Another Year

Another Year

Of writing. Of shoveling snow. Planting a garden. Inch by inch.

One word after another. I’m like those old ladies I used to make fun of.

Who keep trying to be relevant. Who think they still have something to say.

I’ve been reading literary criticism of Ernest Hemingway—literary and criticism, the author spends the first 30 pages not necessarily defending Hemingway but acknowledging the criticism of the man, the Hemingway myth. Today’s culture wraps the persona into the writing—the two cannot be separated—making it difficult to really examine the literature.

Hemingway embraced flash and hybrid before they became a thing.

He was king of the declarative sentence. Especially if it focused on an aside.

His sparse, naturalistic dialogue was famous for talking around the subject.

He approached writing as if it were a job. He called it his “work.” Once he got his work done, he’d drink or box or loaf, go to horse races. As he got older, the process got harder and harder. There’s theories that the multiple concussions changed him, neurologically. There’s science now that backs this up, though we’ll never know what made him a shit in his later years or what drove him to kill himself.

I just turned 67 last week and I wonder how much longer I’ll be at this. At my age some people are just getting started and discovering their talent. There are days when I think: What a loser? To still be at this and not having made a name for myself. To still be giving my work away to third-tier journals. (I am grateful for the publishing credits, don’t get me wrong.) I haven’t exactly made a living off writing.

Still, I ask myself: What else would I do?

In these turbulent times, writing helps me process the world.

Hemingway, no longer able to write, found himself unable to engage in the world, life as he knew it. Hemingway shot himself in the head a day and a half after returning home from a psychiatric hospital. 

I guess there’s something to be said for not being a success, for low expectations. Here’s to another year.

Photos found on external hard rive when changing over computers: