The End of a Writer
What poetry and writing and publishing mean (and don't mean)
When I worked at the pawn shop, we often had customers come in with their white gold rings and ask why their rings looked dull, sometimes even accusing us of selling them a “fake ring”. I would tell them that there’s no such thing as actual white gold, and that all white gold is just gold with metallic alloys and chemicals to give it that silver color. To make white gold jewelry even brighter, you can use rhodium. So we would send these white gold rings off to our repair guy for rhodium plating. It only cost $14 and took a week.
I always liked seeing the final reveal. A dirty ring buffed and polished into a gorgeous, near-new piece. The customers were always happy with the final result, and they would return once their white gold rings had dulled, guaranteeing future service and business for the pawn shop.
That new and shiny thing in your grasp will fade into something normal and maybe ugly. You can plate it with a chemical reaction or alloy for a temporary sheen, but nothing can escape the eventual wear and worn. Not even time.
When Entropy announced their closing last November, the news saddened many of those in the online literary community. Entropy’s greatest resource, aside from publishing all types of original creative work, was Where To Submit: a quarterly mega-compilation of presses, contests, and literary magazines open for submissions. It listed fee amount, genres, and even payment. Although Heavy Feather Review now houses this database, the loss is personally incalculable. Entropy published my essay about the year(s) of online harassment I faced and the failure of accountability on behalf of established literary journals after its intended home, VIDA, dropped the essay without reason. After being subjected to trolls and threats upon publication, Entropy nevertheless stood by me when VIDA didn’t. For that, I thank all the editors I worked with who supported me in one of the darkest moments of my life.
But Entropy is not an institution or government-run organization—it was run by people like me who invested their time and effort into curating a database and a literary presence. We carry our mental health and stresses and emotions and good vibes and bad feelings and every single aspect of us into this labor (and often without payment).
I highlight the ending of Entropy as a parallel to my own feelings about writing. Do writers ever end? I say I am a poet but I write other things. I also don’t write. Am I transformed due to this? Am I, in some way, ending a part of my life?
Hannah in graduate school was a different writer than Hannah in high school. Hannah now is a 30 year old with a day job. I don’t know where being a writer exists in all this. Maybe it doesn’t.
I haven’t read much lately. I stopped reading Nightbitch halfway through. I started Anne Helen Petersen’s Can’t Even and plan to (eventually) finish it. I did, however, read Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty. I reread Girl with the Dragon Tattoo in an attempt to get me to finish, well, anything. I thumbed through some poetry collections backlogged from AWPs past. I click on the pre-order button for books but never hit payment. I share my friends’ new books and publications online. I co-edit an online magazine that will shift into a different submission and publication schedule. My attention span is limited, and I grow angry when I can’t just sit down and reading a fucking book, oh my god, just do it Hannah.
It’s only in places like auto repair shops and laundromats that I manage to get any reading done without force or guilt. I believe it’s due to being in a liminal space where I’m not in control of in-progress chores or tasks. I’m not distracted by the tv or YouTube or the internet. I have a book, a chair or bench with poor back support, and anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours of uninterrupted time.
Unless I’m missing the application paperwork for the Suds n’ Rinse Laundromat Residency for Broke Writers, going to these places isn’t a consistent way of getting any reading done.
I imagine I am not alone in the disconnect from aspects of the “writing” “life”. Even if we weren’t entering year three of a pandemic, my emotional distance from writing (poetry) has been growing further and away.
So I try. I submit a few things, get rejected. The rejection doesn’t hurt. I got rejected from a state arts grant. That one hurt. So I apply for the NEA grant in poetry. I rationalize that it’s fine if I don’t win it because why would I? What have I done? The resentment builds. My frustration with private institutions grows. Capitalism seeps into poetry as it does with all things.
I write 2000 words on things that maybe don’t matter to the world. I opened this essay with an anecdote from my time in the pawn shop. How things wear down over time. It’s a rough definition of entropy. Yes, also Entropy. Am I smart enough to draw that comparison? Did I learn anything?
There’s some sort of end happening in me. A movement from one thinking to another. As founder and executive director Janice Lee said in the Entropy farewell post, “[e]ndings are simply new beginnings”. I want to believe that, anyway.
I’ve been feeling many of the same struggles you’ve described here for a long time. Since the beginning of my artistic “career,” such as it is. Call it 12 years or so, maybe? I’ve gone through a number of fallow periods, times when I felt disconnected from art or writing, times when I had a hard time even taking in other people’s work, times when I questioned what the point of it all is, whether I even cared about any of it anymore. I’m in such a period right now—the past year was the worst of my entire life so far, and having still not fully recovered from it, this fallow period is the deepest I’ve experienced. And I do find myself wondering whether I am actually merely fallow or whether I have become barren.
I’m going to say something here that I hope doesn’t come across as condescending, even though I know I would have found it condescending and sometimes still do: you’re still young. You’re older than you’ve ever been, for sure. And you’re no longer a child, for sure. You don’t feel young. But you are. (All this applies to me, as well.)
That is to say, you have every reason to expect that you have a lot of life left ahead of you, as do I. Neither of us has any way of knowing what that life will bring, what changes, what losses, what new beginnings, though we can know with high confidence that loss and change will come. Neither of us know who we will be in twenty years, ten, five, or even next year. It may be that we’ll never fully come back to our art. But for both of us it’s premature to really call this an ending, no matter what it feels like right now.
Your relationship to yourself and to writing (yours and others’) will change over time. That can feel like death, I know. But it is also a consequence of growth. You will be what you need to be, and so will I. You’re doing fine right now, and so am I. It’s okay. It’s enough.