Welcome to Issue 16 of Obsessions, one femme lesbianâs obsession with the body and culture. If youâd like to support my work, promote it on Twitter, forward it to friends, and feel free to comment on the posts. Until I am able to offer a subscription service, you are welcome to venmo me ($Renee-Greiner) to buy me a coffee if you feel called.
If you write, you know that there are mysterious days where you press backspace and watch the computer erase your work. You have days where you highlight pages and then delete them or you save them with a weird name like
And many, many of those pages will never be touched again. Not by you. Theyâll remain on your laptop or your notebook. In my personal case, I will go back through notebooks with a highlighter sometimes looking for specific lines that may lead to something else.
You have stuff you will write that you will hope no one will ever read because itâs actually bad. Or because itâs misguided because you were trying to write about racism and in order to write about racism, you had to expose that one time you told your brown friend that being gay was harder than being brown. And to tell that kind of story involves actually editing and rewriting and a form of honesty that requires risk and acknowledging how you were wrong. As a writer, you know other writers can offer your bruised product word for word on twitter. This would not be possible if you were a painter or dance choreographer. If youâre a writer, you will write lots of terrible stuff because thatâs part of committing. If youâre a writer whose primary craft is writing and not comedy or acting or creating TikTok videos, you value the craft and the poetry of the prose as much as you value the ability to put something out into the world. When youâre a writer who is focused on the craft, the craft comes before the audience and the audience tends to come to you for your craft.
In August 2015, I threw my most important items (books, little Ganesh and Durga statues, and tarot cards covered in scarves) and mailed them all via media mail from Baltimore, Maryland to Portland, Oregon. My boxes were very heavy and properly packed and they contained some of the most important sentimental parts of me: a book of Anne Sexton poetry that I bought in a used book store in New Orleans with my friend A, a copy of The God of Small Things, and a book called Love Poems from God.
The Anne Sexton book represented all the dripping, watery, violet, existential voids that seemed to gush up every time I would drink Makerâs Mark; Anne represented my friend F and my friend Aida; and my obsession with S who wasnât obsessed with me. And The God of Small Things represented something else; being naĂŻve and collegiate enough to think that being able to love and share literary critiques of a book meant yâall understood each other and all of those friendships would go on for like forever.
When I arrived in Portland, the box containing Anne Sexton, Rumi, and The God of Small Things didnât come. Maybe the muggy, wet August weather in Baltimore had curled around those books and asked them to stay. The copy of The God of Small Things, signed at a book event at Gloria Kaufman hall at UCLA by the author who called herself âthe hooker who won a booker,â opens muggy and wet:
âMay in Ayemenem is a hot, brooding month. The days are long and humid. The river shrinks and black crows gorge on bright mangoes in still, dustgreen trees. Red bananas ripen. Jackfruits burst. Dissolute bluebottles hum vacuously in the fruity air. Then they stun themselves against clear windowpanes and die, fatly baffled in the sun.â
That box never showed up, the box that held the brash and brutal words of my favorite writers. The Rumi book was something I took regularly to teach many of my yoga classes in first New York City and then Los Angeles. I loved that book with the passion of an idealistic person who has been told that she can have a big, big life. One of my favorite poems by Rumi goes:
âBIRDS DONâT BRAG ABOUT FLYING the way we do. They donât write books about it and then give workshops, they donât take on disciples and spoil their own air time. Who could dance and achieve liftoff with a bunch of whackos tugging on you?â
Itâs as if Rumi knew things 100âs of years before Andy Warhol knew 50 years before we knew that in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.
These books do not resembles blogs. They were edited multiple times. Rumiâs poems were probably preserved aurally.
Blogging is a little like trying to find fame as quick as possible. Blogging is a little kid who comes over and puts his fingers all over your full length windows until the entire surface is covered with a large, indecipherable smear. Even if a blogger is writing every day, good days do not happen every day. There are days when writing about your kids shit smeared diaper might help you cope, but you donât really need to publish that post. There are days when I personally start writing about planting roses which somehow turns into a piece about compulsively buying Starbucks and then turns into a post about my latest Lady Gaga dream (we are dating, she has yellow teeth, she treats me more like an enmeshed assistant than a lover).
Meaning, 90% of writing is producing stuff that you will never publish or that you will delete on your computer so that there isnât even a record. I know writers who will never blog because theyâd rather publish two beautiful pieces of art a year then risk putting out messy work. Blogging can be a little embarrassing. Itâs like writing in your journal for an hour, and going wow, Iâm incredibly fascinating and should publish this and everything I have ever thought. I mean I at least know that when I am writing a blog, my sentences do not have the weight and beauty of the the river shrinks and the black crows gorge.
This is the thing though and this will be the most advice-y part of this. If you want a large audience to read your writing either because you want to be able to make a living and pay your medical bills or because you want literary fame, I donât think there is a better, more honest way to do that. I donât think choosing to keep all of your messy rough drafts hidden is going to get you anywhere. The best writers are incredibly self-driven and self-motivated. However, being self-motivated isnât a fixed personality trait. You can develop that trait just by writing for 10 minutes a day and then 20 minutes a day and so forth. There is no reason to assume you donât have that ability, and there is no reason to assume that your favorite creative geniuses did not at some point also go through this stage.
When youâre a comedian or a famous entertainer who writes a book, the publisher buys the book because they absolutely believe that the celebrity name itself will sell many, many books. When youâre a writer who writes the publisher buys the book because they like the book or the draft or the book proposal. And the truth is, with most famous entertainers, their books are overvalued, average Thomas Kinkade kind of stuff. For a little bit of analogy, selling a book as a famous comedian is like getting a job at a good law firm after graduating as a cis white man from Harvard Law School. Selling a book as a good writer is like being admitted to Harvard Law School as a single mother who grew up poor, went to state school, and has no connections to Harvard Law. We are at a moment where folks are beginning to see inequities everywhere and in some ways, this is very, very exciting. But itâs still very disappointing to look around at writersâ fellowships and see applications (which you must pay for) to be awarded $1,000 for an application that requires that you submit 30 of your best pages while we see that the likes of Aziz Ansari, Lena Dunham and Amy Schumer were all paid more than three million for their first book deal. Capitalismâs flaws are more obvious to those of us in the arts because the differences are more striking. There are very few writers who will ever get a $100,000 book deal let alone one in the millions, and there are many writers who will write books for $15k which is not a liveable wage to write, finish, edit and pay the likes of the writerâs literary agent, book jacket photographer and sometimes editor. Usually, when someone getâs a book deal for $15k they have already put 3-12 months into that book (low estimate). Sometimes, I really think that our society is too broken to fix. How can we expect to be inspired and wooed in a world that does not value its artists? What is wrong with us, America?
The writing process can be devastating at times. For me, blogging involves sitting at my laptop with a timer for 30/60/75 minute increments and trying to write continuously. Often, all I am able to create is compost. Repetitive mumbling. Maybe one beautiful phrase strung together. Often, I reveal my own neurotic, unlikeable parts and I delete them (and I wonder all of the time what does it take for a writer to get to the point where they can be so truthful that they donât censor their neurotic, unlikeable parts?). Sometimes I reveal systemic unlikeable parts (the tendency for white collar people who are getting married and essentially celebrating merging their large financial resources by asking everyone to buy them more gifts) and I worry I will have no friends. Often, oh yes so often, I find things Iâm not ready to expose, definitely not without a reasonable book deal (and if you are wondering what I think is reasonable for a book of essays that I have easily put 6 months of full-time work already into and will at least put another 6 months full-time work) I would say $75k is reasonable, but not excessive and not generous.
Queer people must write because history remembers those who write down their stories. As a larger cis-heteronormative culture, we have only begun to believe that consent is something that can be revoked or amended throughout sex because cis-heteronormative women have caught on and wrote many, many think pieces. We the queers taught the cis heteros. If marriage was largely built on top of capitalism as a way of merging resources, it makes sense that that little cis-hetero nuclear family concept wouldnât birth great ideas about consent.
The weakness of fitting into social norms is that you donât have to think about what makes a norm a norm. The strength of being called deviant is that you do have to think deeply about what you believe is ethical and what deviates from your own ethics. The culture of consent was built by the queers who were more comfortable talking about desire because it was our desire that we were being demanded to frame. The writing process is sticky because it involves taking private, messy things and often putting them in front of a microscope. The writing process is smelly because it involves remembering that everything that lives also decays. The writing process is brutal because it involves excising bad lines like taking guests off your wedding list. But if youâre lucky, you will one day write a paragraph that will comfort many, many people from that moment until after you are gone.
Thanks for reading. And feel free to check out what Iâm reading right now.
Renee
What Iâm Reading Right Now:
âThe Fraught Task of Describing Life with David Foster Wallace.â Zan Romanoff. February 10, 2020. LITERARY HUB.
âA Psychiatrist Invited to Yale Spoke of Fantasies of Shooting White People.â Michael Levenson. June 6, 2021. NYTimes.
What Podcast Episodes Iâm Listening To: Cancel Culture. Youâre Wrong About. June 7, 2021. Michael Hobbes and Sarah Marshall.