White Lady Writers Make Me Want To Die
I have recently been trying to get over the fear in my mind that keeps me from writing fiction and that means thinking concretely about the events that informed my past and that means thinking about my past (and then riffing off it?!). It also reminded me that I have to actively and outwardly be bad at something before I get better at it. Like people actually do have to see it lol.
It also means thinking concretely about the present and that’s just a lot to take in okay? But if I write something it also comes out as it goes in— like a shit— that’s what my creativity feels like thats why i write this once a week and shit three times a day #regular. Or like food I guess I should have said like food. But you should already know that shit is food I know I’m the one writing but read in between the lines you know what figurative language is and if you don’t…….are you taking me literally right now? Any answer is correct.
Here’s some thing I wrote on Wednesday evening:
I think today I will be in the nose plant. I am idling in the refrigerator imagine-eminating the feeling of past limbs. The hard tissue that connects my head to my shoulders. I miss that stability. The vacuum sealed plastic has pressed my lips firmly to my right ear. My left cheek is becoming to feel stretched, molding. I find my toes in the steel of the refrigerator door, probably really somewhere near another Face’s left ear. I am not sure why they still keep the ears, but when I could walk, and feel the sharp wind peel across my face, I’d often pass plastic covered tram signs and bus signs and megaboards and moving pictures behind glass that told me something about the angle of my nose was off. Or my teeth really could be whiter. In my smooth stone device, some would even say certain contours of any modicum of my flesh made me inherently evil. So maybe now it has something to do with the ears.
I am paying for my crimes. They’ve taken all of my teeth out, and I am beginning to forget what it was like to speak without the back of my throat to remind me.
This passage just started spilling out of me after i saw this picture I saved on pinterest a year and a half ago that I found in in an email from a pitch that got accepted but couldn’t get published because the magazine suddenly had to close.
this is the first non-erotic fiction/fantasy I’ve ever written down. I can’t do drugs the same anymore, so it’s just this.
I was fantasizing about what if desirability, spirituality, and wellness commodification made the most fucked up bastard baby of a society? Maybe it is cringe. And I do feel some shame for not coming out of the gate with a completely brand new, original world free from anything I currently experience, but I reckon writing fiction, like making or doing anything worth repeating, takes more than one try maybe probably (hate that). Also most interesting things produced by my head are fucked up and I am over waiting for the flowers to come, I’ll just sniff the ones outside, or maybe the ones in your hair.
For some masochistic reason I have a subscription to Poets & Writers Magazine. I think mostly because I want to peer into the publishing world and see what normies are reading without completely fucking my algorithm.
In it’s most recent issue, an author named Sloane Crosley (what a publishable name) is donned on the cover, a white woman crossing her arms in a way that I am sure is meant to look strong but not too girl-boss-y to intimidate any men who may be in the audience and want to fuck her. She’s been praised by the likes of David Sedaris1 and MSNBC. She wears a pair of smart, square glasses with eyes that beam intensely through the top rim of the lenses. Her eyes say ”god i am so fucking rich you wish you were me”. They have that smug intensity that lets you know that she knows she’s wordy and fuckable, which I might be able to appreciate if this weren’t a thin, educated white woman from White Plains, New York; an area with a median household income of $106,000 a year as of 2021 (I am not giving you a source bitch just go look). I am crying because you got to have a big house and be near to new york. I love my grandmother’s (and hopefully one day my) Harlem duplex but I imagine what it would be like to live off the Metro North fairly regularly. To own moist, dark, brown new york soil and eat from it.
I googled Crosley and her eyes say this in all of her photos. A literature website crowns her “the most chic writer in nyc” or some shit like that. Since when do we care about writers being chic? Will I have to be “chic”? I am riddled with uncertainty and the weight in my face has dropped. I am scowling and trying not to cry. Zora Neale Hurston died penniless with a scarred reputation and was buried in an unmarked grave, how’s that for chic.
As I read her profile, the article’s author makes reference to a broad series of books, films, and people that I haven’t the vaguest familiarity with, and I become intimidated. I start freaking out because who the fuck am I why don’t I know anything but also who the fuck is this lady and why do people get to know who she is when I am funnier and hotter and more interesting. I read that her first book came out in 2008. Hm. I was growing tits in 2008, but also it’s when I found my voice. I am convinced me and this woman’s pens could have gone toe-for-toe when I was aged 9.
In her profile, Crosley details the burglary that occurred in her lower manhattan apartment and I feel no sympathy, I may even feel glee. I read one of her essays from 2009 and about 3 paragraphs in I could tell this is written for someone who’s threshold for making themselves feel bad for human things is very high. Or low? I don’t know exactly how to write what I mean but you know what I mean. Right? She’s just so normal. Everything about her makes me feel unsafe. Her eyes say she would call the police on me.
There’s something I utterly despise about the way consistently-published authors write. Like, they’re too sure that their words will reach other people. I refuse to believe that this many people’s inner voice sounds this stale. This is why I am grateful I didn’t finish school. I can only imagine how sterile my thoughts might sound if I subjected myself to a master’s program (don’t take this personally I am sure your writing is grand, especially because you’re reading this). Regularly published writers clearly know the formula, and I hate to hate on someone getting their coin but I do think it’s bad for art. The voice of these people is clearly not one of someone interesting (read: crazy and well-lived) enough for me to read. If I was more boring and followed the heavily-trodden path, or maybe more medicated, would I be a “respected” voice by now? If I had submitted to the paddle of academia beating me into that bland shape, would I be on the cover of something? Would other artists know who I was?
Do I care?
I wish I could say I was above ambition, but I have, somehow amongst the carnage, ruptured the boil of hope that’s grown in my chest, and now it fluids thump through my muscles into my fingers. I could very easily keep my words to myself, but I have developed an understanding that the world of writing needs more people like me, mostly because I can’t find many people with voices like mine to read. I find myself parsing between the lines of academia-laden language and overused analogies to find the heart of what the author really aims to say. Or constantly editing their words to make it more interesting to read. Making the words dance.
The next section of the magazine is an interview with a different author with the last name Seuss. It’s titled “Cobbled Genius”. The premise of the interview is supposed to highlight the sort of artistic training that can only be gained through life experience and not formal literature education. I thought this article might cleanse my palate, but then the author attributes most of her success to an academic who took a chance on her very young (middle-school young) and I noted that the most relevant aspects of her career do, in fact, happen in classrooms. This made me very discouraged. I am feeling discouraged this week. Nothing happened except watching people who are mediocre get praise and be in magazines and live in million dollar apartments in Manhattan and rural Michigan homes. It’s all very personal2. To add insult to injury, if I want to do anything with my writing I will be forced to watch mediocre white women get things they don’t deserve and not kill anyone in the process (ha ha!).
You may be thinking: “how self-centered can this person be to assume two authors of whom they had no awareness are below them in terms of skill and authenticity?”. I would respond my saying I think my lack of context actually gives me the upper hand here. “Stupid People Rights” as Ziwe would say. When I look at someone’s entire line of work and I am mostly unimpressed… I begin to question what these magazines and grants and award ceremonies are actually looking for. I get to see how their work holds up over time. I wonder what makes magazines reject my very visceral stories while another white girl gets the entire country to sympathize with her. I can only think I would never get that famous with the same portfolio because of who I am and who the public tends to sympathize with aka what sells. This depresses me. I did not ask for any of this.
Sometimes I worry a book of my essays would just make a publisher say “you probably need help and also you deserved everything that happened to you”. I worry even more that I get published and the public says the same thing. This is why I am teaching myself to write fiction.
Similarly masochistically, I have been re-reading So Sad Today by Melissa Broder. This book did a lot to help me find my voice as an early adult in my first year of undergrad. After being force fed “classics” my whole life, this was some of the first contemporary literature I’d been exposed to. The book contains many raw aspects of reality that absolutely require out-loud reckoning. Punchy and easy to read, but not without intense feeling and honesty. But it’s still a fucking white woman’s book. I find myself relating and then I remember all the times a white woman has gone out of her way to make my life as miserable as she had it in her power to. I can’t put that past this author.
In the essay Google Hangout with My Higher Self, Broder enters the metaphysical chat and says she “feels like the plants, babies, trees, the ocean, and the moon hate her”. Of course, her higher self tries to cheer her up but all I can think is maybe it’s because you’re you and *insert history of white women here*. If I was the moon I would hate Melissa Broder and I wouldn’t care if she killed herself about it3. Me and this woman do not have middle ground.
Today, there is a full moon in my 10th house. This is the house of ambition, technique, the way you work with large, often distant groups of people, how you spend great spans of your time. I am feeling a flood I felt the first time I ever dreamt of doing anything. The fear that my aspirations will disappoint me, and the confusion that comes from navigating any career/way of making money/living a human life without the dilapidated road map we’ve been prescribed for time immemorial. Berating potential colleagues probably isn’t the best way to attempt a start but I’ve never known a cancellation to truly hinder a career, so I am provoking famous people like a toddler banging a hornets nest with a stick4. I am infamous in a few places for being extremely apt at hating and why abandon what I do best?
I keep finding myself knowing I am special but I am still and empty whole of want for being accepted by something bigger.
I am discomforted when talking to people who obviously had emotionally safe backgrounds. It makes me wonder who I would be if someone bothered to tell me I could be whoever I want. I hate the calm in their eyes and demeanor. I hate when the white mom says that in the white movies, because everyone only told me anything I ever did was wrong. Like, this blog is not for you if your mommy loves you.
And that’s what I hate about Sloane Crosley and Diane Suess and Melissa Broder; their mommies love them in the way that it’s probably been a lot longer since they themselves or their ancestors had to pack up everything and forget everything and then also play pretend as if they had no problems to speak of. All just to be way too loud about the problems they do have. I hate them because they get to not remember and also because they get to be so confidently fucking average. They keep getting published. Writing is their day job.
This hate is not to meant in sanity and I don’t care if you know “well actually” that these women went through something horrible. I know they did, it’s what they write about. The difference is they get to scream it on mainstream media platforms and make lots of money and not be sent to the hospital about it. Their pain is a spectacle people pay to see, my pain, black and brown pain, is just the collateral of reality.
Sylvia Plath, I hate you too, your creativity was only good for killing yourself. And you too, Mary Oliver. I’ll never forgive the middle-aged Midtown Atlanta otter that tried so hard to you-pill me. But you’re right, I do not have to be good. I spit on Pulitzer Prizes5.
I really resent moments when my ambition pokes it’s little head out because there is no major accolade in this system in this society that would not require me to gut major core facets of my being. The machine demands blood. I am grotesque and depraved in ways this blog has not yet touched (like I haven’t even posted any erotica yet), and the horizon for me does not exactly scream famous writer so I am questioning why I do this? Usually, by the time I get to this question is when I give up on something, but I know I am just in a mood and the momentum I have overtakes any existential feelings of purpose. There is no purpose, I am just full of words and it helps a smidge if someone can hear me think them. But I do kind of hope one of these bitches sees this and sues me, or something. I need the publicity.
In one of Diane Seuss’ poems, it reads: “but we cannot even rub two words together. Not enough to let loose a spark. Not enough to light fire in a thimble, and this is the hell of it”.
Yes, the burning, white hell of the celebrated mediocrity of the white woman in her vulnerability is a shit stain on the laced thong of the whole of art. Let’s all clap, shall we?
What I Read This Week:
For fear of activating some insecurity, I never want you to think I finish the books I put here. That is rare and I am a firm believer in skimming and skipping around books. Anyway, here are photos of my bookshelf. Most of these I haven’t even started. Also, I will be in Brooklyn later this week, say hi. Put me in your open mic :)
who pressured his immunocompromised friend to take her mask off in a busy airport which resulted in her extreme illness (or maybe died?). When I tried to find the source again THREE paywalls popped up on The New Yorker website not saying the writer had something to do w that im just saying he’s awful and also super published
When is someone gonna call me a genius wtf? I think I am mostly moody about being affirmed this week
Also I would guess she’s awful with babies? Why should they like her? stupid yt ass thinking like no one owes you partialness. And her “higher consciousness” of course assured her that she had “infinite goodness” are you serious? Even at my most suicidal/being a piece of shit bc im depressed era I knew babies didn’t hate me, at a minimum; the problem is her.
the stick says “fuck you im better” happy aries szn
Unless someone reading this knows how to get me one