The bottom line is no one cares if you don’t write. No one asked you to. No one will die. There are chipmunks who work harder than you. You didn’t need to buy that Moleskin. You forgot you had one anyway. No one said: a poem please. No cried out when you sat down, mid-poem, because you couldn’t bleat another line, a lifetime ago on Minetta Lane. Do not ask what your writing can do for you. Do not got to therapy and crawl inside your inner ear. Did you ever think it was a gift from god? To stop? You won’t have to eat. You need not sing. You don’t have to be anything. When you remember those pages rocking out to sea, remember how good it felt to not reach for a simile. My face and your ass. Is like.
Do you ever think of quitting? Please be as negative as possible.
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Novels are flying at my head. Thousands of pages flapping like seagulls at Brighton Beach. Stories from land locked countries, from the mouths of bats, from trains that never leave the station. From the station itself. How did you come up with so many sentences, so many girls named Cara or Carla or Quintana, or Ray. Did it start on a stair, a hill, a bucket, a pail? What’s it about? Well, that’s a good question. The beach, the mountains, a multi-generational tale of raisin bran. You are nothing like a summer’s day. Why do sympathetic characters bring out the sadist in me? Does anyone really change? Are you my beginning, my middle or my ass wipe? Hi, I’m Betsy and I’m addicted to prose. Oh, Daisy. Grow up. There is a big canister somewhere. Dear Betsy: I am writing to see if you would be interested in my five novels, a 874,000 word quintet about two slugs fucking in a snot can. Do you feel me? Oh mighty novelists with your big boots and musky armpits. Where would we be without you?
To be stuck inside of Memphis with the heating pad blues again. Friends, because I am a bad ass, I turn it up high. All the way. Green. Gold. Orange. Red. I cannot read. I cannot sleep. I cannot swallow. I am in agony without ecstasy. It took me twelve hours to read the NYT front page review of the 25 year girl from Ponashe whose book is being called all the things I hate: luminous, numinous, transplendent, oracular, fablicity, concatacious, obliviosimous. I am as jealous as two slugs fucking in a snot can. Okay: I am weening myself off the oxy. And I promise that if I go to Silver Hill or Betty Ford or wherever Charlie Sheen scratched hash marks into the walls with his purloined Bic pen, I promise that I will not accept a power greater than myself, that I will not admit I am powerless over daisies, that I will not make amends especially to anyone I’ve hurt the worst. They are luminous enough, they are limned with light, they are dead to me.
For some reason, all of my lunch dates over the past two weeks have been with thirty-something editors. I still can’t quite fathom how I got to be the geriatric half of the lunch date equation, no matter how young, hip and cool I am. Still, I’m the one being courted by ARP, have a teenager, and get erratic periods. I often time travel a little during these lunches when I am visited by visions of my younger self, and I wonder how I ever pulled it off given my powerful impostor complex coupled with a tender misanthropy. And yet, and yet.
Betsy Lerner 