R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

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12 about themselves. They want everybody within shouting distance to pay attention to them. I am like them, and I am not. I brag about my work, when it is done, and when it is successful, but I am also loyal to Laura and my children. That’s the price I am willing to pay for my work. That’s how I am made. Sometimes I think I am right, and sometimes I think I am stupid. But that is who I am. I am not saying I cannot be heartless; I have been, and I am often mean. But it pains me, and stays with me, and gnaws at me until I actually can’t work. I am fulfilled by having a long-term love that prompts me to take risks, to write whatever I want, to be in a way ‘heartless’ with my writing. That word is certainly the wrong one. I mean ‘risky,’ or ‘against the grain,’ or ‘anti-commercial,’ or ‘antientertainment,’ or ‘without compromise.’ Does this make any sense? When your life is wild, or out of whack, I think you expend needless energy. But what should be the focus? The petty dramas of your life? Or what’s going on inside your head? For Butler-writing, perhaps, it would be better if I just abandoned my love life, à la Gauguin, and write about my petty dramas of lust and desire, conquest and disappointment, my travels to the exotic. But what takes you further, into new possibilities beyond your time? That question also gnaws at me, and is a part of me. When I read Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics years ago, I vividly remember one thing that rang absolutely true: we are ‘moral’ not just because it is right, but because it feels better, because being ‘immoral’ consumes so much of your psychic energy to the point where it starts damaging other parts of your life, including the life of your mind. But have we reached a point where the moral is pointless, and the life of the mind is a waste of time? I don’t think what my writer friends do is ‘immoral;’ it is simply the way they are, and maybe it works for them, and they can live with it, and their lives are endlessly entertaining. For me, being a good father and husband works for me, and my feelings, and my mental makeup. I don’t abstractly wish I were different; I’m not even sure how I could do that, and mean it. Yet I do wish to be more like my friends, in part because their dramas seem to produce more stories that publishers want to publish. I have read many of their stories, which are beautifully crafted, yet these stories rarely teach me anything, rarely take me beyond the small world of their entertaining personalities, and yet that’s what we often take the time to sit down to read. What has happened to today’s reader? What has happened to today’s publishers? What has happened to today itself? What has happened to me? Yes, I am full of contradictions, I am perhaps a hypocrite, and I can’t explain myself half the time. Maybe trying to explain the human being I am, in time, over many different moods, and years, and successes and failures, is a losing proposition. I wish I could write as much and as well as I can imagine I should write, and love, and also take care of my family. I wish I could think and write, and write about thinking, and my life of the mind, as a loner, as a father, as a husband, as a witness to today. I wish people would want to read that work, because it would speak to them, and perhaps it could help them, or at the very least point
them to some internal revelation which they could then use in their lives. Is this too much of ask of life? Of writing? Our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper Westside is quiet, and for once I am writing, working. Will it be of a quality that I can keep? My head, my eyes, seem to palpitate with pain, yet my mind is thinking, and my fingers are moving over the keyboard, and I am working. I will work until my mind is blank, until I feel faint, to reach a point where this day is not wasted in my head. Why have I set such a standard for each day? Is there not something wrong with thinking that your day is wasted if you do not write words, good words, literary words? What kind of strange beings are those who measure themselves in this way? Sometimes I remember, too acutely, that words are not life, but representations of it, symbols. Yes, the writing of words is an action, yet a solitary one, and one in which we are usually writing, not about writing, but about this life of tragedy, or love, or loss, or confusion, or outrage that has little to do with words. Do writers, or those who think they are writers, lose themselves in the importance of this world of words? I know that these words, once I write them and then judge them to be worthwhile, these words remind me of my life, or of thoughts, or of conclusions I once had. Without words I can’t go back and easily remember, and clearly see the traces of my life behind me. I can’t see the road I traveled, and what I was, and how I have changed, or haven’t. Without words, maybe, it seems as if I didn’t exist. Yet words are such a pale reflection of what I actually did, what I actually experienced, who I was, when I kissed my children goodnight and heard them say their prayers and goodnights to Ocistar, when I had an argument with Laura about how she knew so little about the children’s schedules, cutting her to the quick, and then, when I reached beyond myself and was decent, with no expectation from her to be anything, and my effort, from nowhere, brought her back to me for a moment, ameliorated her guilt. Words just capture a glimpse of these moments, and remind me of them, or moments like them, and I fill in the blanks with my mind, and there is this residue, in words, that I was there, as a person and as a writer, that I loved my wife, that I kissed my children goodnight, that I sacrificed my life, each day, to be with them. Words are a curse. Life is a curse. Words escape life. Life escapes words. What in God’s name am I? How does someone name a God? What is it to name yourself? Tonight, before I go to sleep, I will take a sleeping pill to sleep well, to pacify my loin energy at night, to ensure a good rest, and so wake up to fight my trap. I need to work. I need to create. I need to have boundless energy. I need to never tire of taking my children to school, bringing them back, paying the bills, loving my wife, listening to everybody’s complaints and dreams and absurdities. I need to talk to the people I want to pickax at the Hudson Valley Writers’ Center, and not talk to them as if I want to pickax them, but in a ‘nice’ way, to get what I want, to convince them that quality literary writers, emerging writers, writers of color, need to be our focus, lest they forget our mission. I need to never have a victimcomplex, because once I start feeling sorry for myself, I won’t get anything done. 13
Page 2 and 3: RJ Hembree - Publisher & Editor-In-
Page 4 and 5: 4 She glides slowly at first, this
Page 7 and 8: I am trying to write, to work. I dr
Page 9 and 10: Chicano at a private school in New
Page 11: give a damn what anyone else thinks
Page 15 and 16: Sergio Troncoso, philosopher, econo
Page 17 and 18: ties years ago. It was a scandal, a
Page 19 and 20: disciplines. Do you feel it's a nat
Page 21 and 22: up.” “I’m cleaning! It’s sp
Page 23 and 24: “Have you been taking your medica
Page 25 and 26: was there? “You can’t live a no
Page 27 and 28: In his modest wooden stall Pir Gul
Page 29 and 30: When he was done with the vest, he
Page 31 and 32: On the outskirts of the farming vil
Page 33 and 34: down at him as he walked through th
Page 35 and 36: ight on you.” She still held his
Page 37 and 38: Dear M, I wanted to let you know I
Page 39 and 40: I hope you’re doing well. --K Dea
Page 41 and 42: Dad cried. He sat at his desk, crie
Page 43 and 44: of her jeans. She glanced at the be
Page 45 and 46: the lacquer finish dulled as the wa
Page 47 and 48: “Do you think it just gave up and
Page 49 and 50: “Unlock the doors,” Bill ordere
Page 51 and 52: When I was asked to write an articl
Page 53 and 54: are important. You’ve only got to
Page 55: If you want to earn some serious mo

R J Hembree - Writers' Village University

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