POPULAR DEMAND IS THE BEST KIND OF DEMAND
So, I gave a speech at the English Department commencement ceremony, and to say that it went over well would be an understatement. Afterwards, I was even approached by a literary agent (!) who told me to, you know, get in touch when I had a book to publish. Oh shit. So, in the spirit of that, I'm going to publish the whole thing here, in entirety, lest any other book agents should want to contact me. And, of course, so that far-flung people I care about can read it, too.
It starts when you are a little girl. Walking behind Mrs. Yoho, your cruel and waddling Kindergarten teacher, you narrate the moment in your head. You see yourself in third-person. You think to yourself, “The girl walked behind her classmates like the last duck in the row.” You keep this thought to yourself. You will keep many of these thoughts to yourself.
Your mother reads to you every night before bed. You love to read. You love it more than running on deer paths, sitting in the snow, and trying to befriend birds. You are a lonely child. Sometimes you read to your toys until your voice is hoarse.
Your father tells you incredible lies. He tells you that he once wrestled under the name Haystack Calhoun. He tells you that he invented the cheeseburger, that he was an intelligence officer in Berlin in the 1960s. You will later discover that only one of these is true.
Your mother also tells you incredible lies. She tells you that you have a twin sister named Penelope who lives in the attic. Whenever you lose a favorite toy, she says, “Oh, we gave that one to Penelope. We didn’t think you liked it anymore.”
When you are ten, you realize that your house doesn’t even have an attic. You begin to worry.
In middle school, they let you take electives. You can choose between journalism, music theory, and creative writing. Journalism bores you. It makes you think of Washington Week In Review, the two hours every Sunday morning your parents spend reading the papers. So you sign up for creative writing. On the first day of class, Mrs. Hatfield reads from the first paragraph of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. Mrs. Hatfield tells you that sometimes, in writing, you have to lie to tell the truth. No problemo, you think.
Now you are in high school. You take every class Mrs. Hatfield teaches. Even journalism. Most days, you eat lunch in her office. You have been banished from the table you used to sit at in the cafeteria because you and Amber Dellenbaugh had a crush on the same boy. Instead, you had to sit with the weird girl who ate only a plate of salted tomatoes at lunch. Mrs. Hatfield’s room is much better. Mrs. Hatfield gives you books to read outside of school. When you try to give them back, she tells you that she has extra copies. You know this is not true, but, grateful, you keep them.
You spend all of your summers working on the literary magazine with your friend Scott. You and Scott are convinced that you are the most brilliant aesthetic minds in your school. Your photographs and poems take up half of the space in the table of contents. You have no qualms with publishing ethics. You want desperately to publish yourself, to save yourselves from boredom in your small Pennsylvanian mining town. You mostly succeed.
When applying to colleges, you send a copy of the literary magazine along with your application. You get in. You apply for loans. And now you are waving goodbye to your parents, turning on your heel, and walking into Morewood Gardens.
You see the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center, its calm green walls and deep leather couches. You love it there. You declare your writing major as soon as possible.
You start hanging out with the older writing majors and take up smoking. You go to their parties. You thought college parties would be just like the movies, drunk surfers chugging beer on the front lawn of a frat house. It is not like that at all. They are talking about how Anne Sexton was nothing compared to Sylvia Plath. They talk about poets all the time, on the bus, in line at the movie theater. They write poems for each other.
You love your professors. You look for their names in literary journals, read as many of their books as you can. They probably have no idea that you do this.
Writing classes, you think, are the most fun you can possibly have in a university. You spend a lot of late nights trying to write stories and poems. One night you are waiting in front of your dorm to give your friend Adam a poetry book he needs for class. It is late and the snow starts to fall as you stand there, smoking. You wonder how anybody could say this is easy. It is a torment, but you wouldn’t have it any other way.
You write a lot of papers. You think about how tall your stack of papers would be if you printed all of them out, you think about how far they would stretch away from Pittsburgh if you laid them end to end. Baltimore?
During your junior year, you move into a house with three other writers. That is a lot of writers. Books and coffee cups are everywhere. Your roommates write poems about each other, a practice you find alternately sweet and terrifying. You spend late nights talking about Sappho and Baudelaire.
One of your fiction teachers tries to convince you to cut down on coffee. Balzac died that way, apparently.
In your English classes, you talk about difference, performativity, the panopticon. You talk about the death of the author. But the part of you that writes poems stages a small resistance. “I do not want to die,” you think. You begin writing poems about your subjectivity.
You love to lie. Sometimes, after a reading, people ask you, “Did that really happen?” You can’t think of a way to answer.
One slow Sunday afternoon, while trying to research discursivity and identity formation in 1950s poetry, you decide instead to research Haystack Calhoun. You discover that he was a 600-pound man from Morgan’s Corners, Arkansas whose wrestling career peaked in the late 1950s. He was obviously not your father. On a hunch, you look up the inventor of the cheeseburger. The cheeseburger was invented in 1910 by Louis Ballast, the manager of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In. He is also not your father.
The White Album, Joan Didion’s book of essays on the 1970s, is one of the books that Mrs. Hatfield gave you. You still have it. The beginning goes like this: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” You love these words. In bookstores in cities far away from home, you sometimes find The White Album and read that passage to yourself. You believe it more than anything else. You think about Haystack Calhoun, your father, the cheeseburger, your mother, your made-up twin sister in the attic. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Now you are graduating from college. You do not know how to thank your professors for paying attention, taking you seriously. You do not know how to thank your classmates, especially the ones who bluster in and out of your life, clutching fresh manuscripts, calling you up in the middle of the day to tell you that Martin Espada edited the most recent issue of Ploughshares. You want to tell them that they will fly on the wings of a dove over the highway of life, that they are cowboys at the crossroads of it all. But these, you have learned, are clichés, and you will keep them to yourself. You have no idea how to thank your parents for anything, but you want to thank them most of all for telling you all those fabulous lies.
So, I gave a speech at the English Department commencement ceremony, and to say that it went over well would be an understatement. Afterwards, I was even approached by a literary agent (!) who told me to, you know, get in touch when I had a book to publish. Oh shit. So, in the spirit of that, I'm going to publish the whole thing here, in entirety, lest any other book agents should want to contact me. And, of course, so that far-flung people I care about can read it, too.
It starts when you are a little girl. Walking behind Mrs. Yoho, your cruel and waddling Kindergarten teacher, you narrate the moment in your head. You see yourself in third-person. You think to yourself, “The girl walked behind her classmates like the last duck in the row.” You keep this thought to yourself. You will keep many of these thoughts to yourself.
Your mother reads to you every night before bed. You love to read. You love it more than running on deer paths, sitting in the snow, and trying to befriend birds. You are a lonely child. Sometimes you read to your toys until your voice is hoarse.
Your father tells you incredible lies. He tells you that he once wrestled under the name Haystack Calhoun. He tells you that he invented the cheeseburger, that he was an intelligence officer in Berlin in the 1960s. You will later discover that only one of these is true.
Your mother also tells you incredible lies. She tells you that you have a twin sister named Penelope who lives in the attic. Whenever you lose a favorite toy, she says, “Oh, we gave that one to Penelope. We didn’t think you liked it anymore.”
When you are ten, you realize that your house doesn’t even have an attic. You begin to worry.
In middle school, they let you take electives. You can choose between journalism, music theory, and creative writing. Journalism bores you. It makes you think of Washington Week In Review, the two hours every Sunday morning your parents spend reading the papers. So you sign up for creative writing. On the first day of class, Mrs. Hatfield reads from the first paragraph of Eudora Welty’s One Writer’s Beginnings. Mrs. Hatfield tells you that sometimes, in writing, you have to lie to tell the truth. No problemo, you think.
Now you are in high school. You take every class Mrs. Hatfield teaches. Even journalism. Most days, you eat lunch in her office. You have been banished from the table you used to sit at in the cafeteria because you and Amber Dellenbaugh had a crush on the same boy. Instead, you had to sit with the weird girl who ate only a plate of salted tomatoes at lunch. Mrs. Hatfield’s room is much better. Mrs. Hatfield gives you books to read outside of school. When you try to give them back, she tells you that she has extra copies. You know this is not true, but, grateful, you keep them.
You spend all of your summers working on the literary magazine with your friend Scott. You and Scott are convinced that you are the most brilliant aesthetic minds in your school. Your photographs and poems take up half of the space in the table of contents. You have no qualms with publishing ethics. You want desperately to publish yourself, to save yourselves from boredom in your small Pennsylvanian mining town. You mostly succeed.
When applying to colleges, you send a copy of the literary magazine along with your application. You get in. You apply for loans. And now you are waving goodbye to your parents, turning on your heel, and walking into Morewood Gardens.
You see the Gladys Schmitt Creative Writing Center, its calm green walls and deep leather couches. You love it there. You declare your writing major as soon as possible.
You start hanging out with the older writing majors and take up smoking. You go to their parties. You thought college parties would be just like the movies, drunk surfers chugging beer on the front lawn of a frat house. It is not like that at all. They are talking about how Anne Sexton was nothing compared to Sylvia Plath. They talk about poets all the time, on the bus, in line at the movie theater. They write poems for each other.
You love your professors. You look for their names in literary journals, read as many of their books as you can. They probably have no idea that you do this.
Writing classes, you think, are the most fun you can possibly have in a university. You spend a lot of late nights trying to write stories and poems. One night you are waiting in front of your dorm to give your friend Adam a poetry book he needs for class. It is late and the snow starts to fall as you stand there, smoking. You wonder how anybody could say this is easy. It is a torment, but you wouldn’t have it any other way.
You write a lot of papers. You think about how tall your stack of papers would be if you printed all of them out, you think about how far they would stretch away from Pittsburgh if you laid them end to end. Baltimore?
During your junior year, you move into a house with three other writers. That is a lot of writers. Books and coffee cups are everywhere. Your roommates write poems about each other, a practice you find alternately sweet and terrifying. You spend late nights talking about Sappho and Baudelaire.
One of your fiction teachers tries to convince you to cut down on coffee. Balzac died that way, apparently.
In your English classes, you talk about difference, performativity, the panopticon. You talk about the death of the author. But the part of you that writes poems stages a small resistance. “I do not want to die,” you think. You begin writing poems about your subjectivity.
You love to lie. Sometimes, after a reading, people ask you, “Did that really happen?” You can’t think of a way to answer.
One slow Sunday afternoon, while trying to research discursivity and identity formation in 1950s poetry, you decide instead to research Haystack Calhoun. You discover that he was a 600-pound man from Morgan’s Corners, Arkansas whose wrestling career peaked in the late 1950s. He was obviously not your father. On a hunch, you look up the inventor of the cheeseburger. The cheeseburger was invented in 1910 by Louis Ballast, the manager of the Humpty Dumpty Drive-In. He is also not your father.
The White Album, Joan Didion’s book of essays on the 1970s, is one of the books that Mrs. Hatfield gave you. You still have it. The beginning goes like this: “We tell ourselves stories in order to live. . . . We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” You love these words. In bookstores in cities far away from home, you sometimes find The White Album and read that passage to yourself. You believe it more than anything else. You think about Haystack Calhoun, your father, the cheeseburger, your mother, your made-up twin sister in the attic. We tell ourselves stories in order to live.
Now you are graduating from college. You do not know how to thank your professors for paying attention, taking you seriously. You do not know how to thank your classmates, especially the ones who bluster in and out of your life, clutching fresh manuscripts, calling you up in the middle of the day to tell you that Martin Espada edited the most recent issue of Ploughshares. You want to tell them that they will fly on the wings of a dove over the highway of life, that they are cowboys at the crossroads of it all. But these, you have learned, are clichés, and you will keep them to yourself. You have no idea how to thank your parents for anything, but you want to thank them most of all for telling you all those fabulous lies.
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