Make Art Like You're Going to Die

Because you are

Hi y’all,

I finished a short novel manuscript in late March. Whatever happens to it, I feel like I wrote only the book that only I could write. My husband was my first reader and told me this feels like the most “me” thing he’s ever read, which is a nice way of him saying that this book is really fucking weird.

I took a cue from the poets I know and I wrote the book in the way that one might write a poetry collection, without giving much thought to the marketplace, or to comparative titles, or to a popular audience. If I’m lucky, the manuscript will to find a home at a small press and sell a few hundred copies. I am cool with that, because the trade off meant that I was able to spend a few years not pretending to be the kind of writer/reader that I’m not.

While I certainly love and read novels that fall into the contemporary upmarket literary fiction, my foundational tastes, my literary DNA, tends toward the old and the obscure, and also translated works that are well-known in their home countries but considered odd-balls here. I didn’t want to have “comp” titles as much as I wanted to have conversations with some writers whose work I love: Clarice Lispector, Doireann Ní Ghríofa, Juan Rulfo, Marguerite Duras, and Sera Khandro.

But mostly, I wrote my manuscript thinking that one day, I’ll be dead, so I might as well spend my hours of life writing a book I’d like to read. Knowing that death is at my heels changed the kind of fiction I wanted to write.

I wanted to write a story that deals with meditative states of awareness, or what you might call mystical states of awareness if you’re coming from the Abrahamic side of things. Usually poets are the ones responsible for verbalizing to those states of awareness—not people like me who are fond of paragraphs.

I started writing the manuscript when my family and I were living in Kentucky in May 2021, and I was out for a walk with my then two-week old daughter in a baby carrier. We were strolling past an old country cemetery, and a line, a single sentence, jumped out at me. The line was clear as to almost be aggressive. I think of an old game I used to play as a little girl, where you hold your breath while driving past a cemetery so that ghosts don’t jump inside you. But maybe we should allow ghosts to jump inside us once and while, because the spirit of the line was evocative and true. The line made a lot of sense and yet it was perplexing enough to fascinate me.

I could tell it was the final line to… something.

And I had to find out what the something was. I spent the first year and a half of my daughter’s life writing towards the line while she was napping and while I toted her around in the baby carrier. I wrote the zero-draft of my novel on my iPhone notes until I had—printed out—thirty-two single-spaced pages. From there, I wrote a novel.

One of my goals with the novel was to talk about meditative and mystical states of awareness that exist within dharma but are not unique to Buddhism. I hope I was able to write about experiences of mind without the vocabulary of the belief system I’m normally accustomed to. If the book is about a belief system at all, it’s about neo-paganism and the witchcraft of adolescent girls. (Very popular best-selling subject matter, I know.)

After my husband read the first draft, I made some revisions he suggested then I sent it to two friends for their opinions. The problem with having my husband as my reader is that he also has a crush on me, so if a book feels very “me” then of course he’s going to like it. The result is that I don’t always find his opinion trustworthy. But my other two friends who read it really liked it and got it, and that felt good. Neither of them share my belief system, and yet they could still identify with what I was writing about with a sort of kindred recognition. When we’re writing about the ineffable, so much can leap over from one contained system into another. It’s why I can understand what Thomas Merton means by “the false self” and to what Rumi means by “the Beloved” even though I’m not a Catholic or a Sufi.

I only mention Buddhism once in the novel, and that is to briefly make fun of Buddhism, because no matter how long I practice I can’t ever seem to take religion very seriously, but of course there’s always a part of me that knows that religion is a kind of necessary constraint for practice. I suppose this is what is meant by “method.” Religion is the tool, but sometimes people confuse the tool with the finished product rather than seeing that you are supposed to pick up the hammer and use it to bang a nail into two pieces of wood. Or maybe the more fitting metaphor with Dzogchen is that you remove all the nails with the hammer and the whole structure collapses, and this is freedom.

One thing I’ve learned from finishing a manuscript is that you stay sane by moving on to the next project. So I’ll be working on new fiction and also new essays, and I hope to turn the essays into a book eventually, and I hope there is an audience for such a book. I think there might be—largely because you are reading this.

I’m still amazed that there is a you here—a small audience for essays about dharma and creative practice written by someone who is, by vocation, a fiction writer who writes magical realist short stories about animistic vampires, rather than a Buddhist scholar or dharma teacher.

I hope I haven’t accidentally taught you something. I hope that instead I’ve inspired you in some way to practice or at least think about practicing. One of the things I’m grateful to you all for, dear readers, is that y’all make think there may be at least a teeny tiny audience for the book like the one I hope to write, about lived experience and dharma practice. Even if there isn’t, it’s a great pleasure to write here for you.

This is all a very rambling Kentucky way of me of letting you now that I won’t be publishing new free public posts over the summer, but I’ll be reposting work from the archive and I’ll be offering the following:

• A class on Tuesday, June 3rd at 7pm CST on creating your own writing oracle. This class is free for paid subscribers and $30 for everyone else. There’s also a sliding scale for anyone experiencing financial hardship.

• A mini-salon on Thursday, July 10th at 12pm CST “Feeding the Creative Well: Resetting and Reenergizing Your Writing”. (You can find our main takeaways and watch the last mini-salon, “Why Even Make This,” here.)

• Posts with creative prompts for paid subscribers each month and the opportunity to ask me a practical or spiritual question about writing and/or your creative practice. These paid posts will have previews for all readers, but they'll be written in a more epistolary mode than an essayistic one with the juiciest stuff below the pay-wall.

I’m taking some time off from the public posts for a few reasons, but mostly it’s because I lost my job at the university where I taught for four years (but where they keep pulling me in as a substitute for people on medical leave—financially helpful but also, confusing!) so my kids aren’t going to camp this summer so that we can save money. My partner and I will busy taking the kids to the pool and try to sneak in moments of work.

I also need time to put more attention into my creative coaching and consulting business, because I need to earn an income for myself and my family and I really am far too old to go to law school at this point, and helping creatives and writers get into their swing back is one of my all-time favorite things to do.

It also occurred to me that if I want to write a book of essays on lived experience and dharma practice, I should probably try publishing more in literary journals and magazines in addition to publishing here. Hopefully, I’ll get at least one fully-fledged literary essay polished over the summer and have it find a home in a high falootin’ journal eventually. (And sorry but I still have to brag about this catch. I can’t believe they accepted it!).

Thank y’all so much for the gift of your attention. It’s a dream come true having you as a reader. You’ll see a new free public post in August, and if you’re on Substack I look forward to reading your work in a hammock as soon as the sun comes out again.

Sign up for “Create Your Own Writing Oracle,” Thursday 6/3 at 7pm CT//8pm ET

Stuff I love lately:

This interview with Khandro Phagmo Dorje Rinpoche on the Love and Liberation podcast. It’s not that often that I hear interviews with female spiritual leaders from Bhutan.

I left my family one day to go to work and when I came home, they insisted that I watch this Eurovision video of Espresso Machiato by Tommy Cash. I don’t know if I love it but the song has taken up a semi-permanent resonance in my head. I do love the operatic winner though, Wasted Love by JJ.

I went with a friend to see Rebecca Solnit at the Chicago Humanties Festival and I signed up for her newsletter. She talked about how court decisions like the Marriage Equality Act were brought about because queer people started telling their stories, how years of quieter activisms lead to large-scale movements, and how Orwell—who took a bullet in his neck fighting fascists in Spain—balanced his life out with pleasure and enjoyment. Solnit reminded me that it’s a human birthright to experience pleasure and enjoyment, and that’s what we’re fighting for. Sometimes just living in a way that is unmasked has a value that we can’t quantify or even clearly see until many years later.

I’m kept sane by knowing so many people who donate to UNRWA and other orgs that support Palestinians. And the liberation haikus by poet Faisal Mohyuddin help keep me from falling into despair.

My son gave me sea glass for Mother’s Day.

My daughter ran through a field of dandelions and then fell into a bed of wishes.

"The Sun, Plate 1" from Joseph W. Spoor's Electro-Astronomical Atlas published in 1874.