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doctornerdington · 20 days ago

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hobbyism, intimacy, working it out on the page

some old school longform blogging about process & product & how it really can be that serious, with all the indulgence that implies

i can’t stop thinking about siken’s new afterword for the twentieth anniversary edition of crush, which opens with a fever dream: louise gluck calling to say “we’ll publish it as is, of course, but i have notes if you’d like to consider them.” @whatimages is in my texts commiserating about how we’d sell plural organs for twelve hours of clear-eyed line edits at a kitchen table, and from gluck, for god’s fucking sake. and yes, yes. obviously the nobel of it all. right. what siken’s done in the afterword, though, has i think a longer and rarer shadow than meet-your-hero wish fulfillment. like i said, i can’t stop thinking about it, and these days my focus is about four seconds wide, so i want to pay attention for a while.

i’m not a poet, or haven’t been since college; i’m not a widely beloved and revered literary figure, though any minute now fitzcarraldo will cold call me about publishing my raven boys fanfiction. what i am is someone procrastinating their hp wireless piece (which at current pace will be ready for the 2027 fest) by any means necessary. my inability to engage meaningfully with an entirely voluntary and ostensibly rewarding hobby, with few stakes and fewer parameters, fills me with a pretty incandescent rage: why can’t i do this? the inside of that question is: what’s it even for?

here is siken’s answer to why he writes. it’s a poet’s answer, a literary figure’s. i’m not sure the “we” includes me, but let’s start here and work forwards.

siken’s work—the thrust of his labors with gluck—reaches for a confessionalist ideal of total vulnerability and honesty (though as he’s told us many times, whether and how it happened to him is not the point—he aims deeper than a photorealistic depiction of his own life). he’s working on our behalf, truth-telling on our behalf. so that the poems may be useful, so that the lesson or the gift he leaves on the table serves the reader, he faces the fact of himself and offers us an unswerving intimacy.

i think some version of this is correct across genres and art forms. the work that means the most grows out of an artist’s most human, most intent, most feeling place, however that ultimately manifests in the piece; we can feel that quality and intensity as an audience, can sniff it out. maybe that’s a little mystical. siken would say even mastery without passion or courage produces “polished but lifeless” art, though, or the version of siken i’m projecting onto would. maybe he’d say passion and courage are necessary conditions for true mastery. probably he’d say it with less pretension. my buddy @letteredlettered calls this ‘putting your pussy into it’; i agree with her belief that this is the entire point of making art. what is a figurative pussy if not the most human, most intent, most feeling place a body has. putting your pussy into it is an intimate act.

at any rate fic is storytelling, and web weaving, and often therefore confessional even when it's not explicitly so. in short i buy siken's room as the 'why' of a lot of art.

some additional context for my next point: it’s been a tough couple years, during which i’ve asked the question of “why can’t i do this” across almost every category of my life, along with “what’s it even for.” fanfiction and fandom as a hobby feel to me like something of a regression in the face of this difficulty; i’m retreating to something that was a safe part of my childhood and squeezing as much meaning out of it as i can. like almost all of my fixations, it’ll probably pass. in the meantime, i feel no small amount of shame about it: returning to YA generally; returning to harry potter in particular with all its cultural baggage; taking my hobby of writing emotionally elaborate intertextual porn for seven perverts on the internet incredibly, incredibly seriously. why can't i be goofy engaging in this goofy activity? why can’t i handle an activity with more innate rigor, more gravitas, more discipline? why can’t my hobby be weightlifting, or the history of constitutional law, or, jesus christ, writing original anything? (i would never dream of judging other people’s hobbies or fandom engagement this way, possibly with the exception of disney adults, and the reason for the former double standard is because if i’m compassionate, nonjudgmental, and understanding to myself the way i’m compassionate, nonjudgmental, and understanding to other people, i am no longer the specialest princess in all the land. simple.)

but fic is art with training wheels, right? not just the scaffold of writing an intertext with existing IP, but community—a built-in audience, fellow writers with your preoccupations and tastes and kinks, people willing to go to the mat with you and your work. (fic is also simply a reason to yap, with everything that yapping can engender. fic has immeasurably enriched my twenty-year friendship with @or-dhuilleag, for instance, and brought me @flightspathfic and @garagepaperback, without whom i’m not sure i’d have made it through this midlife nadir.)

one thing peculiar to the art of a beloved, revered, or widely read/viewed/experienced artist:

siken earns the above platitude with the full force and grace of his afterword, which explores at length how his readers have transformed the meaning of his work in the twenty years since crush was first published. i think most fanworks by virtue of their niche intent & footprint, along with the ongoing conversation that comments etc make possible, are actually shared custody between author and reader—certainly unlike tradpub, fanworks can be tweaked and reworked by sneaking into the ao3 editor in the wee hours and fixing a sentence here and there. i’m sure other writers have different relationships to their work, but for me, at least, i feel intensely proprietary about mine. maybe in part because we are wandering together into a third person’s existing world & characters, i’m sharing my writing with you, not giving it to you. i would argue the former is more intimate than the latter.

one of the many pleasures of a friendship with @letteredlettered is her insight into what it’s meant to be read at scale—i can’t track down a pull quote in discord, and i’m sure she’ll correct me if i’m putting words into her mouth, but the gist is that there’s correlation between popularity and being pedestaled such that it’s no longer easy or inviting to be a part of fandom community. i wonder if the inflection point is around the scale at which people started treating her work with more entitlement than consideration.

what siken points to here is the question of who it’s for—whom it’s for. did it really never belong to him? arguing with louise at her kitchen table, had he already given it away to the reader?

(additional reading: compare siken’s take on crush with sufjan’s on carrie & lowell, wherein the full transfer of custody to the listener is because sufjan found the album to be a profound failure on his own terms even if it succeeded for the listener—“Maybe that's what's so frustrating about this record for me, is that I could see and feel and hear the evidence of my effort, and trying to make sense of it musically and structurally and narratively. But I knew deep down inside that I was dealing with something that was unresolvable, and that the final tapestry of the album was never really going to be a stand-in for my relationship with my mom. And that's OK. You kind of have to just live with the chaos of it. I don't want to disparage; I don't want to sound like I don't like this album. I think I want to disassociate from it. It ultimately has nothing to do with me anymore. The music is yours.")

what did it mean to siken, for gluck to meet his debut collection like this?

in the last few years, disappearing from my real life into the bowels of ao3, i have read probably fifty million words of fic (emotionally elaborate porn was only maybe forty-five million of it); almost to the exclusion of any other fundamental theme, we write obsessively, repetitively, and compulsively about intimacy. how and why to be close. how to allow it; how to earn it; how to risk it; how to tiptoe toward it, abandon it, reignite it, revel in it. it possesses us. for my money, the above passage is the most intimate thing i have ever read. his debut? a third of the book? twelve fucking hours as mother and son at her kitchen table?

this is what siken wanted us to know about this book that he believes belongs to us. the rest of the afterword guards his privacy closely, but this he wanted us to hear: that he brought it to a brilliant woman and she made it a taut new thing, made it nothing but the core of itself. that they did it together. it's pedigree, sure, but it's also the only new thing he told us about what wasn't on the page, for a poet who made a platform of the death of the author:

i think he told us a precious story, sharing this. what strange and sacred work they did. i get romantic about poets, i don't know. here, look at the whole setup:

look how they have sized each other up--"it was louise gluck," then "this was someone i could work with." "it was not the best in the pile...i kept thinking about yours, so i knew it had to be the one." and then finding, in person, that they are each a familiar size to the other, a familiar shape. look how seriously they take each other, finding the other worth the work. their measured esteem correctly and productively colluding.

i just fucking love editing, not that you'd really know from how this stream of consciousness wanders. i love it past it being the way to crystallize draft slop into meaning, i mean. i think it's the core of the intimacy that i find so shocking and exuberant in this hobby. my preoccupation is intimacy--maybe my whole hobby is intimacy. i open the doors of my google doc and let someone see me trying and failing, let them help me try again. it's an antidote to shame. it's an exchange of authority and power, it's showing them the half-cooked output of my brain and feeling their fingers muck around in there. help me fix my little story i dumped my entire heart and ass into! let's fight about it!

and lemme see what you're working on, lemme see how your language works, lemme listen so, so carefully for the core of what you're trying to tell me and whittle you back till it's all i can hear. lemme show you i'm worth the work. somebody come help me with that mixed metaphor. maybe part of the shame-antidote is because we're sinking all this effort into gay wandboys fisting. so indulgent! craft, baby. ambition, mastery, ardor. i mean god bless to everyone just vibing out, i'm often jealous.

look at siken shepherding us along here. my point ultimately--it’s not not kink. it lives close to the same place in my brain: being edited is the incandescent reward for the slog of drafting, which i truly despise. it's the well-lit kitchen table where someone i trust and fear drives me, hour over patient hour, towards a truer version of myself. i want them to carve me down to what is beautiful and necessary. i’m starved for it; i want it even before i put a single word on the page; i want to sit next to my friends and build every story from scratch with their attention and care and opinions on an iv line from their aorta to mine. can original writing have a process like this? can any other hobby? i am sincerely asking, because my interest in harry potter and draco malfoy absolutely has an expiration date. assume for the purposes of this question that an mfa is out of scope, you fucking perverts.

loop back to the why of writing. my fanfiction isn't going to be deathless literature: it does something else for me, right here, right now. siken writes to tell us, "i was in this room once. it is a difficult room. i left this on the table for you. i hope it helps." picture him in the difficult room. picture him at the table, reading aloud, his hands spreading the pages across the wood. picture gluck beside him, his brilliant twelve-hour mother, interrupting, arguing, helping. her attitude, his wire frames, winnowing down a third of his book. do you know more now about intimacy? is the room as difficult?

which is all to say: i'm writing something that’s due in a couple weeks. it’s one more story about why to be close. i want it to mean something. it means a lot to me, and i want it to mean something to you. i wrote this, too; i wrote it alone, but if you’re here at the end, i want to talk about it with you. tell me how i can make it better. tell me how we can make each other better.

#❤️❤️❤️#i love this so much #writing stuff #editing

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