I, frankly, don’t know what I’m doing on Substack. Wait wait, I like it; I’m not quitting; it might seem as though, in these couple years of posting my novel, Tales Told Out Of School, a few essays, and verbal side-armed stone-throws across a lake, that I know dang well what I’m doing: “I’m a psyop!” and a data mining blog with your emails out in the Writersphere. Just being histrionic. No, you don’t think that; do you think I can tell who follows me, who you are, what you’re reading, and having for lunch?
I can’t. Okay, full confession: I can see your email addresses. I can see, if you like or comment, again, your handle or email address. But if your email address is genandharvlikefleamarkets123@gmail.com, it’s tough. Especially if I don’t know any Gen and Harvs (although I did; they were relatives of mine, but they’re long since passed). I can check a graph of engagement, a silly red line over months, watch it spike up when I post, then fall off into the abyss. You should see my abyss, the abyss of no engagement. It’s hilarious down there, dark in the daytime. Imagine the Minneapolis storm sewers in a dry summer, the scorched Minnehaha Creek winding through south Minneapolis. Peek down into my engagement pipe and you can see forever, from Lake Minnetonka straight to the Mississippi. Hello-o-o! (hello hello hello).
I see these high-tone accounts who lap up followers and money, who clearly have mastered the medium, and beaten the pants off mainstream media.
Substack emails greetings out to new subscribers, it has posts that trigger emails out to you. But I don’t know what podcasts, chats, and notes do. That’s already doin’ too much. Scary. (Teddy, you ever heard of watching a help video?) I can organize the page to lay out in a certain way. Done. I can choose fonts, add photos, galleries, audio, and video. Done that. You’ve seen my stabs at video ranging in quality from ridiculous to clown town. I am supposed to write notes to only my paid subscribers, and then other notes to my freeloaders to entice you to pay to subscribe. It’s mortifying because I’m still halfass-committed to using it, so in that wobbly spirit, I stay “oh shrug” about using it. And this fits my demeanor as a lifelong subversive.
I will try to stay attentive to you-all because I remain super grateful that you read it.
My writing decisions are not — I keep reminding myself — about what to say or do. They’re about how to be, how to nurture the reading and writing life. Lately, I’ve finished Kate Clanchy’s book about teaching, Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me, am now into reading Olga Tokarczuk’s The Books of Jacob, building strong hands to hold it, and staring at stacks of other story books (short stories are my favorite) by Frank O’Connor, William Trevor (I just read Lucy Gault), and anthologies. I’m interested always in intimacy and morality. My mentor Jane turned her attention to short stories at the end of her life. I like to think I helped that. Around 2019 or so, she asked, “Why do you like short stories?” because, she admitted, she did not like them very much, and I just said, “Because of their economy, I guess. They blow up on you.” Then she turned me onto George Saunders’ analyses of short Russian works, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain.
Okay this part shifts into morality.
I am partial to morality, to how to be. My stories will always focus on intimacy, moral lassitude, envy, lies, revenge, and brave acts of love that buy the giver some time on earth to put up with himself. That’s a long road down from my first incarnation as a writer in the late seventies and eighties before I spun out to journalism and writing rock songs, and fell out of fiction for thirty years. Back when, I wrote lyrical bits with protagonists rebelling against something, looking for a voice to roar with. In the cycle of the artist from lyric to dramatic to epic, I skipped the dramatic, except for my dozens of rock songs about disaffected guys, grumbling employees and bystanders. No, I skipped right to epic with the Tales novel about forces beyond the purview of teachers and students, and the universe neither helping nor hurting the combatants in public schools — it simply shrugs at them. I think it’s a mistake to see my teachers as good guys, administration as bad, and children as sad pawns. Kids, staff, and supporters are all walking paths of ambivalence. They do saintly and terrible things to each other. All of them are good and evil. Mr. O’Shea means well but he can be lazy and selfish. Maybe the cognitively impaired Cantrell, or Nix, the nonbinary kid, are unequivocally better people than anyone else.
Two months since posting the end of Tales, I fell into a morose tar pit where no light of words could escape me. Just recently I shook myself off and began to clean up. But it was very hard to write.
We were clobbered here after spending all of last summer trying to execute Jane’s no-count estate while our house underwent insurance repairs. Then came two more deaths of close people. We count something like 12 deaths in the last two years. My stepson’s biological dad died, and left him bereft, without a home, and we helping him rassle with settling another estate, a nothing estate. Then in December a friend’s husband killed himself in a manner so offensive, it cannot be said, let alone written, and I can’t imagine being her who discovered him. The anger that it conjured in my wife and me should dissuade anyone who considers ending his life from doing it now. Our only remaining assignment should be to live and be accountable to our children and friends. If you go, just know you can’t take all the hurt with you. You leave hurt, you leave smell, mountains of problems, decades of mess that will make suicide an option for your kids and loved ones. Don’t be a jerk. Don’t make your kids and pets and loved ones think it was their fault.
That’s far afield from the genesis of this piece, about the whys and whatfors of Substack, and now I’m clobbering readers over the head to resist suicide, to get help, to be responsible, to do the thing Dostoevsky said about the responsibility of living: that pain and suffering are inevitable, and to stick with living. In The Brothers Karamazov, he wrote about a real life court case involving the awful torture of a five-year-old child by her educated and well-off parents. They whipped and beat the girl for needing to use the toilet in the night, wiped her face with feces, and locked her out in the outhouse in freezing cold. The question Dostoevsky asked first was, how can God permit this? How is God worthy of praise if he creates a world with the torture of five year olds in it? He says about pursuing wisdom, salvation and God, on a balance sheet between good and evil, how can the whole world of knowledge redeem or be “worth the little tears of that little child to dear God?” Ivan declares that it’s utterly incomprehensible, that there is no point in hell if hell lives on earth. Before I spin completely off the rails of analyzing Dostoevsky, I will stop and echo what Father Zosima concludes to Ivan, after he is not convinced by his little brother Alyosha’s plea that only God can forgive child torture. Zosima says that it’s precisely the mystery of the equation between good and evil, that makes living ultimately worthwhile. One must be subservient to the question.
To that, I add, it’s precisely the gobbling black maw of suicide, its mess on everyone that it touches, its sin, that makes death resistible, and living the final solution.
There, well, I guess I had more to say on the subject of morality than this missive to you about mundanely running a Substack. It kind of fanned out ahead of me, and I had to choose a direction. I began by saying this blog challenges me to figure out what to write about, but that’s not it. Yes, that’s where I was for the last month. But the challenge of literature is not so much what to read and write, but how to be, how to live in things that trouble me, to write pieces from now on that I wish I could read.
And I still don’t know how to stop this crazy thing.
"this" she whispered to no one, but...