What He Built

He has been building for eleven years.

He has been building the way you build when no one is going to build it for you — piece by piece, with whatever tools you have, learning the new tools as they become necessary, accepting that the first version will not be the final version and the final version does not exist, there is only the next version.

He takes an inventory on a Saturday afternoon in early October. Not an audit, not a celebration — a quiet accounting of what is real.

Twelve collections. Seven published and distributed. The other five in various stages of completion, drafts and fragments and fully formed things that are not ready yet and the ones that are not ready yet are the ones he is most protective of because readiness matters and he will not release something that is not ready because his name goes on it and his name is the only thing he owns outright and he is careful with it.

Two Amazon Best Sellers. An Inconvenient Attachment, number eleven. A Personal Note: The PTSD Talks, number seven. He thinks about what it means that both of them were about real things — about love that did not work out the way he needed it to, about the PTSD that has organized his life in ways he is still mapping. He did not publish safe books to earn Best Seller status. He published the hardest books he had. They are the ones that found people.

A national media feature. July 28, 2021. Valerie Bell. Worcester.

A website with 29,800 first-month requests.

An imprint. Three pen names. A print brand in development. A platform concept that is beginning to have the specific weight of a thing that is going to exist rather than a thing that might.

* * *

He also has:

Forty-three notebooks in a box in the closet. Each one dated. Each one containing a period of his life that was real and full and sometimes very hard. Evidence that he was there. Evidence that he survived it. Evidence that the language held.

Two cats. Ghost and Omen. One enormous and gray and has never quite grasped that Vincent’s feet are not furniture, which is a feature he has decided to love rather than correct. One small and black and watchful, with the specific intelligence of a creature that has decided the world is worth observing carefully.

One desk, found on the street, sanded down over three weekends.

One apartment on State Street, second floor, view of the city.

One index card above the desk, in his own handwriting:

Where words outlive the wound.

* * *

He thinks about the boy in Holyoke at fifteen.

He does this sometimes, the way you check in with a person you are responsible for. The boy in Holyoke at fifteen, on the floor of his bedroom with the closed door and the loud house and the composition notebook and the pen clicking. That boy did not know that any of this was coming. Did not know about the twelve collections or the Best Sellers or the Spectrum News feature or the website or the platform

concept or the print brand or the forty-three notebooks in the box.

He knew about the notebook in his lap. He knew about the pen in his hand. He knew about the specific relief of writing something true and watching it exist on the page outside of him.

That was enough to start with.

That was everything, it turned out.

Vincent — twenty-six, Springfield, October — would like to go back and tell him. Would like to sit on the floor of that bedroom and say: keep going. All of it is coming. All of it is real.

He cannot go back.

He puts it in the book instead.

* * *

He takes stock of what he has given away.

Not the books — the books are the giving, the main thing, the primary act of distribution. He means the other giving: the posts that he has put out without keeping, the emails he has answered from strangers who found his work and needed to tell someone, the conversations he has had at the few readings he has done where a person came up afterward with the specific expression of someone who has been

waiting to say something and has finally found the person to say it to.

He has given away the language. He has given it freely, without the paywall, without the subscription, without asking anything in return except that people read it and take what they need.

He does not regret this. He has thought carefully about the economics of it — the tension between the work being accessible and the work sustaining the person who makes it — and he has landed in the place he always lands: the accessibility comes first. The language is for the person who needs it. If they can pay for the book, he hopes they do. If they cannot, he hopes they find it anyway.

The platform he is building, WordVerse, is partly about this. Finding a model where the work is accessible and the writer is sustainable. He does not know yet if the model exists. He is going to find out.

He writes: He has built this with his bare hands and he intends to keep building. Not because he expects the building to be recognized. Because the building is the work and the work is the building and there is no version of him that stops.

He keeps the line.

* * *

He has been published by five presses, including his own.

The economics of each have been different, the relationships have been different, the degree of control he has retained has been different. He has learned from all of them, including the ones that did not go the way he hoped.

The press that lost the books — not all of them, some of them, a print run that was supposed to arrive in November and arrived in February — taught him to build in lead time and to never assume that someone else’s timeline is his timeline. The press that changed his title without asking — the book was called Heavy and they published it as The Weight because the sales team thought Heavy was too bleak — taught him to get everything in writing and to negotiate title rights explicitly.

The imprint he built himself, Enrico Port, is the consequence of those lessons. He built it because the alternative was to keep navigating other people’s systems and he is not good at that, has never been good at that, finds the

politics of institutional publishing actively counterproductive to the work.

He is not anti-collaboration. He is not anti- publisher. He is pro-control over his own work, which is different.

He built the infrastructure because the infrastructure he needed did not exist.

He is building WordVerse for the same reason.

He will build whatever else needs building.

He has always built what is not available.

His hand finds the pen.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. This is the practical meaning. Time is the real cost. Publishing pulls hours from writing. He has accepted this. Imperfectly. He would rather be at the desk. He is always rather-be-at-the-desk. But the work requires more than writing. He does what the work requires.

He lifts the pen.

He stays with it.

He looks at the page.

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 is not editing. Not yet. He is reading. Asking: does this hold? Does it carry what it is supposed to carry? He reads the last paragraph again. The light has shifted. The afternoon is almost gone. His back is tight. He has been sitting too long. He gets up. Stretches. Sits back down. Ghost watches from the couch with one eye. Vincent looks at the notebook. The operating principle: the work outlives the moment that required it. The language is what remains. He stays with it. He is making things that will outlast him, that are already outlasting the moments that required them.

He takes up the pen again.

He puts down the next line.

There is always another line.