My publicist Stephanie, tells me I’m her most reluctant client.
I don’t like this being true, but of course, she is absolutely right.
My innate resistance to effectively asking people to actually read my collection, Forms of Defiance, borders on the pathological. The whole process is a blur to me, involving computer programs I cannot seem to master, and social media posts to people I hardly know. It just feels like … well, manipulative bad taste or desperation, both on my part. Some part of me wants to write things, then stuff them in the bottom of my drawer, never much admitting how important this process and these stories are to me.
However, there is a greater force at work in me: a deeper reason at play than my innate terror of overstating the importance of this part of my life. Stephanie tells me that promotion is nothing more or less than the elevation of ideas, the offering of my thinking about those ideas to others. And I certainly care about THAT. If I cannot offer this work to someone outside myself, then certainly I am in spiritual jeopardy. Surely a gift not given is a gift that rots. And stories that aren’t shared ….do they even exist as stories at all?
“Surely a gift not given is a gift that rots.”
I’ve said elsewhere that to my thinking a writer is only the first reader of a narrative; it’s readers who actually create the living organism that has any usefulness to anyone except that first reader, the writer. What follows from this idea is a strict adherence to accountability on the part of the writer – not only accountability in the sense of taking ownership of the actual story’s craft, but also of the ideas and thinking that underlie the story. It is my view that this accountability can only be taken if the work is shared.
Whenever I facilitate anyone else’s artistic work, I try to share this idea, and encourage them to share their work by submitting it to journals, to push forward. Elevate THEIR ideas as well as their craft. By doing so, they inspire themselves to do all they possibly can to hone the story to its best. If a story is, in one sense, a ‘gift from the gods,’ then surely it is a gift to share with others. Even as I say it, I’m preaching such accountability to myself, despite my shudders.
As we offer the work on the page to another – we know we are offering an imperfect creation, and ideas from a human, limited intelligence. So even if limited, imperfect … I was quite happy, with my settled conscience, to receive the first printed versions of Forms of Defiance.