From the Mems 1: I Want To Write, pt. 1

I’ve wanted to write since June 2024.

A newspaper showed up in my mailbox. I love newspapers. I recall Sunday morning shifts at the gas station, thirteen years ago, excitedly perusing the New York Times because its Sunday edition was so thick with words. The challenge of keeping the unwieldy pages lined up and the tactile game of turning them smoothly.

Plus, I would look at the job listings. I knew there would likely be some position that wasn’t posted online, since a contingent of this county’s inhabitants, maybe even the majority, still treat the internet as optional (admittedly one of this place’s better qualities). What I found was a highlighted box advertising a “general assignment reporter” position at the paper itself. My heart leapt — could I get paid to write? 

Never mind that I’d never truly pursued journalism. I once covered an improv comedy event for my college paper, then in its first year. I took a single class, Writing & Mass Media, from author Jeff Benedict, and learned a lot but did nothing to build on it afterwards, being distracted by other personal matters — more on that later. 

But for at least ten years I had written occasional album reviews and list blurbs for the music magazine Under the Radar, whose headquarters are here in Lexington.

It was that album reviewing experience that would ultimately somehow land me the reporter gig — that, and an unshakeable belief in my ability to identify jobs that are so right for me, it’s as if a place has been saved for me at a specific time, on purpose.

Why was newspaper reporting right for me? Well, that was a mystery. All I knew was that the intention that led me to finally graduate college was one vague goal — I want to write — and this job would get me doing that.

~

I’ve wanted to write since Spring 2023.

I’d just finished my first semester of Beginner Creative Writing at Southern Virginia University. I was about to turn 34. I felt older and superior to everyone in my class. If nothing else, I knew that I’d done more reading than all of them. I’d written several poems, and now, I’d finally completed my first short story of my adult life. 

I’d come back to Buena Vista, Virginia, the year prior, to finish college after a messy faith crisis propelled a dropout, a move across the country, and a five-year career in the Washington State cannabis industry.  I’d come back propelled by one major desire: I want to write.

I want to write stories like Vonnegut, like Chiang, like Borges, whom I’d just begun to read thanks to a hybrid Borges/metaphysics class I’d taken last semester. Speculative, mind-bendy stuff. My first short story, finished to meet a deadline, was about a transgender woman reconciling with a religious ex-lover in the wake of a freeway tire blowout, and it read like an amateur 21st century Cheever imitation — mainly because his story “Reunion” inspired the assignment.

I am not an expert story writer, but my overlarge self-regard gave me some certainty that the medium could be in my future. Further along was my conception of my poetic ability: something is there, but it needs discipline and form. Working on that.

Why do I want to write short fiction or poetry? Hell if I know. I like to read them, and I know that I want to write. It’s as good an attempt as any.

~

I’ve wanted to write since fall 2021. The end of the acid era.

The acid era began in late 2019. LSD seemed like a good way to search for an answer to life’s greatest questions, in lieu of religion, and amongst them was my most annoyingly ever-present question: “What the fuck do I do?”

I’ve long felt that we should stop demanding people decide what they’re going to do for their life’s work. It’s a pernicious idea, that people, especially young ones, should be able to predict anything about the future. We instead ought to normalize taking stabs and fucking up and stumbling into a life path. Maybe it’s not as universal as I think, the pressure I felt to decide something I felt I couldn’t know; but I long resented the idea I was given at a young age that most people know their strengths and desires, and just pick a thing that leads to a fulfilling career.

Even the monumental breakthrough I reached during the acid era — that I knew I wanted to write — was hard fought. My partner L has known she wanted to be an author since childhood. She’d started on a real novel in 2017, and it was really good, and she’d displayed the ability to sit in one spot and write for hours on end. Not only did I not have that ability (thanks ADHD [I suspect]), but I was nowhere near the level of certainty she inherently felt. In addition to the creeping feeling that I’d be ‘copying’ her choice, these factors weakened the conviction of my decision. 

At the same time, over the course of several psychedelic trips, there were recurring themes. We watched good movies under the influence, and my predilection for noticing and relishing good movie writing was greatly enhanced. I reevaluated my relationship with language, realizing that the origin of human language is the beginning of human history as we know it. And I noticed that I always wanted a pen in my hand so I could write down the best tripping thoughts.

To this day, the most valuable tripping thought I ever heard was something Lindsay said to me. I wrote it down and it changed my life. 

She said: “Your handwriting is like the shape of your face.”

I know, on the surface it’s some druggy nonsense. But I cannot overstate the impact this weird little observation has had on me. It was part of a broader understanding I needed to come to: that there’s a large part of who you are as a person that you can’t control, or do anything about, and that’s the person other people perceive as ‘you.’ And that ‘you’ will never be the same person you perceive yourself to be. 

Ever since my loss of faith in 2013, I’d been trying desperately to create myself anew; to determine once and for all who I was and to define myself as such, others’ perceptions be damned. I realized that was in some part folly — a waste of energy. The truth is, no one has a truly accurate sense of who they are in the minds of others. And no one can know the future self they will become before they become it. 

I could never know, ahead of time, what to pursue and what path would bring me the greatest happiness. But I could know one thing for sure: my handwriting was like the shape of my face. That meant that I could put myself in my writing. I could maybe have some effect on the minds of others through the shape of my words. 

It was a powerful enough realization that it gave me enough conviction to settle on one thing: I want to write.

~

I’ve wanted to write since 2013, when I began two large-scale projects that would directly lead to where I am now. One, I began work with Under the Radar magazine, starting with intern work on news articles and eventually writing regular album reviews. Two, the shelf that held my beliefs cracked and I completely dismantled my faith system, the basis for my fractured sense of self.

The Under the Radar internship was a sneaky way to get me to write, because it wasn’t even about the writing. It was all about engaging more deeply with my passion for music. (Which is probably why it took me several more years to circle in on the actual writing aspect.)

To this day, Under the Radar, despite certain issues primarily driven by the diminishing cultural capital of an independent music press, continues to represent many of my own values. It’s not just a magazine, it’s a print magazine whose new issues can still show up in your mailbox and be held in your hands. It’s independent and family-run. It operates primarily by the strength of the stubbornness and passion of its owners and contributors; and of a belief that independent music has value that ought to remain vital and consistent even as corporate music gatekeepers like Spotify do everything in their power to sand off the human edges and funnel everything into the same blandly pleasant, but profitable, box.

In 2013, the magazine was being put together in a Civil War-era farmhouse in the Virginia countryside that its owners, Mark and Wendy Redfern, had relocated to from their initial headquarters in southern California. In a sense, both I and the magazine were both dealing with being unmoored — UTR from its original home base much closer to the entertainment industry, and I from Mormonism. 

The full story of my loss of faith will have to be told another time. But the relevant detail here is that in 2013, I found myself back in my hometown after a failed nine-month stint living in Mormonland, Utah. We had moved there the year prior in an attempt to forge a closer relationship with L’s family, and to strengthen our convictions within the church (get thee to Zion and all that). 

We didn’t expect the opposite result. After a mere nine months immersed in the culture, not only was our faith on shaky ground, so was our entire foundation for our identities and life choices. The only thing that remained certain was that we had been happier, and felt more sure of our religion, in Virginia.

Upon arrival and re-enrollment at Southern Virginia University, I heard about the Under the Radar internship and jumped at the chance. So many things were being destroyed in my life, almost outside of my control, and I needed something to cling to. It turned out that something I’d long suspected was true: that my ultimate source of my sense of self and my spirituality wasn’t God — it was music.

To be continued.