“One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” 

- Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

　

　
About a year ago - just over a year in fact - the poet Jack Gilbert died in a nursing home in California. His death was not a surprise. Gilbert was 86, and had been suffering from dementia for a number of years.

You might ask the question: why is an anonymous American poet dying something to bring my attention to? Because all over the world there are people who’ve read Gilbert’s poetry, and most of them have taken a piece of that poetry with them. They’ve internalized lines, or shared his books with lovers. In moments of deep loneliness, they’ve turned to his work, and felt like there was someone in the world who understood them.

When a writer or artist dies, it’s strange to be so affected. Most of us didn’t know the writer personally. Most of us only knew them through their writing, and who a person is on the page, and who they are in real life, can be two very different people.

Yet the beauty of writing is that we recognize ourselves in it. We find that, across decades or even centuries, across class or racial lines, someone, somewhere, was feeling exactly what we’re feeling - the wonder and mystery of being alive. Maybe David Foster Wallace summed it up best when he said that writing “is the act of being less lonely.”

A writer you love is like a very dear friend. And each new book, or poem, is like a conversation - one of the endless, late night conversations that sprawls over multiple cups of coffee and many cigarettes - with that friend. And just like your physical encounters with your closest friends, your literary encounters with your favorite writers leave you feeling elated, leave you feeling possible about what we, as a species, can accomplish.

Great works of literature, like great lovers, change. But the change is almost always internal. The change is the shifting of our own priorities, the accumulation of our new experiences, the recalibration of what matters to us. Books we love at 16 will read differently at 30.

But unlike great lovers - because great literature is as much internal as external - its possibility never lapses or wanes. It was Kierkegaard who wrote, “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

We write and we read to feel the possibility in the world around us - the belief that this world contains beauty and joy; that even in sorrow there is something to be gained. We read to be less lonely. We write to be less lonely. We read to know ourselves better. We write to know the world better.

And when those writers we love die, it is like losing a dear friend. More than that, it’s like losing a piece of your heart, like closing the door on a great love affair.

~

Two weeks ago, the company I work for hosted a conference, in Istanbul. Scholars and academics came from around the world to talk about interfaith dialogue and the need for greater access to education.

My boss, a devout Muslim man in his late-thirties, welcomed everyone, and gave a brief introduction about what the focus of the conference was, and what his hopes for it were.

At the end of the speech, he shared a quote from David Foster Wallace’s now-famous 2005 commencement speech, “This Is Water.” In Foster Wallace’s telling, which my boss recounted faithfully, two young fish are swimming in the ocean. They come upon an old fish, who greets them by saying, “Morning boys. How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on a little ways before one turns to the other and asks, “What the hell is water?”

The point of the story - that we so often miss the most obvious, important things in life - is always relevant, but for my purposes, I want to focus on how remarkable, even improbable it was, that I was sitting in a conference room, in Istanbul, with my Muslim boss and a room full of academic scholars…and he was quoting David Foster Wallace.

There’s no telling what will resonate. Sometimes, we recognize ourselves in the most unlikely of sources. I was moved that my boss had been so touched by the Foster Wallace piece (which I had sent to him), but I was also deeply saddened - saddened that Foster Wallace didn’t know how deeply people were moved by his writing; that his loneliness and desperation had made the world a much better, less lonely place for others. This is the thing with art - you throw it into the world, and unlike a boomerang, it rarely comes back to you. But you never can know where it is, or who’s reading.

~

There’s a story I like, that I’ve told to quite a few people. If you’ve heard it before, I apologize, and I’ll ask you to bear with me (I have acquired my father’s bad habit of telling the same story, over and over again, embellishing key details when I deem necessary).

Sometime in the 1980s Jack Gilbert was giving a poetry reading. He’d spent most of the 60s and 70s living in self-imposed exile, on islands in Greece and Japan, with a woman who would leave him and a woman who would die.

When he came back from that exile, he published a book of poems, re-engaged with American literary life, and even, from time to time, gave readings.

At one such reading, a middle aged man approached Gilbert afterwards. He was, as Gilbert told it, “indistinct in every way.” The man, without introduction, blurted out, “I just wanted you to know that your writing has kept me alive for twenty years.” Then, before a stunned Gilbert could respond, the man disappeared out the door.

This is a truth I’ve learned: poems can save us. Stories can save us.

~

I suppose I should give you a personal example, and I will, in time.

For now I want to talk about stories, the act of telling them, which is crucial to any form of writing. Writing, even at its most nonsensical or abstract, is still a form of ordering the world. Of putting into some form or structure things that are, until then, formless, primordial, chaotic. Language, ultimately, is about our inherent need for some form of order in a universe that, terrifyingly, so often seems to lack any semblance of order.

We tell stories for a lot of reasons, but this, to me, seems to be the major one: we tell stories because someday we will die, and the stories we leave behind are the only way we can salvage something of immortality.

We tell them for other reasons, too - to laugh, to make sense of the world, to entertain, but above all, stories are an act of transfiguration. They take us as close as we can get to something enduring.

I grew up with a family of story tellers. My grandmother would spin incredible fables whenever my brother and I visited, keeping us up well past our bedtimes with stories about two brothers traveling around the world.

My father, too, is a storyteller. I grew up watching Dad preach, and his sermons were always stories - about love, about community, about the need for meaning and faith. From a very young age, I understood that stories were important. That on some basic, human level, they mattered. That through them, we create ourselves, and in doing so, leave pieces of ourselves with our audience - our friends and families.

As Tim O’Brien puts it in The Things They Carried - which was the first “adult” book my father gave me, when I turned 14 - “Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story."

~

In this line of thinking, then, Shakespeare is in my left pinky finger. Woolf is in my right ventricle. Gilbert is in my small intestine. Bolano is in my liver. We carry the writers we love with us, shaping them in our own image, and then giving them to our friends and lovers. And then, through transference, we become tied to those writers in the bodies of those we love.

To quote a dear friend of mine, “by sharing these works of others, you're somehow sharing a reflection of yourself and wondering if the other person will see what you've seen or if they'll see something else entirely.” We fall in love over stories. We fall in love over poems.

~

I fell in love with a girl a couple of years back. If you’ve read any part of this blog in the last year, you’ve probably heard something about it (writing is also, lest we forget, a way to navigate grief, to transfigure sorrow into some kind of beauty). She was young, vibrant, incredibly intelligent. And we effectively fell in love over literature.

The first night we met, she came back to my apartment and I read her a poem of Jack Gilbert’s. It’s called “Highlights and Interstices.”

It was sometime well after midnight on a night sometime slightly after the middle of summer. A hot, sultry night in the Philadelphia suburbs, the cicadas singing incessantly outside. I read her the poem, and then I gave her the book - The Great Fires.


She later wrote, in her own journal, about the experience of reading that book. She would sit in the heat of midday, lying on her belly on the cement patio behind her parent’s house. Dripping sweat, she read the poems, and experienced what so many people experience when reading Gilbert - that he’s somehow burrowed right into the essential material of their soul. In many ways, she first came to know me through Gilbert - it was a language we could share before we developed our own; an intermediary to the faith of love.

Before I left for Greece last January, the girl - we’d shared a few years together by then, and were at the very end of our own narrative - gave me a folder with my name on it. Inside was a copy of “Highlights and Interstices” that she’d transcribed in her own cramped, but beautiful, handwriting. That copy of the poem hangs above my desk here in Istanbul.

The book, which she eventually gave back to me, is with another girl - a tall, lithe, haunted woman who currently lives in upstate New York. Or at least, I think the book is with her. This is the magic of books, and of love - in some ways, they can be endlessly transferred. I don’t know what she’s done with the book, or who she’s given it to. It’s possible the book is traveling through Senegal right now, in the backpack of a man she once loved. Unlikely? Sure. But this is the beauty of writing - anything’s possible.

~

I have given away most of my favorite books. I feel about a great book the way most religions feel about money - hoarding it for yourself is an act of evil.

I gave my copy of Gilbert’s Monolithos to a beautiful woman here in Istanbul, a woman I spent a few months making love to, and talking to, in the garden behind her apartment.

I have given away two copies of Roberto Bolano’s 2666: the second to a dancer who was passing through Istanbul on her way to Indonesia, and the first to the girl I loved who transcribed the Gilbert poem.

I gave my copy of Robert Hass’s Time and Materials to an English woman that I met for one night in a beach in Nicaragua. We kissed in the moonlight and I gave this book and we will never see one another again. For all I know, she could be dead.

I have given away the half dozen copies I’ve owned of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, the most recent to my German roommate in Istanbul, a quietly beautiful woman who has gone back to her village.

Woolf’s To The Lighthouse went to my sister; DeLillo’s Underworld, like Bolano, went to the old lover (she’s the one woman I’ve met who can match my appetite for gigantic, sprawling tomes).

McEwan's Atonement is with a very dear, old friend on a small island in Canada, where she is learning how to be a veterinarian.

Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest disappeared to someone, though I can’t remember who.

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead was given to a Turkish woman I met here in Istanbul, a devout, covered woman who would sometimes visit me in my office. Because she was engaged, and because we could not shake hands or discuss our feelings for one another, we talked about literature and writing - our shared passion for it. How electrified we feel when we discover a great book. How calm we feel when we write.

~

I think everyone should write. Why? Well, first and foremost because writing has saved my life. I mean that both literally and metaphorically.

In the literal sense, writing has saved my life because, on my darkest nights, when despair threatened to consume me - the despair Kierkegaard describes as “an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness” - I have turned to writing. I’ve sat down, and through language, I’ve found a ladder out of the abyss.

This works for many reasons. First and foremost, it works because it is creating order out of the - Kierkegaard, again - “wild ferment” and chaos of heartbreak or depression. It works because there is the hope that someone, somewhere, might someday read the writing, and might recognize themselves in it. It is the hope that the ashes of my own sorrow and loneliness will someday prove fertile soil for someone else.

The pleasure in this - the possibility of someday being read - is not derived from the uniqueness of writing; writing, after all, is not unique. We all write, one way or another, every single day - in our texts and emails, in our stories and phone calls. No, the pleasure of writing is one of assimilation. It’s being folded into the stream of writers who, on their own lonely nights, sat down and jumped into the abyss, hoping to emerge with something. To quote Bolano, “While we are looking for the antidote or the medicine to cure us, that is, the 'new', which can only be found by plunging deep into the Unknown, we have to go on exploring sex, books, and travel, although we know that they lead us to the abyss, which, as it happens, is the only place where the antidote can be found.”

Writing is the joy of community, despite the solitude needed for its creation. It has literally saved my life because, on my darkest nights, its order has reaffirmed the merits of existence as opposed to non-existence.

It has also saved me metaphorically because it has given me something larger than my own comfort to aspire to - a cause that is larger than materialism. It has given me an excuse to work shitty jobs - delivering pizza, cutting grass. It has allowed me to live recklessly, and to feel that I’ve still accomplished something. It has, for a lack of a better phrasing, given me a purpose.

But you are not me. You likely have other purposes in your life. So why should you write? Because if you do, I bet you’ll understand those purposes better. I’ll bet you understand why they mean something to you - and those around you might understand them, too.

I urge you to write because writing and reading are, above all else, acts of humanity and love. The stories we tell about people are, after all, how we show our love for those people. So the next time you’re overcome by despair or loneliness, sit down and tell your stories. I bet you’ll feel better afterwards.

~

I once met the writer Junot Diaz. He was talking at the college near my home, so me and a few hundred other interested kids piled into an auditorium and listened to him read from his first novel, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Afterwards, people waited nearly an hour to have a few words with him, to surprise him with their wit, or to gain some tidbit of wisdom.

I waited until almost everyone else had cleared out. Then I tentatively - I was 22 - approached him and handed him my copy of his novel.

“What do you want me to write?” he asked.

“Well, I wanted to ask you a question. I’m a young writer. What advice can you give me?”

He smiled, perhaps flattered. “I advise all my students to not write a single word until they’re 30, or until they’ve had their heart broken on three continents. See the world, experience heartbreak. You have to have something to write about. If you go to graduate school, if you hop into a career, you’re just hopping from one institution - a lifetime of school - to another one. Live outside institutions for a while.”

I smiled, not sure what to say.

He signed my book “To the three continents.”

A year later I was traveling in Nicaragua with a friend of mine. We were at a bar in Granada, where we met two women from New York. One was a lawyer, the other was an actress. Tall, gorgeous black women, both at least six inches taller than me. The lawyer, who was ten years older than me, taught me how to dance the samba. She stood behind me and put her hands on my hips, her chin in the cleft of my right shoulder blade, and whispered into my ear, “now move.”

Back at the table, her sister was talking about Junot Diaz.

“You know, I emailed him” she said.

“Really?” I asked.

“Yeah. He put his email in the back of his first book, before he was famous. So I wrote him telling him how much I loved his book, how much it moved me personally.”

“Did he write back?”

She took a sip of her beer - ice cold, thin Caribbean beer - and nodded. “He did. He asked me if I wanted to come up to Boston to fuck him.”

“What?!”

“Yeah. I was shocked. When I said no, he wrote back, ‘Why would you write me and waste my time if you weren’t trying to fuck?’”

Last year, Diaz’s third book came out; it was nominated for the National Book Award.

I read an interview with him. The author asked Diaz if he had any advice to give young writers.

“You know,” Diaz said, “I tell all my students they shouldn’t write a word until they’re 29...”

That motherfucker.

I gave his novel, the one he signed, to an ex-girlfriend. I don’t know what the fuck she did with it.

~

It was perhaps Mozart who said that to master an instrument, one had to practice for at least 10,000 hours. Writing, I think, is the same. Learning to write is learning to fail. When you start out, you’re full of grand ideas - elaborate plots, rich characters. And then you sit down and start writing and…

Somehow it’s all wrong. It’s all so terribly, terribly wrong.

The grand narrative you envisioned is flat and convoluted. The characters are all the same character.

What happened? you wonder. The words were so perfect in your head. And yet somehow, in the process of moving from your head to your hands, they were altered, changed, made much, much worse.

What happened was practice. You were just learning the notes of a new song. And that detour the words took is the step-brother to inspiration.

Most people stop here. They give up because the gap between concept and reality is enormous - a chasm, really; an abyss.

But if you keep at it, writing thousands and thousands of pages of shit, that gap will begin to close. Soon, it becomes narrow enough that you might even be able to step across it.

Some friends tell me about stories they want to write.

“What’s stopping you?” I ask them.

“Well, I get stuck trying to find the right word. I want my sentences to be perfect.”

Worrying about the right word in a first draft is like worrying about the wall paper in your kitchen before you’ve built the foundation. Besides, structure is overrated. What matters, I think, is the soul. The heart.

The same friends sometimes ask me my advice on how to write a story.

“Write honestly,” I tell them, as if there were any other way to write.

~

What are some of my favorite stories, the ones I tell over and over?

Most of them are inherited from my father. Maybe my favorite is about my great-grandparents, Ruth and John. They lived in a small house in the small village of Gilette, Wisconsin. John had once been a dairy farmer, but ended his career as a chemist at a paper mill. Ruth kept house, and raised their five children. They were staunch Lutherans of Norwegian stock, fair-skinned and blue-eyed.

To celebrate their 50^th wedding anniversary, my father wanted to interview them, and create a video for the party. So it was that Dad sat down with his grandparents in his parent’s bedroom. Ruth and John were sitting on the bed, and my father in a chair across from them, holding a microphone.

Dad asked them what the key to 50 years of marriage was - how they did it.

Their answers were relatively straightforward, which was in keeping with their Midwestern modesty: respect, laughter, patience.

“I never hit her,” John added, which he was very proud of, considering the era he’d grown up in.

“You have to compromise,” Ruth said.

“If two people agreed on everything,” John added, “then one of them is unnecessary.”

Then, my father likes to tell, John got a gleam in his crystalline blue eyes - eyes that I have inherited, I’m told, directly from him.

“A good sex life didn’t hurt, either,” he said wryly.

My father, understandably, was taken aback. There he was, 27 years old, sitting on his parent’s bed, interviewing his grandparents, and his 81-year-old grandfather was talking about his sex life.

Dad said the first thing popped into his head: “So you had a good sex life?”

And then my great-grandparents - 81 and 79, respectively - replied, in perfect unison:

“What do you mean had?”

I’ve told that story probably a hundred times - to lovers and to strangers, to friends and to family. I’ve told it to most people more than once.

And here’s why it matters: because it ties me to my father and it ties me to my great-grandparents in the same way that family recipes tie generations together. And the beauty of it is that my version is different than my father’s version. And that his version is different than the actual version. And that if, someday I have a son of my own, his version will be different than mine.

Stories are living, breathing things. And just like people, they change and grow over time.

~

A brief aside, one that has nothing to do with writing but that has everything to do with families - which, at their core, are nothing more than stories, too.

This summer I flew from Istanbul back to my home in Philadelphia. From there, my family traveled to Wisconsin to see our extended relatives. We spent five days there, eating and drinking and telling stories around the lake where we congregate every summer.

On Sunday morning we’d been planning to go out for brunch. But, inexplicably, the restaurant we were going to eat at was closed. Instead, we came home and all worked together to make an impromptu breakfast. I made pancakes. My great aunt cooked eggs and got out a big tin of homemade snicker doodles. My grandfather made bacon and ham on a griddle. My grandmother got out her jars of homemade jam and also her jars of home-cured pickles.

While we were sitting there, sprawled in my great-aunt’s kitchen, all of us laughing and eating, I was struck that the recipes I’d spent my whole life eating - the pickles and cookies and jams - we in danger of dying out.

Cooking in the Midwest, as in so many places, was usually the domain of women. Recipes were passed down through generations of women. My grandmother never had a daughter, and the women her sons married were all professional women; my mother, bless her soul, is not a cook. As such, my grandmother is the last guardian of recipes that have been passed down for generations.

Next summer, I think I need to learn how to make pickles and jam.

~

My father has an idea, one he talks a lot about. It’s called flow. In his theorizing, flow is how we come to know God. Flow is the force that connects all of us.

It’s appropriate that flow is a water-based term because water is the root of all life. It makes up a majority of our earth and it makes up a majority of our bodies. Water is the experience of sexual pleasure, and the harbinger of birth. Life, ultimately, is water. To flow, then, is to be alive - to be awash in God’s grace.

Writing and reading are a form of flow. Anyone who has written will understand what I’m talking about - flow is inspiration. It’s that feeling of the words existing outside your body, of being dictated by some ineffable force that is larger than you. Writing within inspiration is like jumping into a river of words and letting them carry you gently downstream.

In this sense, writing is no different than any form of transcendent religious experience. It’s a form of magic. It exists outside the bounds of rational experience. Because when you write within flow, you ARE writing from somewhere numinous, from somewhere bigger than you. When I’m writing within flow, I very literally feel expanded, as if bigger than the parameters of my physical and intellectual self.

Reading a book and recognizing your thoughts and sentiments within a story or poem - things you’d spent your whole life thinking but never being able to articulate - is different form of flow. This is all a bit tricky and abstract, so I hope you’ll bear with me. As I can understand it, writing is a means of creation and articulation - it is the birth of something. But for that life to be realized, it has to be shared. Writing without reading is like an orgasm without sex - it’s self love as opposed to real love. The flow of reading is the flow of affirmation, of seeing. Reading is to bear witness to flow. Who, when caught up in a great story, doesn’t feel like they’re riding a river downstream?

In my life, I’ve experienced flow in four different ways. One is writing. One is reading. One is playing basketball - that experience of being unable to miss, of being guided by some higher power. And one is sex - that experience of being so consumed by another body that your physical self literally transcends the normal constraints of human existence and reaches a pleasure that goes beyond definition or language.

Two of these actions are physical and two are lingual. Writing and reading, then, are our efforts to explain physical transcendence. They are our efforts to know flow. I would call these actions - reading, writing, sex and sports - prayer.

For me, writing is a better expression of flow than sex. This is not to disparage sex, but to celebrate writing. With sex, there's nothing left over. Its enduring pleasure is contingent upon a future - the whims and desires of another person - that is mostly outside your control. With writing, it's always there. There's evidence. Great sex can end. It might never return. Literature can always be revisited.

~

It should come as no surprise, then, that the three major faiths - Christianity, Judaism, and Islam - are epistolary faiths. They are faiths built upon a foundation of language and explained through stories.

At their core the serious writer and the devout believer are one and the same. Strip away the outer layers - the cynicism and the realism, the doubts and the failures - and there is a pulpy, beating heart of idealism and naiveté. Just as the faithful believes in the Almighty’s power to provide salvation, so, too, does the writer believe in the power of language to construct meaning. Anyone who devotes their life to writing should believe in the power of stories to save us; if not, they’re wasting their life.

Even that most hardened of atheists and realists - none other than Bolano himself - believed in the catharsis of the story. At the end of his massive 2666, a book that dives deeper into the abyss than any I’ve read, Bolano suddenly reaches in and extends the reader a hand. In a book that spent its first 897 pages subverting the traditional expectations of the novel - eschewing any main characters, plunging the reader repeatedly into horror beyond imagining (Bolano manages to make the second world war, and the holocaust, one of the less horrifying things in his novel), sending us down endless digressions and dead ends - on the very final page, Bolano reveals that all those tortuous, seemingly random threads ultimately formed a closed circuit, against all odds and expectations. In its final lines, the novel loops back to its beginning, and in this structural catharsis, betrays Bolano’s own faith in stories to provide a measure of meaning and closure.

~

I met a rabbi recently. He was here in Istanbul for the conference I mentioned earlier, the one where my boss shared the Foster Wallace quote. This rabbi talked to me about his faith.

“The rituals of faith,” he said, “are no different than the intimate rituals that lovers share. The way we pray is like the way we make love. The words we say to God are like the words we share with a lover, the private language we develop over years. And to me, faith is like love. It requires you to sacrifice. Love and faith have to affect you on a very deep personal level. If you don’t have a stake in love, or a stake in faith, that’s a pretty sad kind of faith or love, isn’t it? But like love, faith is full of struggle. More than that, it’s full of failure. It’s full of miscommunication, of betrayal. But the point is that you keep trying. You keep trying to find a more perfect language, a means of expressing yourself, and of hearing God.”

~

Here’s the thing about inspiration: it’s mysterious. Like faith, it can sometimes vanish. It’s a struggle. The language isn’t always there. Some days, it betrays you.

I have friends who want to write. They complain about a lack of inspiration. I once read a writer who said that inspiration is for amateurs; the professional writer just gets down to work.

But a professional writer is also writing for money, and thus, his integrity is compromised.

Inspiration exists; it’s flow. But, like great sex or basketball games where you can’t miss, it’s exceedingly rare. And you can never predict when it’s going to arrive. There’s a magic to it. You have to prepare yourself so that when it strikes, you’re ready to enter into it without hesitation - so that you can write from outside yourself.

Ultimately, you can only enter flow if you’re willing to close your eyes and jump.

~

When I was 17, my family put down our first dog, Cocoa. Cocoa was a black lab that we saved from the pound the day she was supposed to be put down. We got her, I think, when I was four or five. I was young enough that Cocoa became as constant a presence in my life as my parents or my siblings.

Dogs - good dogs - have a remarkable way of knowing when you’re in pain, and they manage to comfort you. Cocoa was a great dog. She was there when you were suffering. More than any book or person, she could be counted on.

She was also, it must be added, a total shithead. Literally: on a routine basis, she actually ate, and rolled in, her own shit. But more than that, she was a character. She liked to break out of our house and run, for hours, through the neighborhood, terrorizing people and animals. She would swim in the swamp near our house and come home smelling like a corpse. Or, she would come home with a dead animal - a wood chuck or a squirrel - to offer as a display of her love. She had a sense of ceremony, too. Her offerings usually coincided with birthday parties or barbecues. It was like she was saying - I can be a part of this, too.

The night before we decided to put her down, I was up late, lying on the kitchen floor with Cocoa, just like I’d done hundreds, probably thousands, of times before. I lay beside her and gently rubbed behind her ears. Even in old age she was affectionate - she would reach back to lick my face.

My father came in to do the same thing, to say his good byes to the dog who had been a part of our family for so many years. Like any family member, she had been a source of joy and consternation, celebration and disappointment.

Afterwards, my father sat down at the kitchen table. He got a beer and he offered me one. We sat there while Cocoa breathed heavily on the floor, her chest - which was, by then, marred by tumors - heaving up and down. We looked at her and we sipped our beer.

And then we started to tell stories. We talked about the time we were moving from Washington D.C. to Indiana. As my Dad was ready to leave, Cocoa bolted out of his reach and disappeared for nearly an hour, roaming the old neighborhood one last time. When she came home, she reeked - she’d found a pile of shit and rolled in it. Though my father bathed her, the stench wouldn’t go away. He had to drive the whole 13 hours to Indiana with the windows down; it was mid-December.

We talked about the time she broke through a specially built, metal ‘doggy-door.’ In fifteen years, the guy who built it had never seen one broken.

We talked about the time she was hit by a conversion van and walked away unscathed.

We talked for hours, crying, but also laughing through our tears. The act of storytelling was what got us through our grief.

This is what we do, of course. We have ceremonies where we tell stories. Where we write the narrative of our love for our friends, our families, even our pets.

To this day, family dinners will still devolve into Cocoa stories. These dinners last for hours, and we all end up laughing so hard we cry.

~

It’s hard, as someone who has been saved by writing, to understand how so many writers have committed suicide. It’s hard for me to understand how Foster Wallace could fall into an abyss so deep that even his language could not build a ladder out of it. It’s difficult, and, of course, it scares me.

There are certain dualities to being a writer. The first is less existential as opposed to practical. Writing requires immense solitude. It requires an exceptional tolerance, maybe even a desire, for loneliness. To write is to be alone, even if that writing, ultimately, is a means of communication.

And yet, any writer worth their salt pulls inspiration from actual, lived experience. To have anything to write about, a writer must love and lose, must travel and work, must experience joy and pain and transcendence. Writing is both a solitary and a communal activity. It requires a person to both desire intense loneliness and to need, desperately, human connection.

The second duality is the more dangerous one, existentially. A writer is, at the very least, two separate people. There is the person on the page - an identity that the writer has a measure of control over - and there is the actual person - the fallible, sinning, flawed person who takes lovers and breaks hearts and lies to get ahead in the world.

The space between those two selves can be exhausting, for both writer and reader. What to make of a monstrous human being, like V.S. Naipaul, who writes gorgeous books about colonial oppression and native identity? What of Dickens, who kicked his wife out of the house - because he “grew tired of her” - when two of his children were still under the age of ten? Is there a core truth to such writers? Is there a truth to any of our identities, or are we all these hopeless amalgams of grace and horror?

For the writer, these questions can be even more tortuous. Does the person on the page redeem the person in the world? I've always been of the belief that the former - the me on the page - exists to absolve the sins of the latter, to atone for my mistakes with a modicum of wisdom and grace. I do believe that most of the people I've loved, even those who I no longer speak to, occasionally read my writing, and I do believe that they read it and forgive me for whatever sins I've committed. Maybe this a lie I tell myself, but it's something I believe in, something that keeps me going - and I suspect this is true of many writers. That, through our writing, we achieve a measure of salvation.

~

We read because, to our surprise, we find something in a whore from Juarez, Mexico, that we recognize in ourselves.

We write because we hope that through that whore’s story we can save ourselves from our failures and cruelties, our sloth and materialism.

~

Sometimes, when I pick up a book in a used bookstore and there are markings inside the book - notes and underlined passages - I wonder where this book has come from, who made those notes, what they felt about the book, who they shared it with. I wonder what continents the book has been on, what twists and turns it took - the times it was passed between lovers, the times it was forgotten on an airplane - to end up in this very bookstore. Buying a book is becoming a part of this narrative, however mysterious the rest of it might be. Giving a book is accepting your own transience - allowing that your place in the story has passed, and that it’s time for someone new to take over the narration.

~

“We in America need ceremonies,” John Updike once wrote.

After my dog Cocoa died, I wrote a screenplay about her. Writing was the only way for me to handle my grief.

When my last girlfriend, she of the Gilbert poems, left me, I handled my grief by writing a novel. Writing, again, is the act of transfiguration. And reading is bearing witness to that miracle.

When Jack Gilbert died last November, I went out to the field behind my apartment. I stood there in the cold with a bottle of whiskey and I read Gilbert’s final book aloud, by the light of a nearly full, gibbous moon.

It was ridiculous. It was an act of love. It was an act bearing witness. It was an act of prayer.

It was one final conversation with an old friend.

~

Afterwards, I went inside and called the girl who was leaving me.

“You should write something about writing,” she told me. “You should write something about reading. A treatise.”

“What would I say? I don’t know anything about anything.”

“Yeah, but you’ve got love. You've got the spirit and you've got the soul. What more do you need?”

~

So here’s what I've learned:

Read. Fall in love with writers. Carry those writers in your heart and in your liver and in your small intestine. Carry them into the vast, terrifying, beautiful world, and into new relationships with new lovers, and share them with those people who will appreciate them.

And when you feel ready, start telling stories. Sometimes, and this seems such a miracle to me, they can save you.

Or better yet, they can save someone else.