I'm writing again: a warning

I abandoned fiction writing as an undergraduate. Now I'm giving it another shot.

When?

Once upon a time, I was an English major. I checked all of the boxes. I smoked hand-rolled cigarettes. I wrote serious (and horrible) post-structural critiques of works from authors whose names I can't even remember anymore. I published unreadable poetry in the school journal — and was horrified when asked to actually read it (out loud!) to confused audiences of non-tenure track academics and grad-school burnouts.

It didn’t last. My interest in linguistics metastasized into a full-blown STEM major, which took more and more of my time away from pouring over Walter Benjamin essays I never really understood anyway. It all came to a head when a seasoned professor accosted me at an English department mixer, sloshing her third glass of red wine in my direction, probing when, exactly, was I going to stop all this computer nonsense and get serious about literature? Never, of course. I wanted to make money.

And yet: my professor was right. What I heard was, “are you going to stop all this computer nonsense and get serious about literature?” But what she actually said was, “when are you going to stop all this computer nonsense and get serious about literature?” I didn’t get a choice.

If I don’t write, I daydream. I miss my computer job deadlines because I’m too busy telling myself stories about the lives of people who never lived. I find myself unpacking two packages of paper towels from a grocery bag and zero packages of toilet paper because I was too distracted trying to remember the history of a place that never existed. I am possessed by benign ghosts that won’t let me get on with my life until I learn their stories.

I don’t check many liberal-arts-asshole boxes anymore. I don’t smoke cigarettes. I read more non-fiction than fiction. I haven’t written poetry in years. But my professor’s when? is now. There’s nothing else to it: consider me serious.

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