your own heart better now, in your old age, than you did back here, when you were me? Who wouldn’t feel agitated when finally making real one of the highest, longest-held dreams of their life? It’s exciting, right? Why should that seem unnatural? Or like it’s some problem to fix?

Why not focus on all the good conversations you’ve shared over the past 30 years with writer friends, people you’ve known and loved for decades? Why not recall all you’ve read and written, and the depth and richness that’s brought to your everyday life, and how it’s informed the raising of the two beautiful kids we’re planning while staying happily married, all that time? Imagine how pale the life you’ve lived (ahead of me) would have been if I hadn’t stumbled awhile over these questions you’re replaying now?

Articulate that; burrow down, through, and go under that, just as I’ll do soon with Dorothy on my side, and then you’ll be rid of me, once and for all, when you answer me: How priceless and delicious a gift was that—to have had a literary life?

__________________________________

Outer Sunset by Mark Ernest Pothier is available from University of Iowa Press.

I was drinking a cup of coffee in a Vancouver hotel lobby earlier this year when I heard a few of my fellow guests talking about the Moleskine store display elsewhere in the room. One of them didn’t seem entirely convinced that it was real. “Is this a front?” she asked her traveling companion. Elsewhere in the room, I thought of my time spent in Moleskine stores in New York City, looking through racks and shelves featuring notebooks, writing implements, and other devices central to the craft of writing.

I didn’t leap to my feet and shout, “It’s no front!” because that would have been creepy and wildly inappropriate. But I definitely thought about their comments long after they left the space. Writers have an interesting relationship with their tools and implements.

On the desk in front of me is a mug filled with pens (and a few pencils) of different makes and models, only about half of which I enjoy writing with. Three feet to my right is an array of as-yet-unused Field Notes notebooks; I’ve been a subscriber for a few years now, and once wrote an article exploring how the company goes about creating a new design.

And whether you’re a writer yourself or simply interested in their lives and works, specific destinations inspired by the craft of writing have become more widespread. Institutions like the Morgan Library will periodically feature exhibits of the ephemera of writers—including a 2011 show of writers’ diaries. The Tate Modern show Surrealism Beyond Borders featured poet Ted Joans’s Long Distance, a massive and bound exquisite corpse drawing that featured contributions from a host of writers, musicians, and artists. In this particular case, the work was still being contributed to over a year after Joans’s death in 2003.

There’s even a growing aspect of literary trappings to boutique travel. Brooklyn’s Wythe Hotel, for instance, sells a notebook produced in collaboration with Public Supply. And earlier this year, Montblanc Haus opened in Hamburg, Germany. The space is currently home to a permanent exhibition focusing on the handwriting of celebrities across the ages, as well as a temporary exhibition that spotlights patrons of the arts.

It’s enough to make you wonder, however… do writers have a tendency to fetishize certain tools of the trade? Or is the amount of collective headspace dedicated to notebooks, pens, pencils, and the combinations thereof precisely the right amount?

*

One thing is for sure: interest in writers’ physical writing is very real. As Alexa Schilz, the Director of Brand Strategy for Montblanc, explained, the company had the beginnings of what would become the first exhibition there before Montblanc Haus officially opened. “Our heritage department was already in the possession of multiple authentic autographs from some of the most remarkable writers from the past, such as Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie or Thomas Mann,” Schilz explained. She also clarified that the growth of that collection is an ongoing process.

“We aim at bringing a maximum of diversity into the collection featuring handwriting from people who left their mark in past or present, using a variety of languages, alphabets and writing styles to express themselves,” she said.

As for whether or not Montblanc Haus might work more closely with literary organizations in the future, Schilz didn’t have many specifics to reveal. “Most certainly, the collaboration with writers and organizations in the field will play a major role in the months and years to come,” she said.

Schilz also stressed that Montblanc Haus was also designed with the local community in mind. “We have such a rich storytelling related to our roots, craftsmanship, innovation, design and writing culture, and Montblanc Haus was designed to be the place to showcase all of that,” she said. “At the same time, Hamburg is the birthplace of Montblanc and it is the place where all our writing instruments are created. Montblanc Haus is therefore also a beautiful way to open our doors to Hamburg’s public.”

That focus on the community also played a part when talking with people whose profession involves selling paper, pens, and other writing accessories to the public. Kelly Henick, the Assistant Pen Buyer at Portland, Oregon’s Oblation Papers & Press noted that, in her opinion, writers and artists “are our core customer base.”

Sometimes, they’re also involved in selling pens, pencils, and stationery to other writers. Zach Barocas is the co-owner of Brooklyn’s Measure Twice—as well as a poet and the operator of an independent press. He observed that his own close relationship with writing paraphernalia had changed over time. “Like many of us, I’ve spent countless hours researching and trying new or different, and ‘better’ materials,” he said. “I’ve pretty well settled in, however, with the idea that anything can work but it has to be attractive to the user; that is, the best materials are the ones we want to use.”

Both Henick and Barocas shared plenty of recommendations when it comes to paper and writing implements. (Both are big advocates of Tomoe River paper, for one thing.) And both told me that they’d seen an uptick in people interested in writing gear during the pandemic.

“During the height of the pandemic, we had a lot of people come to us wanting to get into the fountain pen hobby,” Henick said. “I think it helps us feel more connected to each other to receive handwritten notes and handwriting our thoughts and feelings in journals.”

*

To go back to the stack of unused Field Notes for a moment—there’s a part of me that admires their design to the extent that it feels wrong to mar that look and feel by doing something gauche like, you know, actually writing in them. That’s one thing that’s kept me from making my way through them as much as I’d like; the other is trying to match the design of the notebook with the themes of a project, which I realize is borderline insufferable.

But it brings up a larger question: at what point do the tools of writing go from functional objects in their own right to signifiers that give the trappings of being a writer without ever having to sit down and write?

That also came up when talking with Barocas. He spoke about his fondness for one particular notebook in part because of its relatively humble design. “LIFE Vermillion ruled notebooks are a favorite,” he said. “The paper is wonderfully receptive to any pen or pencil, and if the paper’s color is a bit unorthodox, it’s quite easy on the eyes. They’re also fairly humble books, paper covers, sewn bindings, roughly 70 pages—not the notebook one might reserve solely for one’s most profound thoughts. It’s a notebook one can dig right into.”

He also spoke about the ways in which writing can impart a sense of community. “As our culture retreats further and further into minimalist fantasies and streaming, for example, it becomes almost a kind of moral position for some people to have some pens and notebooks around, to send a card or letter, to write poetry or prose longhand,” Barocas said. “It’s not uncommon to [see] these same people writing more, reading books, buying records. These practices bring people together in ways that are better described elsewhere but are worth noting anytime. We feel less isolated with pen and paper, perhaps more in tune with the prospect of something happening outside ourselves.”

That, in turn, speaks to something inherent to the writing process for plenty of writers. It can be difficult to feel the progress of a new work—especially when dealing with the ephemera of a digital file. I can point to a stack of notebooks related to a specific project and draw a certain comfort from that, and I can’t be the only one. (Just as I can’t be the only writer who sometimes posts notebook photos on social media.)

The last few years may have deepened the ways in which writers engage with their writing instruments of choice, but the tradition that informs that engagement extends much deeper into literary history.