There are a lot of reasons why my opinions on this week’s Philadelphia Weekly cover story don’t count.
- 1. I don’t particularly like CA Conrad’s poetry, so therefore, I’m unfairly biased.
- 2. I am not a fan of the man himself, as my only interaction with him was (quite drunkenly) calling bullshit on his “write what you know” advice to a woman outside National Mechanics a few years ago. (This doesn’t make me look particularly good either, so I suppose it’s a draw.)
- 3. I can’t even get the PW to put my shows in their events listings, so what makes me an authority?
What I will say, despite my disqualifications, is that it seems journalistically lazy to just print a writer’s origin story as an article. If Conrad is any kind of writer, it’s as much mythos as pathos. I don’t fault him for that, its part of the territory. Who I do fault is Tara Murtha, because if you’re going to write a story about a man’s personal mythology, it shouldn’t be verbatim.
I don’t like to write about my own life. I developed my capacity for imagination to escape, not to dwell. If what I am writing is grounded in something genuine, it’s the memory of a feeling, rather than the way things looked, or how people acted. I do this for my own sense of privacy and propriety. I don’t like the reactions I get when I write in memories.
I had to write an essay in college that approached a factual issue from a personal angle. I wrote about my mother. It was an easy assignment to complete, but I didn’t like the way the professor treated me after she read it. To her I had become fragile and vulnerable, and the mere fact that I’d made it to my senior year of art school was miraculous. “You’re a miracle!” she said.
Last July, Second Stories did a show on Stepdads. The audience was small enough, intimate enough, that I thought talking about something personal would feel casual, conversational. It didn’t. It was like trying on jeans in front of a room full of people. The reaction I got was overwhelmingly positive. People who’ve never complimented my fiction were enthralled.
Christian said to me, “It was un-Jaimelike. You weren’t the hero of the story.” The point of having an origin story is that you get to be the reason you – not as an infant, but as the you that stands before your audience – have come into being. You brought this self into the world. And while I don’t deny the influence of the world on the adult I have become, I would like to believe I have been most responsible for it.
can i just point out that those two sentences you have me saying were two different points?
as in, “it was un-jaimelike” because it was not like the stuff i’d heard from you and “you weren’t the hero of the story” because in memoir-type pieces the author usually ends up being the hero, even and especially when he or she insists it’s otherwise.
just wanted to clarify. now i will stay out because i like conrad’s work, but also like when you throw down.
I must have mistakenly conflated the two sentences in my general fuss over the evening, and because I’ll admit, it’s unlike myself to give away too much credit that I feel owed to me
I made a point of not writing too much about what I don’t like, because I wish to appear diplomatic on the internet. At least, diplomatic enough to say that disliking something disqualifies any grand statement I intend to make.