The Coarse Grind: Part 1

Yo. Trainer here. The editors have bestowed a responsibility upon me to address writing, creative expression and how to keep the juices flowing with the boot of empire on your neck and a day job that’s killing you more than keeping you alive. Starting my weekly blog, Going for the Throat, and writing about myself and trek down the savage road of creative expression has been the best thing to ever happen to me as a writer. For one thing, I’m never out of material. I’m staunchly in the punk rock school of thought that asserts a writer writes. Terms like ‘good,’ ‘bad,’ ‘true’ or ‘sane’ won’t stop me from writing, but, nothing will. Any writer or creative knows—when it’s flowing let it flow. No doubt you’ll have to face The Boss in your distant future, probably in the horrible morning. He, or she, will be the exact and transmogrified face of a dream deferred, but, if you’re anything like me, your boss is only part of a world that exists away from your typewriter and outside the arena. And so, the problem with creative expression is not the creative part nor the expression but reality—the real world coming in to interrupt you, characters at once less real and more banal than anything we can dream up and punch down at the keys—knocking at your door, standing over your desk and keeping you from the real work. The expression is not the problem, and neither is material, especially if you’re only writing about yourself. The problem is reality and it’s the same for everyone from the working poor to the filthy rich. Right here is never as good as what we can gin up at the keys, and there are parallel existences to be had from a life observed that can enrich and inform each other. With discipline, we can shape our reality through our writing and we’ll always have something to write about. To paraphrase Richard Hell, writing is the best profession because whatever happens to us, the best and the worst are all worth going through and even a cause to celebrate because as a writer we are writing it down.

I do my best thinking while writing but it’s more like I discover what I know. Even your best thinking will get you nowhere so it’s good to know what you know and handy to have proof and documentation besides. When the gods are leaning on the walls and I’m broke and feral, the way out is the way in ain’t it though. When I can’t do anything I write. I like to let it bleed, get it all out and live in whatever wisdom came out and is staring up at me in black Georgia and a WordPress draft bubble. I write live for the thrill of it, because I’m a performer, and you should always write with someone in mind. Sometimes it’s a woman. Sometimes it’s a young poet. Sometimes it’s a Yoga teacher in the sticks of PA but it’s always the people. I am writing for the people the way Hunter Thompson and Rollins, Bukowski and Twain did. I’d never betray you, good Reader, because I know that as long as I’m telling it, you are going to read. You’ll receive me, you’ll hear me, which can be the difference between being someone who matters and someone who was never here at all. You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall. Bukowski called it ‘framing the agony’ and I defy you to feel the same after writing. I’ll go out on a limb and say that, like Yoga, it always works. If you’re dying to live or suffering broke down in a too small flat, like Uncle Hank you got it out of you and the proof is on the page.

Ah, even now, with this 700-word introduction stanchioned like a tower between me and my blues, I feel some space. There’s some space to breathe and that’s really all you have to do in this life—breathe. In and out. Space and breath could be the difference, good Reader, between letting the blue world roll right over you and bounding upright at the writer’s desk with your enemy’s head on a stick. What I’ve described to you mostly is a philosophy and that philosophy is that writing is therapeutic, manifest, and the most fun you can have with your pants on. The challenge is always the same. It might even be more real in these harrowing end days of the American Century. In case you haven’t noticed it’s the end of the world but more pressing than ecological collapse is the end of the Middle Class which means the end of you and me, good Reader. We might have to choose. I, for one, have been sleeping in. 2017’s publication through Yellow Lark Press has been delayed and the last thing I want to do after hauling freight with 20 other jerkoffs in a warehouse is come home and write poetry. But I will and I will try. As mentioned, it’s a philosophy I’ve described—it’s that important to me and it works. I’m faced with it, again, the workingman’s blues and all I can do about it at the moment is maintain these Sunday sessions on the iPad sipping honey sweet espresso with you. I’ll also be taking a cue from James Kelman and a little direction from Anne Lamott. These Sundays together will be one of a few and hopefully many times I will show up, at the desk, and creatively bang my head against the wall. I’m hoping it’s the wall that gives but I’ll take what I can get.

A working class hero is something to be. See you next month good Reader. Don’t quit.

Part 2

Jim Trainer Author
Jim Trainer’s The Coarse Grind, a column on the creative life, has been published monthly at Into the Void. Jim was curator of Going For The Throat—a weekly publication of cynicism, outrage, correspondence and romance—and publishes one collection of poetry, and sometimes prose, per year through Yellow Lark Press. “KEEP BLEEDING IN THE ANNO FINEM” is his 7th.
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13 Comments

  1. Like a sunrise on the Palouse your rolling awakening urges the writers to rouse themselves to the keyboards. Your words are true and the message clear and here we are to jam our pens into the earth and claim life for the day. Follow you? no. Take up the torch and the pitchfork and further the firebrand? SURE! Fellow is better than follow. Never, ever give up; but showing up gives breath and fire and purpose to those who look your way.
    Right? Write! It is a rite!

  2. ….And you think you’re so clever and classless and free
    But you’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see
    A working class hero is something to be….

    You are my working class hero ….

    • Aw, Jody, thank you! Thank you for reading and your continous support. How brilliant are those lyrics?! I hope someone reading can go on because of these words. God knows I don’t know if I can most of the time.

  3. […] Yo. Trainer here. Strange to be writing on a Tuesday morning but it’s strange to do anything at this hour. If I’m doing anything at this time of day I’m conscripted to which does’t make this any less peculiar. Having to write is different for writers like me, I mean, I have a deadline so it will have to get done but I’m not writing for a paycheck or under the gun and anyway under the gun of what a paycheck has become living under capitalism. We’ve cages long and wide in this country and privilege has kept me in roses mostly, considering how they do almost everywhere else in the Final Century. It’s too early to get political and too early for anything else but I’ll take it, with the schedule I’m on, and write when I can, thankfully for longer and longer sessions these days and just after sunrise on a weekday will have to do when we both know I’d rather be burning it at dusk or hid away from the business of the square world and during thee hated work week. As far as having to write this at all, I've made a life of writing to understand and as a refuge, so I only have to write this column in as much as I need to make sense of things or get away from it all for a while and be here with you and isn’t that nice? […]

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