Acknowledgments

In working on this project, I used fragments of lectures and letters written during my time on the faculty of the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. I am so grateful to my students and colleagues in that program; they have been the small and private audience for much of the prose I’ve written in the past decade.

In using these materials, texts that I’ve quoted in my lectures, classes, and letters may appear in the randomized sentences on screen.

They come from texts I teach often including the essays of my friend and mentor Charles Baxter (collected in his essential volumes Burning Down the House, The Art of Subtext, and Wonderlands, all published by Graywolf Press), as well as the plays of Anton Chekhov, the novels of Jim Harrison, and the poems of Richard Hugo.

You will also find quotes from Kiese Laymon’s memoir Heavy, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as well as his essay “Harlem is Nowhere,” and Jane Smiley’s novella The Age of Grief. There will be quotes from short stories by John Cheever (“Goodbye, My Brother), Lorrie Moore (“Paper Losses” and “Dance in America”), Barry Hannah (“Love Too Long”), Jamel Brinkley (“No More Than a Bubble”), Larry Brown (“92 Days”), Donald Barthelme (“City of Churches”), Grace Paley (“Wants”), and Mary Gaitskill “Tiny, Smiling Daddy”). and poems by Cathy Song (“Snow in the Morning”), David Clewell (“We Never Close”), Mark Halliday (“Chinese Leftovers”), and Ellen Bryant Voigt (“Larch.”) Quotes from Tarfia Faizullah, Jericho Brown, Jesmyn Ward, David Lynch, John Prine, Justin Vernon, Bob Seger, and other artists—likely referred to originally in my letters to students—also appear.

Below is my attempt to gather all the quoted material that may appear in your experience of this shuffled memoir. If you note any other material that requires citation, please let me know!

It seems a shame to say so, but the hardest part of being a writer is not the long hours of learning the craft but learning how to survive the dark nights of the soul. There are many such nights, far too many, as you will discover. I hate to be the one to bring you this news, but someone should. Part of the deal of having a soul at all includes the requirement that you go through several dark nights. No soul, no dark nights. But when they come, they have a surprisingly creepy power, and almost no one tells you how to deal with them.

Charles Baxter, Letter to a Fiction Writer
Being in darkness and confusion is interesting to me. But behind it you can rise out of that and see things the way they really are. That there is some sort of truth to the whole thing, if you could just get to that point where you could see it, and live it, and feel it … I think it is a long, long, way off. In the meantime, there’s suffering and darkness and confusion and absurdities, and it’s people kind of going in circles. It’s fantastic. It’s like a strange carnival: it’s a lot of fun, but it’s a lot of pain.

David Lynch
Your heart gets bored with your mind and it changes you.

John Prine, All the Best
Often within the mind the real and the unreal merge, and the marvelous beckons from behind the same sordid reality that denies its existence.

Ralph Ellison, Harlem is Nowhere
Every poem I write is more accurate than anything I can ever tweet about it: my interior life, and its struggle and desire to converse with the exterior world.

Tarfia Faizullah
Sabers!

Barry Hannah
Pickup trucks hauling snow speed down the mountain.

From “Snow in the Morning” by Cathy Song
Stay open so long it hurts.

David Clewell
I have wasted my life.

James Wright
What are you going to do now? What else? I’m going to keep writing.

Larry Brown
Your heart flutters and you become winded with little walking and everything you know or think you know about the woods is forgotten, or you aren’t sure you ever knew enough in the beginning.

Jim Harrison.
Still and all, in spite of the quality, it was a mean present to give a woman you planned on never seeing again, a person you had children with and got onto all the time, drunk or sober, even when everybody had to get up early in the morning.

Grace Paley
We walked for a long time, deeper into Brooklyn. It felt as though we were actually sinking. Wooden boards slanted across the windows of the apartments above a corner store and lines of stiff weeds punched through the cracks in the sidewalk

Jamel Brinkley, “No More Than a Bubble”
Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly

James Wright
And scorn sufficient to support a town

Richard Hugo
"Mostly sexual things," she said. She was not afraid of him

Donald Barthelme
Don’t empty houses ring?

Richard Hugo
Diurnal is a lovely word another is circadian

Ellen Bryant Voigt
The way memories pour out of us

Charles Simic on Edward Hirsch’s “Gabriel”
Am I not a madman? Should I not be treated by those who know me as one mentally diseased?

Anton Chekhov, “The Seagull”
“I don’t care,” Lawrence said. “Whiskey, gin—I don’t care what I drink. Give me a little rum.”

John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother.”
We admitted we were powerless over others – that our lives had become unmanageable.

Al-anon
The compass reads an impossible direction

Jim Harrison
The omelet tastes like her

Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long.”
It’s beautiful up there in the moonlight, and there’s a green pool up there, and we can swim in it

Frank Capra, “It’s A Wonderful Life”
I can dream whatever I want

Donald Barthelme, City of Churches
“For a second you see—and seeing the secret, are the secret.”

Eugene O’Neill, Long Day’s Journey Into Night
The reason life is so strange is that so often people have no choice

William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow
He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve

Robert Stone, Helping
He is always in, not knowing what he’s done

Richard Hugo, Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg
I’m going to die from love!

Barry Hannah, Love Too Long
We slept in parking lots!

Sufjan Stevens
My dead, my gentle, my beautiful orchard.

Anton Chekhov, “The Cherry Orchard”
I tell them it’s the body reaching, bringing air to itself

Lorrie Moore, “Dance in America”
We are all overbrained and overemotioned

Barry Hannah
This is it

Kenny Loggins
Had she even asked? Did she now call him the bitterest name she could think of? Did she stand and turn and slap him across the face in front of several passers-by? Who told you that?

Lorrie Moore, “Paper Losses”
Where is the angry machine of all of us? Why is God such a blurred magician? Why are you begging for your life if you believe those things? Prove to me that you’re better than the rabbits we ate last night… I believed in You on and off all my life! There better be something up there like Janie or I’ll humiliate you! I’ll swine myself all over this town.

Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long”
My wife and sister were swimming—Diana and Helen—and I saw their uncovered heads, black and gold in the dark water.

John Cheever, “Goodbye, My Brother”
We are alive and we are dying

Barry Hannah
You might come here Sunday on a whim

Richard Hugo, “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg”
I’m sort of in trouble

Mark Halliday, “Chinese Leftovers”
For Dean, who came to get me and did

Alissa Nutting, Made for Love
You tell him no

Richard Hugo, “Degrees of Gray in Phillipsburg”
Take a good look at me now!

Phil Collins, “Against All Odds”
Gone, all gone

Mary Gaitskill, “Tiny, Smiling Daddy”
It is not only that we know that love ends, children are stolen, parents die feeling that their lives have been meaningless

Jane Smiley, “The Age of Grief”
He was the scrawniest fighting man I’ve ever seen – he was barely there, just a piece of wire, really.

Katherine Anne Porter, “The Grave”
They threw me off the hay truck about noon

James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
I hate to be the one to bring you this news, but someone should.

Charles Baxter, “Letter to a Fiction Writer”
Almost no one arrives much later

Jane Smiley, “The Age of Grief”
My husband died of champagne—he drank terribly—and to my misfortune, I fell in love with another man and went off with him, and just at that time—it was my first punishment, a blow that hit me right on the head—here, in the river

Chekhov, “The Cherry Orchard”
For the first time in my life, I realized telling the truth was way different from finding the truth, and finding the truth had everything to do with revisiting and rearranging words

Kiese Laymon, Heavy
There is a counter and a telephone and a rack of car keys.

Barthelme, “City of Churches”
There was the pungent smell of the plastic shower curtain and disintegrating soap.

Aleksander Hemon, NOWHERE MAN
My stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.

John Updike, A&P
They were nurturing, homeopathic, and enabling,

Lorrie Moore
The blinds gibbered for a moment, commenting on my performance, then settled in silence.

Aleksander Hemon, NOWHERE MAN
I believed in You on and off all my life! There better be something up there like Janie or I’ll humiliate you! I’ll swine myself all over this town

Barry Hannah, “Love Too Long”
Lumpy shadows lifting rocks, carrying water, planting

Cathy Song, Snow in the Morning
All of my changes were there

Neil Young, Helpless
They spawned and raised their hate together, cardiovascularly, spiritually, organically

Lorrie Moore, “Paper Losses”
There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again

F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
Until the town you came from dies inside

Hugo
The shine went out of everything

Maxwell
Smell the pines, and watch the sunrise against the peaks, and…we’ll stay up there the whole night, and everybody’ll be talking and there’ll be a terrific scandal

Capra
There is a brief time when first lost that you are sure you will be lost forever

Harrison
Bakopoulos seems lost, adrift in unfamiliar waters

J. Robert Lennon
I knew she was going to lay a lot of stuff on me that I didn’t want to hear

Brown
The only writing that was any good was what you made up, what you imagined

Brown
And months later, in the courtroom, where she would discover that the county owned her marriage and that the county was now taking it back like a chicken franchise that she had made a muck of, forbidding her to own another franchise for six more months, with the implication that she might want to stay clear of all poultry cuisine for a much longer time than that, when she had finally to pronounce in front of the robed, robotic judge and a winking stenographer whose winking seemed designed to keep the wives from crying, she would have to declare the marriage “irretrievably broken.” What second-rate poet had gotten hold of the divorce laws? She would find the words sticking in her throat, untrue in their conviction

Lorrie Moore
I had some misgivings over the battle royal, by the way

Ralph Ellison
Coffee beans slide down waxy pyramids.

Cathy Song, “Snow in the Morning”
The view from the treetop you reach with effort only reveals the tops of other trees

Jim Harrison
Day and night, I am held in the grip of one besetting thought, to write, write, write! Hardly have I finished one book than something urges me to write another, and then a third, and then a fourth—I write ceaselessly

Chekhov
But in fiction, we want to have characters create scenes that in life we would, in all likelihood, avoid

Charles Baxter, “Making a Scene.”
Now where is the money?

Lorrie Moore, “People Like That Are the Only People Here.”
Let us record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall, let us trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness

Virginia Woolf “Modern Fiction”
I’ll go to another country, go to another shore, find another city better than this one

Constantine Cavafy
Inflation or recession or whatever rubbed me out

Hannah
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss

Hugo
Nothing in the world matters but you and your woman

Hannah
I am thirty-five years old, and it seems to me that I have reached the age of grief

Smiley
My skin's coming off! I'm getting old! Nothing makes any sense to me!

Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers, to tear them from their stems, and trample the roots that bore them under foot

Chekhov
I don't think it is the years themselves, or the disintegration of the body

Smiley
“We don’t have any rum,” Mother said

Cheever
Jesus Christ, this goddamn rain.

Tom Waits, “Ruby’s Arms”
when the jail was built, still laughs

Hugo
I catch an idea in every sentence of yours or of my own, and hasten to lock all these treasures in my literary store room, thinking that some day they may be useful to me. I hurry forever from one story to another, and can’t help myself

Chekhov
To prepare the honey I feed to unknown crowds, I am doomed to brush the bloom from my dearest flowers

Chekhov
I get lonely in a hurry. I go crazy inside when you are gone

George Jones
Towering blondes, good jazz and booze

Richard Hugo
The brow of a horse in that moment when the horse is drinking water so deeply from a trough it seems to inhale the water, is holy

Larry Levis, “Anastasia & Sandman”
As it is I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, who must always be a little in love with death!

Chekhov
I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger

James Joyce, “Araby”
She taught me to like this, a little hot ketchup on the edge of the plate

Hannah
Say no to yourself

Hugo
Every poem is a love poem

Jericho Brown
My head’s burning off and I got a heart about to bust out of my ribs

Hannah
Say your life broke down

Hugo
I didn't want to see him pack his underwear and ironed shirts

Grace Paley, “Wants”
I’m not taking you one mile more if we don’t get some clarity

Hannah
Isn’t Irish what you’ve always liked? There’s some Irish on the sideboard?

Cheever
Fuck the revolution fuck the whole motherfucking thing: all’s I want is my woman back so my soul can sing

Etheridge Knight, “Feeling Fucked Up”
I lie there, changing, becoming, reheating

Dean Bakopoulos, “Spotless,” Switchyard Magazine
Your heart a searching dog in the rubble

Hannah
Most of our bodies are better taken care of and better looking than ever

Smiley
My life, my youth, my happiness, good-bye! Good-bye!

Chekhov
The droppings of last year’s horses blaze up like golden stones

Wright
There you stood, everybody watched you play. I just turned and walked away. I had nothing left to say

Bob Seger, “Still the Same”
He took a bath, and the hot water made him feel better but when he looked at the mildewed line of caulk his stomach turned again

Gaitskill
The car that brought you here still runs

Hugo
And mistakes ought to be rectified only this one couldn't be

Maxwell
So accurate, the church bell simply seems

Hugo
The duende is not in the throat; the duende climbs up inside you, from the soles of the feet

Frederico Garcia Lorca, “Duende”
The waitress is slender and her red hair lights the wall

Hugo
The compass reads an impossible direction

Harrison
I crouch like a crow
Contrasting the snow
For the agony, I'd rather know
'Cause blinded
I am blindsided
Peek in
Into the peer in
I'm not really like this
I'm probably plight-less
I cup the window
I'm crippled and slow
For the agony, I'd rather know
'Cause blinded
I am blindsided

Bon Iver/Justin Vernon, “Blind-sided”
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls

Hugo
A dance floor built on springs

Hugo
I wanted to write a lie. I wanted the book to begin with my weighing 319 pounds and end with my weighing 165 pounds

Laymon
Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret

Stone
I had to find an explanation other than the real one…I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn't have gone through and couldn't get back to the place I hadn't meant to leave

Maxwell
Say your life broke down

Hugo
Sometimes I wish I had a sport

Hannah
Dance begins when a moment of hurt combines with a moment of boredom

Moore
In our own lives, how many episodes are there that we would like to go back to and do over again? Who, back there in our own past lives, has been insulted and injured by our actions and words? What actions have we done that we would like to undo? There may be several, or none, depending on our temperament, but I persist in thinking that Macbeth, as a play and as a tragic figure, tells us about how the world is and must be, and… So Long, See You Tomorrow tell(s) us about another provisional world, where what has been done can be imagined as undone, where the houses have no walls and where the victims of circumstance go to be undestroyed

Baxter
The girls who leave each year for Butte

Hugo
The view from the treetop you reach with effort only reveals the tops of other trees

Harrison
And on most days he received more than thirty letters, all of them alike, stamped from the dough of suffering with a heart-shaped cookie knife

Nathanael West, “Miss Lonelyhearts”
He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before

Stone
Comedy enters after tragedy strikes; it is pain’s metamorphosis

Moore
Miss Lonelyhearts lay on his bed fully dressed, just as he had been dumped the night before, His head ached and his thoughts revolved inside the pain like a wheel within a wheel

West
In the first hours after the blast, citizens were led to believe that a minor fire had broken out at the power plant

Terese Svoboda
And mistakes ought to be rectified, only this one couldn't be

Maxwell
For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away

James 4:14, KJV
As soon as I stop working I rush off to the theatre or go fishing, in the hope that I may find oblivion there, but no!

Chekhov
The principal supporting business now is rage

Hugo
My life my youth my happiness goodbye!

Chekhov
Then I won’t stay! You must stay

Barthelme
I think if there’s a truly seductive quality about Clementine, it’s that her personality promises to take you out of the mundane.

Charlie Kaufman, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat

Hugo
I don’t know, but I can’t help thinking about it

Smiley
Do your stuff, baby! Who is the best? Who’s the man?

Moore
The doors of the churches were opening, on both sides of the street

Barthelme
I got to get back to work and get dulled out again

Hannah
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try

Hugo
It’s life flipping death the bird

Moore
There is another sort of blow that comes from within-that you don't feel until it's too late to do anything about it, until you realize with finality that in some regard you will never be as good a man again

Fitzgerald