This Modern Writer: Alone in the Dark by Ashley Farmer

I’m no athlete.  My days are spent in front of a classroom or on a laptop: little heavy lifting involved.  But at nine each night I knot my laces, close the building’s iron gate behind me, and hit the street slow.  I’m a reluctant starter, gaining momentum at the corner of Ocean and Orange as I play pop songs on repeat (three, four times each), drumming sometimes, often singing.  I breathe two split-breaths out, two split-breaths in.  I follow the same path (beneath the stars, if we had them): to the edge of the next beach town and back again.

I know intimately the sidewalk cracks, which yards get colder at dark and which walkways warm up, who dines late, who smokes what.  I observe television flickers against apartment walls and police interrupting domestic disturbances.  I’ve cultivated loves: for the man around the corner, a careful attendant to baby marigolds placed with mathematical precision and his mini-pond, enthusiastic blue lights and plastic lily pads bobbing; for the woman who receives with regularity elaborate bouquets—not the kind you buy yourself but full-fledged special occasion arrangements.  Then there are deeper affections: curve of beach shaped like a pale animal, the people praying to a statue in the park above.

When I run, I write, or work towards it.  I collect as best I can what I see. I steal the mansion’s red walls and white baby grand and conjure myself at the bench playing Bach.  I create the missing family for the glass cube construct with zero landscaping and the single barstool against the kitchen wall.  Prose makes space for young boys leaning fixed gears against the liquor store.  The slap-slaps of palm fronds insert themselves.  And so a run is also a kind of cataloging, a taking in of this newish city that used to feel strange and strangerly and sometimes dangerous.  By moving outside, I’ve made myself at home and claimed my place here.  I’ve embraced this as my territory both literal and creative.

But the connection between running and writing extends beyond appreciation of space.  For me, the desire to run and write—the weird, wired need for the body to go and do it  (and even more so, the euphoria of having done it, finally, finished)—are likely rooted in the same human heart spot.  It’s inexplicable, and split apart from the rational and real-world, a hunger disconnected from anything I could defend.

For this reason, running tethers me to the writing process and vice versa—when there are plenty of reasons not to do either.  Yoga would be kinder to the knees, my hours could be better spent on XYZ.  And the ghost questions arise from who-knows-where, tangling me, causing me to trip if I’m not careful: If you’re not gonna get sponsored by Power Bar or sign some three-book deal, what are you even doing this for?  Are you serious in your devotion?  Shouldn’t you already be better at this?  But as I press myself toward longer strides, tamp down the brain’s blaring of “tired, quit”, and develop discipline both against and for myself, I consider the page differently.

As writers we endure rejection (no news to anyone who writes or even anyone who doesn’t).  It’s necessary, a part of our existence, and some of the messages are more painful to receive than others depending on the hopes or hours we’ve pinned to a project.   While we’re connected in this same shitty experience of anti-success, the pummeling is often private.   That doesn’t mean we don’t share our failures with one another, but the second in which one absorbs it—or gets stung by an attendant fear that races up alongside it—is often felt in the body when one is alone.   It was when I started really questioning the value of this enterprise—revising manuscripts, sending work out, staying up too late to keep touching all of it—that I began my first plodding jog around the park.   I was slow and didn’t last very long and I was alone in the pain of it.  I made fists and pushed off the balls of my throbbing feet and thought I’m done with this.  But I was surprised when I became fortified by a kind of physical defiance.  A toughening up.  And so maybe I run and write for the same reason: because sometimes I believe that I can’t.

When I realized that this was part of my motivation, the gratification in words and miles was almost immediate. So was the realization that there’s no failing at something “senseless”, something you do out of devotion, not reason.  I’m not sure what it would mean to “go pro” at writing, and with running, whatever that might mean is out of the question.  And if our injuries, those mild or harsh bursts of pain, occur in private, so do the victories.  There’s likely no one awaiting us at the end of a run with champagne and pink carnations like a finish line (since I haven’t raced yet, it’s what I choose to imagine).  And when we write, our best lines—in the moment we feel them created from either muscle or magic—aren’t celebrated by even those who love us most.  At best we can hope to have a friend or lover or sister who wants to see us do our best, who understands what we’re aiming toward, and who’s waiting for us to finish up in time for a too-late dinner.

Bad metaphors are sometimes true metaphors: writing isn’t a race but a process.  It’s not about competition with anyone else, just one’s self.   This work is about discipline and personal best. Etcetera. I’m certain parallels can be made between almost any other physical endeavor and this pen/page business. But even as I type this—for no good reason at all, for no one but myself—I feel my heart pump beneath my shirt, my fingers tingle, my breath speed up.   I’m no athlete and maybe not even a writer.  But tonight I’ll pound hard along the water and feel myself moving alongside my invisible, far-flung brethren, this pack of us optimistic and willful.  Each of us traveling alone through dark.



Ashley Farmer lives in Long Beach, CA with the writer Ryan Ridge. Recent work can be found in The Collagist, >kill author, Mud Luscious, Stoked, and elsewhere.