before we get started

i read the below passage aloud to josh the other night, from bret lott's before we get started. i was struck while reading it how similar those years of his were to our last few years, and it made me laugh. i can only laugh in retrospect, though. i told josh that anyone else reading that passage, unless they've had a similar experience (of having babies while working while going to graduate school while teaching remedial english) would have no idea how simply awful it was. otherwise, i imagine it sounds rather romantic and the stuff of movies. you know, the starving artist and all. please, let me just say: it isn't romantic at all.

but, maybe we will think so in a few years. funny what time does to memory.



     I wrote my first novel back in 1984 and 1985, started it in September after having graduated with my M.F.A. in May. We had moved from Northampton, Massachusetts, to Columbus, Ohio, during the summer so that I could start up at my first job, teaching remedial English at Ohio State University. The job was a three-year terminal lectureship--it sounds as bad as it was-- in which I taught five sections of remedial English per quarter. The writing of the book began for no better reason than that I thought it was time to write a novel, having written nothing longer than twelve pages prior to embarking on the book, my creative thesis a collection of short stories. We had a one-year-old kid then, and lived in a two-bedroom townhome apartment, the two bedrooms upstairs, on the first floor a living room and kitchen, a basement beneath it all. Each morning I got up between 4:30 and 5:00 and maneuvered my way down the stairs, careful not to step on the third step down, as that board groaned and woke up the baby every time. Then it was to the kitchen for a cup of instant coffee and a piece of toast, all by the light of the stove hood, and then down to the basement and the desk I had stationed there beneath the only window, a narrow thing six feet up that looked out onto the dirt of the flowerbed and through which I could see stars still out when I sat down at that desk. For one year I did this, working on the novel, trying to figure out how to write something this long, writing from 5:00 until 7:00, when my wife got up and the baby, then stopping to make breakfast while Melanie got ready for work, then driving her in, then dropping the baby off at day care, me finally returning about 8:30 or so to the basement, where I would write until 10:30, then head out to Ohio State, and my five classes.
     I tell you this not as some sort of when-I-was-a-kid-I-walked-barefoot-twelve-miles-through-broken-glass-to-get-to-the-typewriter story, but simply to set the stage for the question I  had to ask myself every morning once parked at that desk, those stars still out, a story I was writing waiting to be written: who cares?
     ...And the answer that came to me, while writing a book no one had asked me to write, my family asleep above me, dawn coming up on a day that would involve changing diapers, cooking meals, and ministering to around one hundred freshman who had problems remembering to capitalize the beginning of a sentence, was that I cared. And the truth of this caring was and is and will always be that at the time of invention, in these moments of quiet when the world we see spinning itself out in front of us calls for us to record it, we writers merely amanuenses at the foot of the oracle, the story itself--the truth of this caring is that I will always be the only one in this moment to care.
     You are on your own.