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The Coarse Grind: Part 4

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It’s what I do all day—I sit alone in a room and dream up stuff and write it down, just doing the best I can.
– David Mamet

Well, I did it. I tried, at least. With nominal effort I got nominal result and another week hasn’t blown by with only a paycheck to show for it. Work was exhausting. I had to miss my favorite songwriter on Wednesday and, well, it was what it was—but I came through with a poem. I knew I’d have to force it, too. As mentioned last month, the last thing I want to do after driving a truck in the freezing rain for 10 hours is sit behind a typewriter. I did it anyway and I was able to talisman things from my day, mental images or states of being that weren’t the grind. What I came up with is birds. I conjured them up at the type, and they soared and dove above me. They took the deathly focus of the American laborer off of me, away from my sore shoulders and arthritic hands and up into the blue expanse. It was a moment apart and a temporary cure and I got it on wax, that is—it made it to the page.

A lot has been made of training your subconscious to anticipate creative endeavor. I’ve heard the creative self compared to a furtive animal—it won’t come out of the woods and into the clearing until it knows it’s safe. There are too many kinks and fuckarounds in my life right now, and most of them have put a stopper to the works. Everything from my roommate overcharging me $1,750 in rent to coming down with some kind of irritable bowels has put a halt to ambitious creative endeavor. I couldn’t even come through with my usual 600 words over at Going For The Throat at times—though, I’ll admit, some weeks I was just too angry to write. Which is another story for another time. What I'd like to impress upon you is that you need walls and a door and ideally no grifting roommates to create. You've got to schedule it and you've got to keep the schedule.

Last week was a breakthrough. This week looms large. I’ll be on the road in four weeks and hopefully won’t be waking before dawn every day. I know I’ll need to carve out some kind of place for myself, metaphorical or symbolic or otherwise. I look forward to it, truly—sometimes movement and travel is all the inspiration you need. This next month though, slogging it out, here, and putting my shekels away, working for the weekend and our Sunday sessions together with sweet espresso—I’ll be putting it all to the test. Everything you’ve read at The Coarse Grind will have to walk its talk. I’m going to find a way for my creative self to survive in the pitifully small window between work and sleep.

A working class hero is something to bebut I ain’t long for this life, good Reader. Just got to make it to the end of March and then July. Which could very well be the thrust and theme of The Coarse Grind: Live to create, and eventually creating will keep you alive.

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Part 3

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Multi-Award-Winning Author William Luvaas Knows the Power of Perseverance

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Welcome to Saint Angel is the fourth novel of multi-nominated novelist William Luvaas. The Seductions of Natalie Bach (TBS, 1987) was nominated for the National Book Award and The Pen-Faulkner award. Going Under (Putnam, 1994) was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His story collection A Working Man’s Apocrypha (University of Oklahoma Press, 2007) was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (and his wife, Lucinda Luvaas’ film version of it won Best Narrative Short at the Delta International Film Festival). Luvaas’ second collection, Ashes Rain Down: A Story Cycle (Spuyten Duyvil, 2013) was the Huffington Post’s Book of the Year 2013, as well as a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards and The Montaigne Medal. The novel Beneath the Coyote Hills (Spuyten Duyvil, 2017) was a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Prize. Twelve of his stories have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His stories and essays appear in dozens of publications such as the North American Review and he has taught writing at San Diego State University and elsewhere.

Carol Smallwood asked Luvaas a few questions about his writing and career:

© William Luvaas

Smallwood: Can you tell me about your recently published novel, Welcome to Saint Angel?

Luvaas: Welcome to Saint Angel is a story about development gone mad in the bucolic So-Cal valley of Santa Rosa de Los Angeles (Saint Angel), townsfolk split into warring camps. Developers want to turn the valley into a sprawling bedroom community and appropriate its meager water supply to grow lawns in the desert. Al Shar­pe and his zany allies want to preserve its natural beauty and rural character. T­­he battle between them is both comic and tragic. The story of one man’s heroic fight to save the place he loves and a rural community’s struggle to preserve its way of life and tight-knit community­, the novel speaks to the impact of unbridled development and suburban sprawl on the natural environm­ent and on people’s lives.

Smallwood: How long did it take you to write it? 

Luvaas: I wrote the first draft in 2002-2003. It took four revisions in all, squeezed between other books, before I got it right; each one came faster. The final revision took about four months.

Smallwood: How has living in California influenced your fiction?

Luvaas: Profoundly. I’ve set my past three books in California’s high desert where I lived for fifteen years. I’m inspired by its huge, dramatic, unforgiving landscape and fascinated by the quirky outcasts who live there. Outsiders proliferate in my work, along with grotesque realism which thrives in the desert. My writing has always been informed by my surroundings—whether New York, the Mendocino Coast, or L.A.

Smallwood: When did you first begin writing?

Luvaas: I wrote some bad poetry in college, then a 1,200 page ‘starter’ novel in my late twenties, The Uranian Circus, which I wanted to be the defining novel of the 60s. Never published. When I moved from Northern California to New York in my mid-thirties, I wrote and published The Seductions of Natalie Bach—my 60s novel.

Smallwood: What are some of the topics of your essays; have you written poetry?

Luvaas: I learned early on that I am a better storyteller than a poet. My essays often focus on societal traumas (like Trump’s election), and personal traumas, and how past dysfunctions influence present behavior. Loss is a major theme in both my fiction and nonfiction. I’m fascinated by the puzzling machinations of fate which often seem informed by loss. So I’ve written about the loss of a close writer friend, the burning down of a small town’s favorite restaurant, how the loss of a tooth in a long-ago skiing accident returned to haunt me just when a major literary agent offered to represent my work. But I’m not a fatalist: a stubborn resistance to ill fortune runs through all my work, along with a longing for something better.

Smallwood: In an interview with The Book Review, I was intrigued by your collection of linked stories, Beneath the Coyote Hills. Could you tell us about the book?

Luvaas: It includes ten linked stories, each independent but sharing the same cast of characters, themes and locales—something between a novel and a story collection. The stories explore what life might be like after several decades of global warming, extreme weather events, epidemics, and collapse of the world economy and social order. They are set in two isolated California communities where ordinary people try to survive and keep some semblance of order and meaning in lives stressed by environmental and social apocalypse. Each story presents a new crisis­, with collective troubles reflected in individual troubles as holocaust in the outside world engenders personal holocaust.

Smallwood: What advice can you give struggling writers? Please comment on changes you have seen in the writing field.

Luvaas: Stick with it no matter what. Talent is important but of little use if you aren’t persistent. Thomas Mann advised us that only those who can’t live without writing should attempt to be writers. Because it’s a hard haul, not just getting the work done but finding an audience for it. You will most surely face disappointment. You have to get up, dust yourself off, and keep going. There are no easy ten-step programs; you just have to write. You need to have faith in yourself, but some doubt, too, so you will keep pushing the envelope. It’s an awkward dance: self-confidence coupled with self-doubt. The writer’s two-step.

When I started out, books were promoted through print media. Now social media and blogs dominate. Publishers were more willing to take risks and support marginal books they believed in. Today, with fewer readers of serious fiction, publishing houses are reluctant to support ‘literary’ writers whose work doesn’t fit neatly into a marketing niche.

Smallwood: Can you tell me anything about what you’re currently working on?

Luvaas: I’m writing a novel about a woman who flees a powerful and abusive husband with her teenage son. He’s a district attorney with all the tools of the surveillance society at his disposal, so she must disappear off the face of the earth to escape him, which is nearly impossible in this age of facial-recognition software. She’s also battling depression and opioid addiction. Their odyssey takes them on many madcap adventures, always staying just ahead of her husband.



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The Coarse Grind: Part 3

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In the hall of mirrors of the New Century, things are what they appear to be.
– Your Writer, Going For The Throat

Writer’s block is an economic luxury.
– James Kelman

Aho Good Reader. The Coarse Grind has yielded to cold espresso. With honey and cream, of course, and NPR blathering in the background. This month’s column may be a solemn offering, or one with hardly any truth and just the rhythm of the keys and the words they make to keep it humming along. If you’re joining us for the first time, you should know I’m not picky about content. A writer writes and I’m mostly behind and think of writing a hell of a lot more than doing it anyway. Truth is it’s become a physical impossibility—I am often simply too tired and beat down to consider stanchioning myself at the Selectric II for a poetry session. The poems that do come out after working labor all day come out like an explosive bowel movement. One poem in particular I had to hold on to. It came to me in the predawn dark and had to be stored somewhere in me until the end of a 13½-hour day hauling copper when I could bleed it out onto the page. Another was the result of feeling cagey after work, in a stupid café with stupid people who talked too loud about things I’ve no use for. I turned that poem into a feel-good piece but when I wrote it I was feeling anything but. It’s a kind of spell that comes in handy when life demands diamonds from dogshit. Anyone working labor knows that most of the world is conditioned to never see you let alone acknowledge your presence and in my neighborhood that attitude can be elevated to high art. I’m sure they suffer in their way but they’ll never know the strife of being trapped in a dead-end slog just to keep a roof and walls so you can write poetry. Writing this, I’ve realized new parallels between labor and poetry though I’m well aware their relationship is dire to begin with. At best it is one of hard-bitten romanticism and at worst one of alcoholism and bitterness.

A while back songwriter Pete Marshall sent me an essay by writer James Kelman. It was a revelation and a shot in the arm. Kelman is up and at his writing desk two hours before his bus-driving shift at 7. He’s a husband and a father, too. He’s published and he keeps writing and he still works for a living. What’s most striking about the essay is what Kelman never says. He never bemoans his lot. Nor does he delude himself with a dream of some kind of way to ‘make it’ as a writer. Kelman knows what I told you on our maiden voyage here at The Coarse Grind—a writer writes. Plain and simple and point blank. You might make it. You might not. But if you’re a writer you’d better write—or, spare yourself the misery and risk of alcoholism and don’t be a writer. If not writing sounds horrible to you then you’ve got what it takes.Although I never doubted you. Writing is a way to talisman our misery.It gives thrust and grandeur to an otherwise bland and brutal trek. We come through by wearing through. They can take our bodies, they can put you at the wheel of a 16’ stake bed, drenched in sweat and hauling 6 pallets into Hill Country. They can insult your soul and bombard you with overproduced and compressed trash, call it culture and parade it as music that you punch on and off as you drive. They can take your mind, tell you what they want to tell you, never admit it’s a rigged system and that capitalism eats its young. But they’ll never be able to take away the inner life. Ask Dostoevsky and Levine. Bukowski and Oliver, Fante and Carver. They suffered their dysfunctions like the rest of us but they lived true in their work. We know they did because it lives on and their work is our fuel and fire ain’t it though. There are poems in my heart, funny tragedies, peccadilloes and stories that connect us to a greater whole, make us laugh our madman&woman laughter and bring liberating tears to our eyes. That is Art, Good Reader, and what Art is for. It should make us strong and give us reason to go on. Is there a better religion? Do you really think you’ll quit?

What’s bizarre but not at all surprising is the life this column is taking on, for me, its writer—the parallels are running deep. I’m up at 4 and out the door by 4:40 a.m., Monday through Friday. I’ve about an eight-hour window after shift to drive home, feed and shower, handle normal niggling life detail and—write poetry if I intend to continue publishing a collection every year. As mentioned it’s become a physical impossibility. A challenge and a question I’ve no answer for. Only inspiration. I can’t give you this one in a bow, Good Reader, because I’m fucked. I know I am. How will my Art (and I) ever survive? If I’m to do at least fifty hours out there on the road and get decent sleep, how will I ever continue to be a poet who says what needs to be said? I’ve managed to come through with these Sundays together. Last Sunday was a bust and it worried me some, but I’m up and at it today and I’m gonna run with it. Life goes on and I’ve got to keep writing it down. I’ve got to make enough money to pay my debts and make the nut for when I leap again in the Fall. Make no mistake about that either, Good Reader, because come next fall leap I shall. I’ll be trying to make it, on the hustle and betting on the muse forever, or one more time before old age takes me, or suicide.

Write while you can and I’ll see you next month, Good Reader.

Ab irato,

Trainer

Part 2



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Vertical Montage by Csilla Toldy

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There are a great many things to admire and enjoy in Csilla Toldy’s third chapbook of poems, Vertical Montage, which was recently launched by Lapwing Publications as part of the Belfast Film Festival 2018. Dedicated to the Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, the book contains poems written loosely around the themes of film and filmmaking, and Toldy is certainly cinematic in her poetic approach.  In ‘Tour Eiffel’ she conjures fluid images of one of cinema’s favourite landmarks, Paris’s ‘helpless princess’ who stands ‘in a solid kind of trance.’ On the previous page Paris is evoked again in ‘Brute and Beauty,’ a very striking tale of a city which, it is suggested, was saved from the destruction of war because of its beauty. The poem is introduced by a chilling quote from Adolf Hitler: ‘It has been my life’s dream to see Paris.’

War is the thread underpinning this collection, apart from the explicit theme of filmmaking. Toldy escaped from socialist Hungary as a teenager in 1981 and has a keen sensitivity for political conflict, most affectingly evoked in ‘Horror,’ her chronicle of a bombing from her childhood:

Metallic smell, unspeakable horror, like the clean rifle under your nose.

This is also expressed in ‘Bussokusekika’ (below), the most successful of the filmpoems accompanying this collection, which was selected for the ZEBRA Poetry Film Festival in 2016. Running at only 1.14 minutes the film is a stomach-punch of empathy and the human cost of war. On the page the poem is beautiful but in the film it becomes a bilingual conversation between two soldiers on opposing sides. The painful politeness of the first lines,

I’m so glad to meet you.

It’s an honour to fight you.,

sent a chill down my spine, the use of black and white footage of men playing racketball mocking the absurdity of war.

Eisenstein was famed for his ‘montage’ technique of filmmaking in which arbitrarily chosen images, independent of the action and plot, would be presented in a sequence which would most affect the viewer. Toldy draws on this technique in her filmpoems, although in ‘Point’ and ‘Hommage to a Towering Shade’ I found it hard to look past the clashing fonts the poet uses which detract from her fine words.

Going back to the chapbook itself there is a great richness of theme and language in Toldy’s snapshots of life which span many eras and spaces. There is a quiet playfulness to the poet’s depiction of the famous photograph of construction workers eating lunch on scaffolding in ‘Lunch in the Sky.’ Through her eyes those men who built the empire state building fuelled by ‘air-borne bread and bacon’ are ‘humble and helpless like children.’ Toldy continues this theme of social history with a brilliant elegy for the emergence of advertising in America, ‘Neon Eldorado, 1920,’  and the charming ‘Bag-Piper in High Street Kensington.’ In this last poem, Toldy’s skill and balance as a poet can be seen in her ability to allow pathos into a scene of potential comedy. This is also apparent in the poem ‘Day for Night’ in which Toldy recounts, with a softness of touch palpable throughout her work, three men on a train ‘swaddling me, the eavesdropper with the melody of their Arabic.’

The finest poem is the epic ‘Berlin,’ in which Toldy wields her considerable command of language to evoke the chaos and trauma of war. It deserves a place in the canon of the most powerful of anti-war poetry. It begins,

O

Before the sky fell in

we danced to the music of our crazy laughs

Hilariously electrified by the current of a bleak future.

and ends,

We are the human gods

begging for forgiveness.

This review has not mentioned the references to filmmakers or the techniques of filmmaking which run throughout the collection for the simple reason that Toldy’s explorations of war are more successful, and it is these poems which make this chapbook a powerful work deserving of attention.

I will give the last word to Toldy herself, who in ‘The Cellist’ offers us a beautifully constructed and pared-back poem of loss and hope:

‘The Cellist’

rebelled against death

and destruction

his music saved the dignity

of the dying

restored the hope

of the living

his answer to war was harmony

 

he says

 

that with his life’s work done now

delirium can cloud his pain

and his dignity is the freedom

to destroy his body hoping to find

harmony in peace

Buy Vertical Montage (Lapwing Publications, 2018) here.



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The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky by Jana Casale

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The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky is a book is written by a woman about womanhood, and it would best be prescribed for women, or men who want to spend time inside the mind of a woman for a while. Along with offering value to these express audiences, the book does raise ideas worth entertaining, once the final page is finished. It’s a book that will have you laughing and leave you thinking.

Without doubt, the writing is funny. Jana Casale skillfully creates a lovable character, Leda, and sustains the character’s quirky voice throughout the entire novel, which is not short—the reader follows Leda through college, into adulthood, and beyond. The novel’s length is arguably one of its shortcomings, ironically enough. I found myself taking breaks and reading other books between chapters. The book does explore consistent themes of friendship, identity and creativity, as Leda grows into herself as a woman and wife, still defining herself as a writer, even when she sets aside her writing ambitions to raise her daughter. She gradually allows her career and creative goals to shift, but maintains a constant preoccupation with being “linear,” which means “to be lines of thinness from her head to her feet.” This goal shows Leda to be a young woman who is caught up in cultural pressures, as she asserts, “it was very important, VERY IMPORTANT, not to be fat,” and goes on to say that “this was the first innate truth of her womanhood.” As a young woman myself, I must admit to finding this upsetting. Even if this assertion is intended as satire, I find fault with the way it exacerbates what you might call the ‘thin ideal.’ This poses the question of whether cultural norms and ideologies are reinforced or simply reflected in works of art; the fact that Leda is obsessed with being “linear” might draw important attention to the fact that this is the attitude at the moment, or it could be the reason why it’s the attitude at the moment.

This is one example of several ways in which Leda is deeply affected by the stereotypes that she scorns. She seems to be averse to stereotypical roles for men and women, and yet, she acts according to such roles: giving up her desire to go to grad school in order to follow her boyfriend to California, spending her evenings cooking dinner and waiting for him to come home from work, befriending women she doesn’t particularly like but gets to know when their children play at the same park. While I found myself feeling slightly frustrated at Leda’s seemingly inevitable lapse into these prototypical, maternal behaviors, there is something refreshing about how she goes about them. Leda acknowledges that she had greater ambitions than being a wife and a mother, but also realises that being a wife and mother is what she wants. These roles make her happy and fulfilled. So, in that sense, she’s not yielding to social pressures because they are social pressures, but rather, she’s doing what she wants to, even if it happens to fit into the mould of social pressures. She says this explicitly, when telling her daughter, “Don’t do something you don’t want just because you think it’s something you should do,” to which her daughter responds by saying, “But the thing is, it is what I want” (when talking about getting married and having kids). Leda’s (and her daughter’s) form of feminism, then, is not exactly what you expect, but is still empowering (aside from feeling the need to be “linear,” which doesn’t feel empowering).

Leda’s life is empowering and encouraging in how she shows half-hidden truths in full, humorous light, saying what’s often left unsaid in order to maintain the pleasant delusion that, if left unsaid, maybe it isn’t true. She is honest about small, frustrating interactions with women in public places, such as the woman overzealously helping in the dressing room, and the falsely-positive woman-hostess in the restaurant. She is honest about the ways in which young women often navigate their friendships through great amounts of jealousy and constant comparison, as Leda does with her friends as they each rotate through sexual partners and boyfriends. This female tendency also shows itself, quite comically, in Leda’s life as an adult, once she has a daughter and meets other moms at the park every week, when the women take full advantage of that time to validate themselves by bragging about their childrens’ accomplishments and growth. These interactions are pervasive on social media as well, as Casale writes funny and accurate imitations of passive-aggressively catty, ostensible compliments on Facebook in response to posts about crawling and walking (as one woman signs off with “#mobilebaby”). In this way, Leda sees how insecurity riddles its way into almost every stage of life, showing itself to be, unfortunately, greater than something that a young girl outgrows. Another feeling Leda is unable to outgrow is the temporary nature of many relationships. There’s a slightly sad but beautiful moment at the park during one playgroup when she realises the ways in which she is incredibly unlike her friend, a woman with whom she only shares motherhood in common. After this realisation, Leda also sees the ways in which her daughter and her friend’s daughter are only growing apart. She says, “it was inevitable, their own lives constantly diverting from the second they were born, the sound of it silent; if they could have heard it they would have heard its speed, the churning loud engine warped in passing, like a train rolling by.”

The novel contains many gorgeous, tragic moments such as this, in which life’s beauty and pain are painfully exposed at the same time. You can’t help but care about Leda and her daughter, and Leda and her mother: two relationships which carry significant weight toward the end of the book. These woman-to-woman connections seem to be the most striking and most essential. Despite Leda’s relative lack of success in her writing and other pursuits, she is a faithful friend, wife, mother, and daughter, and in this way, finds satisfaction. Leda doesn’t write books or gain fame for her creative work, but her daughter does find a beautiful short story that Leda wrote, which Leda’s daughter eventually passes down to her own daughter, providing hope and possibility and the closest thing to immortality that a woman will ever achieve: being able to positively, honestly influence another young woman whose legacy will be passed down to another young woman, and another young woman, as Leda seems to do, ad infinitum.   

Buy The Girl Who Never Read Noam Chomsky (Knopf, 2018) here.

 



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Ytasha L. Womack

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Ytasha L. Womack is a critically acclaimed author, filmmaker, dancer, independent scholar, and champion of humanity and the imagination. Her book Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture (Chicago Review Press), a 2014 Locus Awards Nonfiction finalist, is the leading primer on the exciting subject which bridges science fiction, futurism, and culture. Learn more about her at ytashawomack.com.

Patrick A. Howell: I have often thought of one’s principles as being both peace and technology because they enable the human spirit to reach its highest form. Having recently read of language being the first and most fundamental technology, it was interesting to see your identification of ‘race’ as a technology. How does race being a technology affect the United States of America as well as global culture?

Ytasha L. Womack: Race as a technology is a recognized aspect of Afrofuturism. We all know that race was created and yet our society maintains these categories as existential states of permanent existence. Race or the notion of being black or white specifically was created to justify the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The caste system that resulted was encoded through law and violence. People in our society have fought very vigilantly to change the system and recognize our shared humanity but the idea of separation continues to exist.

How race functions varies from country to country and sometimes is defined by who colonized the nation centuries ago, the nature of enslavement or colonization, and the reconciliations, if any, that followed. Race is closely related to access, and as access for people changes, race as we discuss it changes as well. Race, like many identities, including gender, religion, etc., is more fluid than we know. This fluidity is attributed to the fact that it was created in the context of limitation and individuals are constantly negotiating their relationship to it. Technologies are created to serve a need or function and discussing race in that is a reminder that it is, in fact, a creation.

Howell: You wrote Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi & Fantasy Culture in 2013. With Octavia Butler, Janelle Monae, and Renee Cox there was already the blueprint for ‘Afrofuturism’ but it was not until your book that there was a cogent embodiment of those concepts in a literary treatise.

Womack: The book did help synergize people who were interested in Afrofuturism but weren’t familiar with the term. I’ve always seen Afrofuturism as universal so I’m not completely surprised by peoples’ enthusiasm about it. I just feel that naming a subject is empowering and helps point people to works and histories that remind them they aren’t alone in their contemplations. My book isn’t the first writing on the subject. There were quite a few essays in academia. However, my book is a leading primer that I wrote largely to create bridges for people who approached Afrofuturism in a range of ways but, for the most part, didn’t know they were Afrofuturists or that such a thing had a body of work behind it.

Howell: The trailer for the blockbuster film Black Panther (Marvel Studios, 2018) featured an image of your book. I see the influence of Black Panther as having the ability to shift mainstream culture away from alt-right and back toward alt-left. Are you a futurist? Can you create the future? Do you have any actual super powers?

Womack: Someone once told me that my super power was the belief in possibility. I thought that was a pretty wack super power at the time. However, now I think there’s a virtue in optimism. To quote Rev. Jesse Jackson, you can’t move forward with cynicism. As for the future, people collectively create futures every day through their thinking and actions. Many of us are just not cognizant of how our thought and actions (or lack thereof) shape the world.

Howell: As a filmmaker, your vision and its manifestation create realities in other folks’ minds. Do any agendas—social, spiritual, visionary—color you and your work now or in the next decade?

Womack: As humans we’re hardwired to engage in stories. I like telling stories that remind us of our own humanity, resilience, sense of purpose, and the value of community. I like sharing histories and present actions that reflect that as well.

Howell: What is imagination? Is it a real space? Or is it a private hallucination? Are we, the children of slaves, kings and queens, the imagination of our ancestors? Is there a collective experience of imagination that informs your work?

Womack: The imagination is as real as the dreamer wants it to be. I think Rasheedah Phillips’ work in Black Quantum Futurism is really interesting because it looks at African traditional and diasporic perspectives on time as it relates to quantum physics. Essentially, her work is a reminder that our current take on linear time is a perspective we’ve all been conditioned to work within. Our current perspective on time as linear is like looking at the ruler as the object it measures.

Howell: Politically and socially, America is in a position with the KKK, alt-right, and relics of the 1980s setting a tone a lot of us did not foresee for the 21st century. What does futurist Ytasha Womack see in the distant future?

Womack: People can create whatever they want to create if they believe they can do so. I think it would be great for more people to give thought to the kind of world they would like to see and to really envision what that world looks and feels like. Personally, I like creating spaces that value humanity. Perhaps we should give more thought to thinking about valuing humanity and what that means. Many people put energy into what they don’t want instead of into what they do want. They put a lot of energy into fear and frustrations. Having a vision and taking steps to bring it about is important.

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The Coarse Grind: Part 2

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It began as a mistake.
— Bukowski, Post Office

My biggest motivation as a writer was always fear. The fear that I’d never be a writer ironically fueled me on. Before I go back to hauling freight tomorrow, I know if I don’t get this column penned it’ll be in the wind. Without the self-imposed deadline of 600 words every week I might not write at all, for long periods of time, which only rouses the beast within—and with knives dulled and typewriter cold I won’t have it in me to be anything but a day laborer, which is, for some of us, unconscionable. Point is at every crisis of doubt I came through but it never feels like it at the time. Those moments when I thought I’d never be a writer were exactly the motivation I needed to in fact be a writer. The greatest and most protracted period of crisis was being laid off as a bartender, here in Austin, as a failed singer-songwriter (another story) that qualified for $144 every week from the state of Texas for being unemployed. I lost my mind and tried to drink the anxiety away. It didn’t work. I started a blog simply because I like the way columns of black text look on a white page. I still do it every week and it changed everything for me.

A blog comes with instant character and backstory and, for hair-trigger paranoiacs susceptible to high drama like me, the conflict comes free of charge. For me the conflict was trying to be a writer. The reader knows who I am. They might not know who Jim Trainer is but they don’t have to. Personal history and biographical information are inferred by the reader simply by clicking on your page, seeing the title of your blog and your name. With character and conflict determined and audience secure (which also infers point of view), the stage is set. Begin writing badly. And give yourself a deadline or it’ll stay that way. Read your stuff out loud, get rid of the clunkers like poet Charlie O’Hay says, record yourself reading and listen back.

I get the same charge out of writing blogs as I do performing. Writing a blog is a performance. I developed my voice imitating others whom I admire and then systematically taking away obvious bite-offs of their style until it became my own. I mined for those kinds of clunkers too, and, eventually I could write with someone’s voice in my head (which is all we’re ever doing anyway) but using my own words on the page. Deadlines are your friend and so is self-hatred if you don’t make them.I have another deadline, it’s softer than the blog’s deadline and that’s Letter Day. I officially fell in love with letter writing while reading The Proud Highway, Hunter Thompson’s first published collection of correspondence. Thompson fleshed out ideas whole in his letters and he didn’t have to be bothered by the facts. His imagination ran wild in his letters and he developed his voice in a joyful way and eventually carved out a place as what Frank Mankiewicz called “the least factual, most accurate reporter” on the campaign trail in ’72. In Stephen King’s brilliant On Writing, King recommends writing to someone dear to you, always—write to a specific person, typically someone dear but hell even someone who infuriates you as long as the anger is inspiring. Don’t get paralyzed, stay inspired, and that’s where the person you’re writing to comes in. Don’t write to yourself. That won’t keep your reader interested. Write about yourself all day long. I’ve been writing about myself for eight years. It is admittedly dreadful at times—a little too close to the bone but it keeps me writing and developing my voice, which I try out on friends and loved ones vis-à-vis the soft deadline of Letter Day—in the two letters I write and send out from the Office every Friday.

It’s become a problem, writing about myself, to be honest. But I write, on the regular, at least 600 words a week and it’s not pure anguish, like it used to be. It’s become a fun and handy way for me to wrangle my own blues and make things different somehow—because everything is always dreadfully the same. Writing is a ticket to anywhere inside. It’s refuge, plain and simple, and love and beautification magic.The problem with creative nonfiction and writing about yourself is that everyone’s privy to your inner workings. People you haven’t spoke to in years know exactly how you’re feeling, what you’re thinking and what your immediate plans are. Then again, that’s the thrill too, Good Reader. All those eyes watching you and all those hungry hearts waiting to devour you and take what you’re giving. At the end of the day you’re writing and if you want to be a writer then writing is a good thing. You either hang yourself or you hang it on the wall.

Part 1

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The Coarse Grind: Part 1

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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

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