Still Fighting

What does still fighting look like on a Tuesday?

It looks like getting up at 6:15 when the body wanted to stay horizontal until 8. It looks like making coffee before doing anything else because the coffee is the bridge between sleep and functioning. It looks like sitting at the desk and opening the notebook and writing the first sentence even though the first sentence is bad, because the bad first sentence is the door to the second sentence which might be better, and the second sentence is the door to the third, and by the fifth or sixth sentence you are writing something real.

Still fighting does not look like dramatic resistance. It does not look like a fist raised against the sky or a declaration in a notebook or a breakthrough moment. It looks like the cereal aisle on a bad week. It looks like the 4 AM sessions when the writing is terrible and you do it anyway. It looks like hitting send on the post

when you don’t know if anyone needs it and then finding out forty-seven people did.

Still fighting is mostly just: still showing up. Day after day, to the desk, to the notebook, to the pen, to the first bad sentence and the better one after it.

* * *

September 14, Thursday.

He writes six pages in the morning. Four of them are good. He knows the difference — has known the difference for years, developed the judgment that lets him assess his own work with something approaching accuracy. The good pages are the ones where the sentence is doing something more than conveying information, where there is a quality of surprise even for him, where the language is arriving from somewhere deeper than the front of his mind.

He marks the good pages with a small check in the upper corner. He marks the not-good pages with nothing, just leaves them. He does not cross out the not-good pages. They are part of the record.

He types up the good pages. He saves the file.

He makes a second cup of coffee.

He opens the WordVerse notebook and spends an hour on the platform concept. He has been thinking about pricing and he has been thinking about what a sustainable business model looks like for a platform that wants to actually serve writers rather than extract from them. He writes notes. He writes questions he needs to research. He writes, at the top of a page in capital letters: THE INFRASTRUCTURE MUST SERVE THE WORK.

He underlines it.

He closes the notebook.

He reads for an hour — actual reading, not research, not for work. He is in the middle of a novel by a writer he has been meaning to read for years and has not gotten to because the years have been full of other things. He reads in the chair by the window. Ghost climbs into his lap, which Ghost does not usually do in the middle of the day. He reads with one hand and pets Ghost with the other.

This is also the practice. This is also still fighting. The rest is part of the fight. He has been learning this slowly, imperfectly, with frequent backsliding, for years.

* * *

He has been asked, in the comment sections and in the emails from strangers and in the one interview he has given that was long enough to get past the surface, what keeps him going.

He has several true answers.

The work keeps him going. The next poem, the next book, the next line he has not written yet. The work is specific and demanding and when he is inside it he is inside something that requires all of him, which leaves no room for the things that would otherwise crowd in.

The cats keep him going. Ghost on his feet at 4 AM, warm and heavy and present. Omen watching from the shelf with his collecting- information expression, cataloguing him, finding him acceptable.

The people who write to him keep him going. The teenager who showed the Instagram post to their mother. The woman whose son watched the Spectrum News segment and cried for the first time. The person at 3 AM with the notebook who writes: I found your book and for the first time I don’t feel alone in this.

The stubborn thing at his center keeps him going. The part that has said wait every time the alternative presented itself. He does not know

what that part is made of. He does not need to know. It has never failed him. He trusts it.

He takes up the pen again.

He stays with it.

He is still here.

He intends to keep being here.

* * *

He thinks about what the work is for, on the days when the answer is not obvious.

Most days the answer is obvious. The work is for the person at 3 AM. The work is for the reader who found his book at the right moment. The work is for the translation — for taking what the body knows and does not have language for and finding language for it, so that it can be held and examined rather than just experienced.

On the days when the answer is not obvious, he goes back to the archive.

He takes out a notebook at random. Not one of the Holyoke ones, those are sealed. One from the middle period — twenty, twenty-one, twenty- two. He reads it. He reads the person he was writing with the honesty available to someone who is still finding the craft, who has not yet learned to be afraid of honesty, who writes directly at the thing rather than around it

because he does not yet know enough to know that the thing is hard to write directly.

He reads the directness.

He thinks: I need to get back there. The craft has improved but the courage has sometimes lagged behind the craft.

He closes the notebook.

He goes back to the current manuscript.

He writes more directly.

He finds the thing.

He writes it.

He keeps it.

He does not soften.

This is the practice. This is always the practice. The courage to write directly at the thing. The craft to make the directness land.

He is still learning both. He will be learning both for the rest of his life.

The pen comes up.

* * *

The first time his writing appeared in print somewhere he did not control, he found out by accident.

He was twenty, sitting in the library at the community college where he had taken two classes that semester — not as a degree

program, just because the classes were there and he wanted to learn things that the libraries could not teach him alone. He was reading a literary magazine that someone had left on the table, a regional publication out of Northampton, and on page 34 he found a poem.

The poem was his.

He read it twice to be sure. The first reading: disbelief. The second reading: recognition. The line breaks were different — the editor had made changes he had not approved — but the poem was his, from a submission he had sent six months ago and had never heard back from and had assumed was rejected.

He sat in the library for a long time.

He took out his phone and found the magazine’s contact page. He wrote an email that was very controlled and very polite, asking about the process, explaining that he had not been notified of acceptance, noting the changes to his line breaks without characterizing them as a violation.

They apologized. The acceptance email had gone to spam. They offered to publish a corrected version in the next issue. They asked if he had more work to submit.

He submitted three pieces.

They published two.

He has not always controlled how his work appears once it leaves his hands. He has learned to make peace with this — not full peace, not the peace of someone who does not care, but the working peace of someone who understands that publishing is a collaboration and collaborations involve compromise and the alternative is not publishing.

He always submits his preferred version. He always notes his preferences clearly. He accepts what is within his control to accept.

He keeps writing.

He keeps submitting.

He continues.He thinks about what it means to be a writer who publishes.

Not what it means aesthetically or philosophically — he has thought about that extensively and has arrived at positions he holds and will defend. The cost is time. Writing time given over to distribution, to logistics, to the machinery of getting the work out. He resents this imperfectly. He does it anyway. Because the work has to reach people or it is only half itself.

He reaches for the pen.

The page receives it.

He takes in what is there.

This is part of the practice too — the pausing, the looking back, the small assessment that happens in the space between one section and the next. He reads it back. Is it right? Is it true? He does not know yet. The light is different. The day has moved on. His body is tired. Ghost is asleep. Vincent looks at the notebook. The work outlasts the pain. He picks up the pen. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He lifts the pen.

He keeps at it.

The next line always comes.