On beginnings
Look, mom! I made a website!
Walt Whitman famously fussed with, edited, and republished his masterwork, Leaves of Grass, about eight times during his life. When I learned this, I felt a sense of sheepish kinship: this deeply weird ancestor and my younger self, separated by a century and a half, yet holding onto the same fraying rope as we struggled through deep water towards the most perfect words possible, and then the impossible words past that.
I bring this up—the inability to end a work, to let it be finished, instead dragging it on and on with the occasional desperate shock like a poor little zombie—here at the beginning, because to me they feel like the same problem. I’ve lost count of the number of times I began to write the book I want to talk to you about now. Word by word, I agonized, I polished, I smelted down and recast, I abandoned, I came back and started over, and for years and years I got nowhere.
Certainly other factors were at play (climate crises; America; the daily minutiae of being your own zookeeper, etc.). But in hindsight, my biggest issue with The Novel was that I couldn’t let any of those drafted beginnings...end, even temporarily. At some point a beginning has to become a middle, after all, which means it stops being a beginning: it ends. But if the damn thing wasn’t perfect, I couldn’t move on. And because it could never be perfect, it was dead in the water, and there was no point sharing it with anybody.
However! That is not what we’re doing here!
I’ve learned a couple things over the past decade. I don’t want to write alone anymore, and to paraphrase (probably) Voltaire, I don’t want to keep letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. That’s why I’m asking you, whoever you may be, to come along for the ride as I finally fricking write this thing.
Start (again) as you mean to go on
This past March, I started writing again—but I didn’t start at the beginning. Instead I started with a scene that’s now about three chapters in. Can’t get stuck on the beginning if you don’t start with the beginning! Hah! Take that, brain! It worked, though. When I went back and wrote what turned into chapters one and two, I wasn’t Writing The Beginning; I was just filling in the scenes that needed to happen before those ones over there, but after these over here.
It’s an ambitious project, and many days I feel like I’m just pulling myself hand over hand on that ragged rope in the water. But I’ve learned to float a little, when I need to.
This website—this post and the posts to come, the subscription thing, all of it—is a beginning of its own. Although it’s been a blast and a half, writing this book is a big risk for me, as all truly important things are; sharing it with other people feels like its own kind of risk, too. I’m putting my name on this. I’m valuing my work highly enough to ask people for money! That’s insane! But here we are. I’m doing this. And I’d be over the moon for you to join me.
Things you can expect from me, now and over the coming months: behind-the-scenes updates on how the book is going; art; microessays on a variety of subjects; enthusiastically compiled playlists; other cool things I’m interested in sharing, all of which can be delivered easy-peasy to your inbox. Most of these posts (though not all) will only be available to paid members. Head over to the FAQ to learn more about membership options, and about this project in general.
In whatever way you’re here to support me, I’m deeply grateful for you, and glad you’re along for the ride.
Until next time, friends.
—Rachel/at the game table/Tucson AZ/September 1, 2022
Outro (a partial catalogue of cool, pt. i)
The semi-regular newsletter of one of my favorite bands, Hiss Golden Messenger, often has a section at the end sharing “Things That Are Good to Me.” Given that a good 52% of art is joyful mimicry, I’m going to try a similar thing here.
- An index of issues of the aforementioned HGM newsletter, called “The Kitchen Table Speculator”
- This bonkers thorough Walt Whitman archive, where you can read the many (many) versions of his works, each deftly situated in its historical context
- Trainsong: Guitar Compositions 1967-2010, Vol. 1, the Michael Chapman album I was listening to while writing this post (favorite songs: “Little Molly’s Dream” and “Theme from the Movie of the Same Name”)
