Back in Barcelona with no departure plans
There’s this feeling that I should start living my life differently
Love notes from Siel is a newsletter about love, writing, and the nomad life from me, Siel.
Dear friend —
Last week, I went to the Difficult Women Book Club, again. I love this group’s collective name, with its sense that by reading and discussing books, we're doing something cantankerous, contrarian, resistant to the status quo. We're not pliable or easy. We're not here to please —
The book on discussion was The Color Purple, an American classic — and the crowd of thirty or so women weighed in, speaking English but each with a different accent, we were from all over the world but had found each other and formed a community of sorts through literature.
I’ve been thinking a lot about community lately, now that I’m back in Barcelona. For the first time in nearly four years, I have no departure plans. Instead, the plan is to live here, to become — or to just be — a resident.
I haven’t been a resident of a place in so long that I’m not quite sure how to be one anymore. There’s this feeling that I should start living my life differently, that I should — I don’t know — start pursuing life goals or hobbies of some sort. Like learning to garden or getting in shape. Taking up guitar or redecorating the apartment. Gunning for a work promotion or raising kids. Or — since I still self-identify as a writer — writing “seriously” again.
Though what does it mean to write “seriously”?
When I was younger I desperately wanted to be part of a literary community, like the surrealists, with their exclusive literary salons. This desire, I think, is a common one for young writers or artists. Recently I read Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, a novel that follows two guys who in their youth start a literary movement called the visceral realists. In those fervent early years there’s a lot of energetic arguing over who’s in and who’s out of the group, over writing, over literature in general. But then the novel keeps going, following these guys as they slowly get older and start floating ever more meanderingly and aimlessly through life, living in one country then another, making friends then losing them, writing not all that much. In fact their lives seem kind of miserable and pathetic, often they’re working random menial jobs, sometimes begging or robbing to make ends meet.
The novel, you could say, is about the death of youthful literary aspirations — or perhaps the slow, sad starvation of writerly dreams. The visceral realists take on shitty little low-skill temp jobs because they’re writers, they want to save their time and energy for their writing, but because they have shitty little jobs they end up spending most of their time and energy scrounging for basic life necessities, a place to sleep, food to eat. Then decades later they’re more or less still stuck where they started, at a loss as to how to turn things around —
Of course, plenty of non-writers come to feel stuck and regret their choices in life too —
The language around the practice of writing cuts both ways. On the one hand, we talk of writing as a self-care tool, a nurturing way to create time and space for ourselves, our emotions, our creativity. On the other, we also talk of writing as tough, grueling work, if we’re serious about it we must force ourselves up early to grind out our novels bit by bit in the wee hours before work, we must deliberately isolate ourselves to stay in the world of words, we must continually sacrifice and suffer rejections, disappointments, and a lot of lost time, we must make shape our lives entirely around our writing.
As one character says in The Savage Detectives: “Discipline: writing every morning for at least six hours. Writing every morning and revising in the afternoons and reading like a fiend at night.” Read one way such a schedule sounds like a beautiful luxury — to be able to dedicate your whole life to writing! On the other, this spartan way of living seems like a sort of jail.
A lot of writers — or at least a lot of the writers I know — seem to be rethinking their writerly lives these days. For example: L.A. writer Wendy Ortiz has decided to stop sending her work to literary journals. “I’m done with the dance of submitting,” she says.
This decision to me seems revolutionary. I’ve been dutifully submitting to journals since college, having long ago accepted that this is just what one must do, it’s an essential part of being a writer, devoting my free time and paying $3-$5 a pop in submission fees to hopefully to get published in a periodical very few people actually read — usually only to collect indifferent form-letter rejections, month after month, year after year.
What liberation to finally say goodbye to all that! Says Wendy: “The idea of deleting my Submittable account, like all the other social media accounts I’ve deleted, feels freeing, like I was in a long line of waiting to be seen and decided instead to skip away in an entirely other direction. Toward the forest! Maybe toward obscurity. We’ll see!”
What would it mean if I did the same? That I’ve chosen to no longer suffer a steady stream of tiny rejections? That I’ve decided to make my writing life more joyous, no matter the consequences? That I’ve made a smart, practical decision to stop wasting time and money after conducting a long-overdue cost-benefit analysis? Or that I’ve given up my literary dreams?
Will I still be part of a writing community? And will I have a purpose for writing, if I no longer submit?
What about you? What do you submit to in your life? Is there a habitual thing you’ve hated doing for a long time, but don’t know what it would mean to stop?
Love,
Siel
Three links you might love:
Difficult Women Book Club is a worldwide phenomenon — and has a
. Find a group near you.
How to be a bridesmaid for strangers. “That there’s a market for a hired bridesmaid, Glantz says, shows just how high the expectations for weddings have become…. It also tells her something else: that people don’t have the support networks they need, not just on their wedding day but in everyday life.”
How to become a hermit in a cave. “Her basic goal remained intact: to neither see nor speak to another human being for five hundred days. She didn’t even want to see her own face.”
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You're the second writer I've seen quote Wendy this week. It's a powerful urge to be done with all that. To be a writer is to live with constant rejection -- I was rejected from a fellowship I had high hopes for this week -- and sometimes it feels like the best one can hope for is the rollercoaster of ups and downs. Is that any way to live a life? It's not one I would recommend. But. One thing I think you and I and Wendy all share is that our writing practice involves a great deal of reflection, which is a tremendous asset in the face of rejection. I believe the interrogation of one's desires and evaluation of one's efforts takes the teeth out of rejection. There's nothing a rejection can teach us about ourselves if we've thoroughly investigated the work and what it means to us and to the world.
I loved this love note, and will write a note back soon.