Talk To Don

About three months ago, a friend of mine threw a party at her house. Although I usually don’t like to go to these kinds of things, I went out of a sense of obligation, determined to stay for at least a beer and a courtesy chat. It was one of those awkward kinds of gatherings, where the host worries whether enough people will show to make it “an event,” where those in attendance cling desperately to the first person they recognize, and where the chatter is directed mainly by the posturing of a few individuals who have decided to make the night theirs.

As I stood in the crowded entryway, sipping somewhat too frequently from my plastic cup, I happened to mention to someone that I was applying to the MFA program in creative writing at the University of Minnesota. “You are?” she exclaimed, and with a magical twist of her arm, drew towards her a lumpy looking fellow from out of the corner, “well then you HAVE to talk to Don, here. He’s our resident writer.” She disappeared, leaving him to shuffle and look embarrassed. Grudgingly, he said, “Not published, yet. I’ve got three completed manuscripts and a stack of rejection letters.”

I told him a little bit about my struggle with writing the personal statement and how challenging I found the whole process of defining the desire to write. “If it were you applying,” I asked, “what do you think you’d say?”
He thought for a moment, “Well, why do you want to write? I mean, do you want to be a writer because you like to write, or because you have something to say?”

Fair enough. The question made me pause.

See, I like to write. There is something inherently pleasurable in the process of recording and refining thoughts, organizing them first in one way, then another. There is something interesting in the challenge of translating experience into a clinking chain of words that readers can use to grasp onto. But that in itself is not sufficient reason to become a writer. That is what things like journals and letters are for.

I do have things to say as well. I have in my small life managed to construct for myself a rather complicated code of ethics and explanations. Behind every small act lies the shadow of a much larger significance. Everything means something, and it all fits together into a complex jigsaw of motivations and cogitative movements. A fair amount of my time is spent looking for that threshold moment of an idea, exploring the relationships between things and people and why happenings play out in the way that they do. Of course, that in itself is also not a sufficient reason to become a writer, though it is a perfectly good reason to become an analyst, a social scientist, or an historian.

Don was still waiting there with his either/or question lingering in the air. I panicked and blurted out, “I guess I have lots of things to say. I mean, not like a burning social issue or anything concrete like that, but, you know…”

I stopped and made myself return the question, “Why do you write?”

Don swept a suddenly indifferent glance over me and replied, “Because that’s the only time I get to talk to myself.” Then he walked away and I understood that I had been dismissed.