Today is Monday. I transmit from a cottage in Republican country. I’m tired because I worked all day and now listen to a  soft rock mix on I-Tunes because I’m forty-four but sometimes forget and have to ask my son, “How old am I?”

If you’re my son’s age, I’m ancient. If you’re twenty-one, I’m old. If you’re thirty, I’m olderish. If you’re fifty, I’m younger than you. If you’re sixty-five, I’m still young. And if you’re over seventy you don’t give a shit how old I am.

When I was eighteen the worst fucking thing in the world was aging. I thought middle-aged women were the fucking pits.

I believe my perspective changed around thirty.

When I was twenty-seven I got in my car and fastened my seat belt the first time in my life. I’d suddenly become aware of my own mortality. Someone I knew had been killed by a drunk driver. I was still doing the same old thing. Still fucking around with the college thing, still fucking around and writing once-in-a-while. Just fucking around mostly.

That’s when I got depressed and not normal depressed either. I ended up in the ER suffering anxiety attacks and a doctor put me on Paxil. Later, another doctor prescribed Zoloft.  The anxiety and depression continued until I was thirty-four. 

Remember the movie Logan’s Run? They killed you when you turned thirty. I had not yet accomplished several of my most shining accomplishments by the time I hit thirty. And I still have more cool stuff to do. Like a fine wine, I get better with age.

Blah-blah-blah.

My granny says I’m a late bloomer. And I can’t be any other way. I am who I am and have developed exactly as I should have. Anything else is impossible. If it takes me three, four, however many years to finish my novel then that’s how long it takes me. I’d rather write the best novel I’m capable of writing than jerk something off just to get it done. I’ll take quality over quantity any day, but that’s my standard not yours, and maybe I say that because I’m so goddamn slow and meticulous and paranoid. 

I understand the mentality “more is better.”

Like Amber Sparks, I’ve spent time on Facebook noting how well other writers are doing, how much they’re writing and publishing, and of course compared myself to them and then come up a sad sack of unaccomplished, unproductive shit. 

Sure I panic. I twist myself in knots and can’t sleep at night and cry. Our culture is designed to make sure we feel inadequate. But also, I’m friends with some of the most prolific writers on the planet. I know some very talented people. It sucks.

But here’s another thing: writers lie. They exaggerate. They brag all the time. We’re human. Writers are chronically desperate for attention. We have fantastic-sized egos. Otherwise, we couldn’t endure the thankless solitary drudgery of what we actually do, which is sit in front of a computer for hours a day writing a lot of stuff nobody will ever read or care about.

For the record, I’ll never be on the cover of Poets & Writers no matter what my age; I’m not going to win a huge award or write a best selling anything. Writing will not make me famous or rich. It will keep me sane. It makes me happy. But maybe I say that because my time is up. I don’t know. If “youth is all” then I may as well kill myself now. I’m past my prime. I will not be the young, gorgeous Elizabeth Wurtzl posing topless on the cover of my memoir. How will I ever market myself? 

When I was in my twenties I made a lot of cash off my looks. But I wasn’t writing. I was making cash off my looks.

When I look in the mirror now I don’t see a babe anymore. I see a woman who’s given birth to a child. I see a middle-aged woman. This could be the death of me. Well, there’s this. When I was twenty-one my stepmother told me other women didn’t like me. I’d been in competition with other women all my life, starting with her when I was nine and fighting her for my father. She won.

When I was seventeen a female boss fired me as a busgirl at a Mexican restaurant because her husband came in the place and flirted with me. Few years later, another woman told me she couldn’t hire me because I was too beautiful and her male employees would never get anything done. And yet another female supervisor pulled me aside once and said, “You need to wear a bra. You’re flopping.”  I wore a bra; in fact, a bra with those thick miserable cups and fat unbearable straps.

I hate bras. Anyway, my tits aren’t huge. I’m not Pamela Anderson. Maybe I was to that woman. Sexual competition between women is nasty and fierce. Consider what Athena did to Medusa. Some women will do anything to ruin or at least narrow your chances with men.  It’s called shaking you up. It’s called undermining your confidence. It’s called bursting your bubble.

You’re not as hot as you think you are, bitch. Slut. Whore. Fatass. Skank. Cunt.

I was in a ladies room once. Guess I was thirty-two, and an older woman approached me then met my eyes in the mirror. She said, “Enjoy it while it lasts” then gestured at her own face.  “This is what you have to look forward to.” She meant her wrinkles.

And meant to scare me of course.  

If you’re a woman, aging is Medusa’s head. Nobody wants to date/fuck/marry an old woman, right? Suddenly, you don’t exist. You’re invisible. If you’re my age and single you’re not George Clooney. You’re an Old Maid. Something is wrong with you. You’re dysfunctional therefore undesirable; you’re a lesbian. Whatever.

The older I get, women like me more and men like me less. I find solace in this. 

Back when I dated my son’s father, or fucked him, however you want to look at it, he took me to his bedroom and there on the wall was a poster of me, some ad I’d done in a bikini. 

I looked exactly how you’d think I’d look in something like that and that’s all I ever was to him.

I also think his mother disliked me.

One thing I appreciate about aging is my priorities change. I look in the mirror some days and think, “Jesus, you look old.”  I keep getting better and better as a writer. I’ll never accomplish everything I want. Goals keep us going, that desire. Imagine something worse than getting older, like giving up.

Like many writers, I was deeply affected by Amber Sparks’ recent post at Big Other. It made me realise that I am anxious, seriously fucking anxious, and I was so scared to admit it that I didn’t even realise that admitting it was an option.

But Amber is not afraid to say these things, and so I will not be afraid either. Here is why I am anxious.

I have to do everything now now now while I am young and shiny because that is all I have. I have my youth, I have my shininess, and that’s it. When I am older I will be just like everyone else, except not quite as good. And that makes me anxious, not only because I have to do everything now now now but also because I’m almost 27 and that’s not even that young. It’s not old, obviously, but it’s not young enough to be newsworthy.

If I were a willowy, elfin 17 year-old my age would be marketable. I’d be on the cover of Poets & Writers no matter how mediocre my book was, just because holy shit, a 17-year old novelist. But I am not willowy and I am not a teenager. A 27 year-old is not marketable unless the book is amazing, and I am scared that it is not amazing and I am not young and so it’s just not quite enough, in terms of book or in terms of me.

I should be concentrating on writing the lushest, cleanest, densest, truthfulest, bad-assiest stories I can possibly write. But I am scared of taking years to do that and then discovering that the stories are shit. I am scared of being old and just okay, because it’s easier to be young and just okay. For a young writer, it’s enough to have potential because you’ve got plenty of time to get better until it’s not only potential but an actual solid finished thing. Sometimes it feels like having people say ‘she’s done so much, and so young!’ is all I have. All I can have, so I’d better make the most of it and write MORE NOW FASTER.

I am impatient.

I don’t want to be left behind.

I don’t want to waste this relative youth, this sole thing I have.

I thought I would publish a novel by 20 but that didn’t happen, and then I thought 25 but that didn’t happen either, and then I think, well, 30 is okay. I’ll still be young if I publish at 30. Even 35, that’s still young. In the writing world, anyone under 40 is young.

I am focusing on the wrong thing.

So here it is. I am saying it. I am anxious that youth and shine is all I have. And that, let me tell you, is fucking terrifying.

I’m not writing this for reassurances. I’m writing it because Amber’s honesty inspired me and made me want to be honest too. I’m writing it because I know some writers fear they’re too old, they’re running out of time, they’re not shiny and lithe enough. I’m writing it in the hope that other people are anxious about their own youth too, that they fear it’s all they have. I’m writing it because we’re all anxious, and I think it’s important to admit it.

Coconut hair spray dissolved into a fine mist.  Clumps of wooly hair fell to the floor. Buzz, Buzz.  Hands slapped, snapped, popped. What’s good? Chillin.  Laughter boomed, caromed off the walls, struck me in the chest.  I flipped through the latest Ebony, a magazine I’d never read anywhere, except here in the  shop where I couldn’t bring a book for fear of being unmasked, dragged into the back, water boarded, sleep deprived, or maybe even worse.  Forced to listen to a lecture by Michael Eric Dyson, on “The Failures of the Black Middle Class.”

I crossed my legs, squirmed, bit my nails. I leaned forward, backward, and forward again. I looked up.  A wall draped in pictures of red-gloved brutes wrapped in golden belts, their muscles glistening under frozen sweat.  Further to the left, glaring, pointing his big ugly Black Nationalist finger right at me, it was none other than El-Haj Malik El-Shabaz, the pimp turned pedagogue turn prophet, Malcolm X.  Just keep on reading, I told myself.  And stop staring at the guy with the shiny brown nose, white dreads, and gold-rimmed glasses, or at the fat-fingered, cream-colored dude who’s bare handing a piece of Halal chicken.

You up, man.  The barber stood over me.  Baseball cap blacking his eyes, the initials C.V. tattooed on the side of his neck. He told me to get in the chair.

Bring it down close, no lines. Just leave it natural, I said.

Natural? Never heard that before. Sounds weird.

Yeah, I’m not from around here, I wanted to tell him.  And I wanted to tell him that I wished there were a black barbershop on the other side, Larchmont, my side of the border, so I wouldn’t have to wade through this wasteland just to get my hair cut.

Yes, even we, the aristocrats, the talented one-tenth, had to leave our suburban enclaves full of banks, bistros, synagogues, predominantly white public, private and parochial schools.  We had to leave, that is, in order, to get our unruly, African hair cut. Just this afternoon, I hopped on I-95, drove ten minutes south, got off at Exit 17, New Rochelle.  Stomach tingling, sweat bursting on my forehead, I entered the kraal, sped past a Baptist Church, an African Methodist Episcopal Church and almost ran a red light.  At the light: Hands tight on the wheel, eyes checking all the mirrors, making sure windows rolled up, doors locked, as a bucket and squeegee wielding black bum staggered towards me. I waved him off, mouthed No, No, but he kept coming.  Green light: I darted past an abandoned gas station, one, two, three, foreclosed homes and a procession of brown skin men who hung their heads, dragged their feet, and shoved their soiled fingers into telephone slots.  I wondered why I hadn’t brought a camera, safari shorts, a spare pair of socks, malaria pills, bug repellent, and Fodor’s Guide to Predominantly Black Neighborhoods 2010.  In a municipal lot, next to a police station, and far far from the barbershop’s covetous eyes, I parked.  I took two deep breaths, licked my dry lips, and got out of the car.

You can find Clark online here.

Every now and then I find that some teen girl has posted one of my poems or stories on her blog. I get all excited and talk about it on my Twitter and Facebook, and send her a comment or email to say thank-you. And perhaps this is annoying. Perhaps it’s like I’m showing off, like I’m shouting “oooh, check me out, I have a fan”, like I’m a total wanker. And I am a wanker, but there is another reason that I do this.

When I was 16, I had a website. It was dreadful, obviously. I was into kinderwhore and riot grrrl and fairytales and confessional, but I did it all in this awful cack-handed teenage way, so it was just bad poetry, lists of my favourite song lyrics, and photos of me reading books in my underwear or pouting in torn slip dresses and a tiara (see photographic evidence). Everything was in lowercase and I used punctuation like ~ and * as little decorative flourishes.  I had lists of words I like to say out loud (caterpillar, amalgamate, she), lists of words I like the look of when written down (coyote, liar, anaemia), things that fascinate me,   things that make me cry, things I like the smell of, me me me me me.  I’m bad enough for navel-gazing now, but at 16 I was infinitely worse.

The only thing I loved more than talking, thinking, and writing about myself was books. I fucking loved books. I loved them in a way that I can never love them again, because no-one can ever love anything with the life-consuming intensity that they do at 16. I lived and breathed books. They told me how to feel, how to react. How to live life, and how to then turn that life back into words. In particular, there was a poet.

This poet, she knew me somehow. She knew what I secretly felt and she knew how to put it into words. Her life was the life I wanted: that wildly creative, fucked-up, dramatic mess that I was convinced would never get boring. Oh, how I loved her! So I carefully typed out a couple of her poems and posted them on my website, below some gushing blurb about how oh-em-gee aMAYzing she was and how I wanted to be just like her.

Imagine my epic, eye-burning, heart-swallowing joy when the poet’s name appeared in my inbox.

“Please remove my poems from your website, as this violates my copyright”.

She was right; of course she was. But I was 16 and I was in love and I had been spurned. I took down the poems and had a sulk and vowed to never read the poet’s writing again. Obviously I can sulk for a really long time, because in writing this post I realised I never did read her work again. She was right and I was wrong, but I still feel like I lost something. Everything I’ve ever read has made me into the person and the writer that I am, but there’s a tiny handful of words that stuck. Perhaps I could have been a different sort of writer if that poet had loved me back.

I am grateful and amazed and appreciative of everyone who has ever read my writing, but those teenage girls are the ones I write for. My dream has always been that my stories will speak to some girl—some lost, dreamy, hopeful, hopeless girl just like the one that I was a decade ago. I dream that she’ll read my story and finally understand something about herself, or about other people, or about the way the world all fits together.

I don’t write stories that only teenage girls will like and I rarely write teenage girl characters, because when I was a 16 year-old girl I did not want to just read about 16 year-old girls. I wanted to read about Daisy Buchanan and Esther Greenwood and Winston Smith and Kate Byrne and Courtney Love and Dirk Gently. Especially Dirk Gently, because I had a crush on him. I wanted to read about explorers and painters and rock-stars and mothers and strippers and existential detectives. I wanted to read about 26 year-old tattooed queers who live in book-lined, chandelier-lit tenement flats in Glasgow with their graphic-designer/musician girlfriends and pet hamsters (well, probably). I wanted to read about people who were mistaken and determined, people in love and falling out of love. I wanted to know the truth about the world, and I wanted it in words.

A decade later I still don’t know the truth about the world, but I know tiny bits of it, and that is what I try to write about.  The copyright-claiming poet was not wrong, but I never want to be right in that way.  I know what it is to love words and stories with such a passion, and I would rather have a dozen girls repost my stories than stamp on their hearts.

In The Virgin Suicides, when Cecilia Lisbon is in hospital after her first suicide attempt, the doctor asks: “What are you doing here, honey? You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.” Cecilia replies: “Obviously, doctor, you have never been a thirteen year old girl.”

Every now and then I take time off from real life with the specific intention of dedicating myself to a period of writing. It might only be a day out the office, it might be a week; either way, I am totally up for it. I will write.

I make sure I won’t have to go outside for anything. Plenty of food and drink in the fridge. A pile of favourite old books. A pile of intriguing new books. A stack of vinyl to play through. Lock the door. Unplug the phone. Get everything just so. Time for some serious, intense, manic writing.

And this is what happens:

8.00am
Wake up. Get out of bed. Drag a comb across my head.

8.15am
Get back into bed. Fall asleep.

10.30am
Wake up. Get out of bed. Drag a comb across my head.

10.45am
Boil the kettle. Open the laptop. Turn on the television. Get back into bed.

11.00am
Check emails, glance over the newspaper, sip tea. Open up RedTube. Masturbate furiously.

11.45am
Open up whatever it is I’m working on. Edit the last few paragraphs from the previous day. Write three new sentences. Delete them. Reply to any emails.

12.15am
Get out of bed. Stand under the shower singing a medley of favourite songs. Brush teeth in shower and try not to get toothpaste anywhere sensitive.

12.45am
Get dressed in clothes I’d never actually consider leaving the flat in. Preferably some sort of tartan pyjamas and threadbare socks.

1.00pm
Boil the kettle. Make sandwiches. Watch the news. Read the newspaper online.

2.00pm
Open up whatever it is I’m working on. Write loosely, carelessly. Type more than a hundred words but less than three hundred. Flick wildly between websites, email accounts, newspapers and twitter. Repeat until overall word count reaches a thousand but I’ve no idea what I’ve actually written.

5.00pm
Open up RedTube. Masturbate furiously.

6.00pm
Make dinner. Drink a beer.

7.00pm
Read books until bed-time. Steal ideas to pass off as my own.

Tomorrow will be a better day.



Alan is a twenty five year old male from Fife, Scotland. He won his first poetry competition at the age of ten, for a long-lost verse entitled “Ode to a Baked Potato.” His prize was a board game. By day, he works in a basement for a slightly evil global corporation. By night, he studies on the renowned Creative Writing MLitt at Glasgow University and edits the online journal From Glasgow to Saturn.

Through the years I will own a heather-blue, wool ski cap that itches my head and causes my forehead to welt; a black polar fleece fez which will sit high on my head but leave my ears cold and exposed, and me looking like some Ukrainian refugee.   The fez will have flaps which come down and cover the back of my neck and ears, but then I will look like an Appalachian refugee—and a cold Ukrainian trumps a warm, back-holler hillbilly any day.   I also will have a brown knit skull cap that my wife will make for me one winter when we will be trapped inside by an ice storm and there isn’t anything else to do and besides, I’d will need a cap when we finally can go back outside again.    Finally, in the center console of the second truck I will own will be a blue, polar fleece ski cap that I buy at Old Navy because it is only $5 and I will figure if I am ever stranded, I can wear it while I wait for rescue.

Mostly, I will never wear these hats.   They will sit in a dresser in the basement ready for the inevitable day of really cold weather—which in Portland, Oregon comes once a year, in December or February, when the city gets a requisite day of snow.   But here is what I will learn after I get divorced: that if I wear a hat and gloves when it is even slightly cold or raining outside, I won’t mind being out so much, and I might even enjoy it.   This might seem like common sense to you and something I should not have to wait 44 years to figure out.  Maybe you are an adult on the East coast who has been wearing a hat all your life.   Or maybe you live in Denver or Jackson or Bend and know that 60% of a body’s heat loss is through the head.   I probably learned this, too, but I am also told that I don’t look good in hats—particularly ski caps (will they even be called this in 2009?).   My mother tells me only boys wear these types of hats.   I don’t know what she says girls wear, but I’m sure she thinks it should be something stylish and jaunty, worn high on the brow (not pulled down low like a Neanderthal or a serial killer), a hat that just grazes the tops of the ears.   The problem with a hat like this is that they stopped making them in 1958—well, except for berets, but I am told I don’t look good in these, either.   And besides, only pretentious writers wear berets.

But, in 2008, I will get divorced and truly embrace my sexuality, and then I will realize that the reason I never wore a hat was because I thought they made me look butch.   Which I was, am, will always be.   But it will take a girl embracing this in me to make me understand that not only is it okay to look like a big old lesbian in a Carhartt jacket and a polar fleece hat, it is preferable to looking like a cold and miserable lesbian who scowls and complains whenever she has to go outside in the winter.

It also will take 21^st century hair products for me to embrace hats.   Before, when severely inclement weather forced me to wear a hat in order to avoid contracting pneumonia, my head would heat up and my fine, thin hair would lose what little body my gel or hairspray imparted, and stick flat against my head, making me look like a 12 year-old boy.   But with 21^st century hair powders and glues and polymer gels, I will be able to take a hat off, palm the top of my head, and reconstitute my hair.

One winter after my divorce I will be in Central Washington, hiking over the frozen Columbia plateau.   It will be so cold I will think, I’ll just grab that blue cap out of the truck and slide it over my noggin.   I’m out here alone tromping over buff-colored grass that’s so frozen it’s not even cracking under foot, and it seems ridiculous not to wear a hat. So even though the navy blue will not be the exact right blue to complement my black Carhartt gasoline jacket (with quilted arms and a blanket lining), I will snatch the hat and pull it on.   It will cover my ears and sit so low on my forehead that it will almost touch the outer edges of my eyebrows.   But it will do the trick.   I will start to warm up.

Then I will do something surprising—take a picture of myself.   I will feel warm and happy—a rare day free of the millstone of “should” that hangs around my neck.   The landscape in its sparseness will fill me with quiet.   Freezing fog will have covered the bare branches of the Garry oak trees, turning them into land-based coral, and the Ponderosa pines will look like flocked Christmas trees.   Between the white ice, grey fog, and the dark of the trunks, branches, and my Carhartt coat, the world will look like a black-and-white photo.   My red Irish cheeks and my blue cap will be the only spots of color in the picture, and I actually will like the way they stand out in the photo.   Like it so much that I will do another surprising thing:   I will upload the picture to my Facebook page.   It will not occur to me that my friends might comment on the picture, but they do.   No one will say I look like a Neanderthal, a serial killer, or a ball-buster.   No one will say, Where did you get that ugly hat?



Kate Carroll de Gutes is a writer, trouble-maker, and wry observer. Kate started her career as a journalist, which means that she is a stickler for the truth (capital T) and that her writing is almost always sparked by some event or thing outside herself. Her writing has been featured in various anthologies, newspapers, and magazines, and on the web. She lives, writes, and rides her bike in Portland, Oregon.

To lose one job may be regarded as a misfortune but, as Oscar Wilde might say, to lose two looks like carelessness. I am on my fifth in five years. A monogamist by nature, when I was first hired by the Very Important Talent Agency straight out of college, my fantasy was that I would love and be loved by my corporate family, and that I would rise to the top of my new office like bubbles in a glass of Diet Coke.   Instead, I found myself on Unemployment only a year and half after graduating (with Honors!). Two jobs and three years later, I was on the dole again and starting, again, from scratch.

My address has been almost as unstable as my professional life. Though the bathroom ceiling has caved in and the heat puffs and rankles like an old man with a heart problem, though the oven is temperamental and the living room leaks, I am holding onto this, my fourth apartment, with both hands.

It is hard not to view all of this as failure, especially when I compare myself with my high-achieving classmates from high school and college. The amazing ones have started their own non-profits in third world countries. The average ones are earning graduate degrees, and even they will emerge, shiny with prestige and purpose, to volunteer with un-unionized workers in rural Pennsylvania. All I have to show for myself are my experiences getting kicked around the island of Manhattan for half a decade, and my sense of humor.

I was a good child, the good child, in fact, when measured against my older and younger brothers. At home as well as at school I was praised for being agreeable and intelligent, never punished in a serious way even when I did skirt the rules. Nor did I need to be punished. When I drank, I did not drive. When I got high, I went to art museums or sat around and had lengthy conversations. When I decided on a whim not to complete or hand in a project for my European history class, I received an “A” and the apologies of my teacher, who insisted that she must have misplaced my work. When I graduated from college, it was—did I mention this already?—with Honors. How did I belly flop so spectacularly on the surface of the real world?

An analyst might trace the roots of my problem back to the end of high school, when my flighty, nervous English teacher sat me down with tears in her eyes, and threw a Molotov cocktail through the window of my self-image. “You’re just not an English person,” she said. It felt as though my mother was telling me that I was adopted. Over the years, I had questioned my sexuality, my religion, my attractiveness, and my ability to be loved, but never my identity as an English person. Less than a year before, I wrote and handed in a deconstruction of Great Expectations that argued that it is only when Pip symbolically rapes Mrs. Havisham that she can finally break out of the prison of her eternal wedding night. I was proud of that paper, because by the end I had even sort of convinced myself; and I did well on it, too, possibly for the same reason.

Technically I could have ignored my over-involved, overwrought English teacher. You can’t tell me what I am, I could have shouted. Instead I was reduced to a mess on a bathroom floor like poor, quivering Private Pyle, and without the power to shoot back.

You’re a creative writing person, my English teacher had concluded. My freshman year of college, I took a Fiction workshop. Thin, unsmiling Professor Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am, who dressed like a Victorian gentleman, presided over a long wooden table of students who, like me, had been scribbling away since they were six. Within weeks, she had scared Fiction right out of me. The only stories of which she approved were lightly obscured memoirs, tales of true-life horror from high school and hospital beds. Meanwhile I was sweating through an update of “How the Camel Got His Hump” from Kipling’s Just So Stories, with a self-obsessed college student in the role of the camel.

Professor Do-You-Know-Who-I-Am was unyielding in her disdain. Vampire, I thought. That would explain the deep-set purplish eyes, the scarf obscuring her pale throat. But, as I had done so many times before, I buckled before the stronger personality. I discarded my numerous drafts and asked myself, “Now what?” The path of an English person had been blown away; the path of a creative writing person blocked by a monster. What else did I like? What else was I even capable of?

“Sociology?” I asked my father, who had always given off the comforting impression that he knew everything.

“That doesn’t actually exist,” he replied. “It’s a trick college plays on you.”

“Psychology?”

“Only if you want to listen to rich people whine at you all day.”

I had little patience for whining and even less for the problems of the wealthy. My father had no suggestions to offer: he too had always expected that he would be an English person, until to escape the encroaching shadow of the Vietnam War he ducked into Law School. My mother is also an attorney, though not a particularly happy one: somehow, though she began her career with “Q” Clearance at Los Alamos, New Mexico, she ended up mired in a remote Federal Government backwater.

With no great purpose in mind, I majored in Film & American History, and I enjoyed college until my last year put me through an emotional paper shredder. My dog died in the summer, my grandfather died in the fall, and after that I sat up at night waiting for the third shoe to drop, because everyone knows misfortune has three feet. I was also quite prepared to worry about more abstract things: What would I do with my life? How would I use a Humanities degree to earn money?

Fear of my future, which stretched in all directions with the opaque menace of the ocean, kept me awake for long stretches of time. It would have been wise to make use of those pre-dawn hours to study for my upcoming Honors exams, a series of grueling oral and written tests administered by outside experts. Instead I stared at the dense crowds of words as though at patrons inside a restaurant whose conversations I could not overhear.

The Ivory Tower would soon be no more than a smudge on the horizon, or perhaps, now and then, a tourist destination. In exile from it, I would have to shape a career out of my marketable skills—which was much like trying to build a castle out of mud and twigs.

I applied to Entertainment jobs in New York City, where my then-boyfriend wanted to go to law school, and, more esoterically, to poetry MFA programs. A Very Important Talent Agency (VITA) expressed interest in me and had the potential to put in me in the black rather than in the world of the red wheelbarrow, glazed with rainwater, beside the white chickens. I eliminated all other goals to focus on one: Get a job.

After a phone interview, a preliminary interview, a grammar test, and a typing test, I sat, at last, across a desk from Pat, the head of Human Resources at the New York office of VITA, the Very Important Talent Agency. She wore candy-red glasses that matched her Dansko clogs. Though her accent placed her roots in the heartland, her manner that made it clear that New York City was her native soil. Under her scrutiny, despite my resume, my fancy clothes, and my new Longchamp purse, I felt like an immigrant at Ellis Island being checked for lice.

“We have another step in this process,” said Pat. “You can be taken in front of a panel, and they will decide whether to let you into the program as a Trainee. That is for candidates we think will eventually end up as agents—we start them in the mailroom, and then they work their way up. It’s a tradition, one we are very proud of. But I’ll be frank you with you, Ester. I don’t think you want to be an agent.”

She paused, blankly ominous. One instinct urged me to jump to my feet and begin pledging allegiance, under the assumption that this was a test. Another told me she would be able to see through any act. After all, she was right: I did not want to be an agent. I wanted to be employed.

(What was an agent, exactly, anyway? This was before Entourage.)

I decided to sit quietly and wait for the “but.”

“But,” she said after a long moment, “we do have another option: we can start you as a Floater. You can work here, get to know the place, see if this is the right fit.”

She paused, then straightened up and slammed her hand down on her desk, jostling Yankees memorabilia. “I’ve hired a lot of people who turned out to be stupid,” she said, “and I’m tired of it. So I have to ask you, Ester: are you stupid?”

It was a fascinating question. I was planning to insert myself into the sprawling, foreign, and overheated city of New York, where I knew almost no one. My companion Mr. Ben was a skinny vegetarian who was as prepared to start law school as a bone is prepared to be thrown to wolves. We did not have an apartment, let alone a plan for financing one. We did not have trust funds.

I was relatively certain that I did not want to be an agent, yet here I was, across the desk from someone who in a former life must have run the KGB.

Even if my emotional state was shaky and had confidence had been turned into cheesecloth, one thing remained certain. I was not so stupid that I did not know when to tell someone what she wanted to hear. I was not an English person; I was not a Fiction person. Soon I would not be a student anymore at all. It was time to become something new.

Meeting Pat’s eye like the tough, go-getting city girl I aspired to be, I said, “No. I’m smart.” And I hoped to God that much was still true.



Ester Bloom, the winner of the Lois Morrell Prize for Poetry, has been published in the  Apple Valley Review,  Conte: A Journal of Narrative Poetry, the Morning News, Nerve.com, and Salon.com, among other venues. Her first novel,  Applebaum: Agent of God, was picked up for publication by ICM, and she is currently at work on a book of comic essays entitled  Never Marry a Short Woman. For almost a decade now, she’s been blogging at  http://babblebook.blogspot.com.

I’ve been lucky lately. Like, super-lucky. In a three-week span I:

#1. Got a story accepted by BBC Radio 4 (due to be broadcast in January);

#2. Landed a paid internship at Creative Scotland;

#3. Won third place in the Bridport Prize (during which I met Zoe Heller and PJ Harvey).

Bloody hell, I thought, what could possibly happen next week to top this? An acceptance letter from the Paris Review? A busload of Suicide Girls showing up bored and horny at my door? A huge inheritance cheque from a relative I never met? Well,  I’ll tell you what happened: fuck-all.

I went to work, read books in bed, watched crappy crime dramas, had too much red wine, and painted my toenails. I wrote a paragraph on my novel, realised it was drivel, deleted it, then stared at my blinking cursor. I drank a lot of tea because, you know, British. A normal week, neither happy-making nor sad-making. But after my weeks of lucky breaks, it felt like the shittiest seven days ever.

I know, I know, I’m a right whingy cow. I don’t want to seem like I don’t appreciate all these good things happening, because I really do. But a career is a ladder, and every rung up means that the next rung is even higher. I am not good with the afterwards, with the holding of breath, with  what now? I know that isn’t even really a comedown, just reverting back to normality. So feel free to tell me I’m a whiner, but then tell me what to do about it.

How do you deal with the literary post-orgasmic chill?

I could talk about advice not taken, mistakes made, people slighted, opportunities missed, pity parties so elaborate they are weekly street festivals. Someday, I’ll write about those things. But I’ve been so surrounded by distraction lately that I’m thinking about what’s left when distraction falls away. Some of that is what follows here.

1. There are two writing ladders of which I am now aware. There is the craft ladder, on which you improve all of the abilities that get covered in writing manuals and workshops and writer interviews conducted by or for other writers. And there’s the authenticity ladder, on which you find truth. Your truth. At the bottom of that ladder, you have to do it with a low quality plastic spork. Somewhere in the middle, you do it with a jewel-encrusted titanium sword. I suspect that near the top, it’s all about your bare hands. In an ideal world, you’d ascend both ladders simultaneously…but there is no such thing as an ideal world, is there? The craft ladder is shiny and well-maintained and visible for miles, but the truth ladder has chipped paint and is broken in places and behind clouds in others. It’s a little like the Christmas tree in the Charlie Brown Christmas special. Plenty of opportunity for disparagement, plenty of shed needles, and everyone’s secretly a little disappointed when the gang covers it with tinsel and lights toward the end.

2. Using creativity is about setting rules. I like those kinds of rules because they’re not limitations, they’re guideposts. I like setting down guideposts and then going what feels like completely bonkers. I don’t think it’s actually completely bonkers, though. In recent months, looking at something I wrote and thinking “I’m going to be wearing a sandwich board and talking to pigeons soon” has been a fairly good indicator that I’m on the right track.

3. The other day Kyle Minor said this on Facebook about about stories under 1500 words:  If you go shorter, you can ride the lyric train and let the last sentence save you. It was like the floor opened up underneath me, that sentence. I love to read and I’m not much of a musician. But a lot of the time, what I actively try to emulate is a song, or a part of a song…something that is three or four minutes long. Probably related: I dream about trains all the time.

4. I dislike the overuse of the word “fear” in discussions of approaching the act of writing. I spent a lot of time as a student thinking that it spoke to other students, who had legitimately intense and terrifying secrets they wanted to share. I had secrets I wanted to share — what writer doesn’t? — but they were (and still are) smaller and in some ways, mundane. Fear isn’t a good word choice for what stands between me and the page much of the time. There’s no one word that covers all for everyone, but a phrase that is close comes from the Bene Gesserit Litany against Fear. The second line:  Fear is the mind-killer. What the Litany neglects to mention, understandably, is that there are other mind-killers besides fear.  Most of the time, what gets in my way is mind-killing.

5. I’m always in pursuit of myself. If keyboard writing stops working, I switch to longhand. If lines seem limiting, I go to sketch paper. If sitting at my kitchen table makes me jumpy, I go back to my regular desk. No one tactic works for very long. I’ve been wondering if my reptilian brain — the one that really likes by-rote things like Bejeweled or solitaire — has grown to blimp-size, and that’s why I have to keep up the chase. It’s a more pleasant theory than the one in which a side of me continually mocks another side of me.

6. Most of the time, when I sit down to write I have to take out the garbage first. I spend somewhere between 15 and 30 minutes just writing about whatever’s going on in my head. Stuff going on in my life, things I’m obsessing over, grievances, whatever. I have a journal, and this is even separate from that. There is always muck to be skimmed off the surface.  If I have the luxury of substantial time, I’ll push the garbage phase to that full 30 minutes because I know that toward the end I will want to be writing about something else…anything else. If I do that step correctly, there’s a quiet afterwards that is empty and spooky and if I’m lucky, beautiful.

7. There’s an essay in Alice Walker’s book  In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens called “Writing The Color Purple.” In it, she talks about how the characters visited her — almost like imaginary friends. I used to work like that. I’ve been thinking about trying to take it up again, because imaginary friends have the extra perk of comfort. In the meantime, though, I often start with artifacts and go at them with the archaeologist toothbrush. Three for the last three stories on  this page: Christmas trees, Keurig coffee makers, Jack Van Impe.

8. I love the highs I get from having a story that is humming along nicely. What I love more, though, is when it’s obvious that it has been heading in that direction all along. Some random object, idea, emotion I was rolling over mentally five days ago, seemingly unrelated, clicks into place like it always belonged there…because it did. I wonder what I would think of that phenomenon if I was an atheist.

9. I love Margaret Atwood’s novel  Cat’s Eye for many reasons, but a big one has to do with how it depicts artists’ relationships with their work. The main character, Elaine, paints subjects and themes that draw from her life, but aren’t distinguishable to her audience as such — there’s a significant gap between those two experiences, and it has an effect on how she responds to the art community. Her ex-husband, meanwhile, changes media and schools and attitudes with the times — it’s nearly parody, how it’s portrayed. I think most writers who keep with it for any length of time are probably some combination of the two.

10. My standard answer to “why do you write?” is that I write to make sense of things. I don’t think I succeed in that very often, though. Mostly what I do is show you something, and maybe you say “Oh yeah, I’ve seen that too,” and then we both move on. I don’t glance back right away — just like how when I leave a restaurant table, I don’t want to see who sits there next. But sometimes I circle back later, because I’m both obsessive and easily bored, and I see that you’re someplace totally different, and it gives me a little bit of hope.

Editor’s Note: We conducted this interview with rapper and activist Wyclef Jean shortly after he announced his bid for the Haitian presidency. Haitians officials have now declared him ineligible to run for the nation’s highest office. We present this interview as a record of the rapper-turned-politician’s thoughts as he prepared to make a gigantic leap from the world of entertainment to the world of politics.

For years, Wyclef Jean has sung about the problems of the poor, most notably Haitian immigrants. With his music, he’s attempted to fashion himself as hip-hop’s answer to Bob Marley. Now, with his eyes on the presidency of his native Haiti, he hopes to fashion himself as that country’s answer to Barack Obama.

In, what was at times, a testy exchange Jean discussed his transformation from musician to statesman and his plans for the country.

We all know Wyclef the musician; I guess you should re-introduce yourself. Who is Wyclef the politician?

A born-again hooligan only to be king again.

Well, there are no kings in Haiti. What makes you qualified to run a country?

The time has arrived. The prophecy will manifest.

That certainly sounds very grandiose. With no political experience, why have you decided to run for president this November?

You must understand, I can’t work a nine to five. So I’ll be gone till November.

I kind of expected you to have a more noble answer. That being said, you’ve been such a jovial figure for most of your career, do you think it’ll be hard for people to take you seriously as a candidate?

I used to be underrated. Now I take iron. It makes my shit constipated. I’m more concentrated.

This is serious business, Wyclef. For instance, what’s your platform?

If I could rule the world, everyone would have a gun and the ghetto, of course, would giddyap and get on its horse (giddyap).

That’s interesting. You did include security as among your four policy pillars.   What are some other changes you would implement as president?

If I were president, all blacks would have reparations. No segregation. Feed the nation so there is no famine. Muslims, Jews and Christians would all hold hands. Every week on the beach, party by the sand.

You’ll have to forgive me, but that all sounds very pie-in-the-sky. What’s your plan for rebuilding the country’s crumbled infrastructure?

It’s all about survival, man. Anything can happen.

So rebuilding is not a priority? Many people still have no shelter since the quake.

I feel the rain coming. Let me play my guitar for them right now.

You realize many are saying it’s ill-conceived for a pop star who has never held public office before to lead a nation as desperate as Haiti. I doubt that your answers have persuaded them otherwise. How do you convince people you are not delusional?

I woke up this morning. I was feeling kind of high. It was me, Jesus Christ and Haile Selassie I.

Selassie said, “Greetings in the name of the most high, Jah Rastafari.” Christ, took a sip of the Amaretto. Passed it down the table said, “Today I’m gonna be betrayed by one of you 12 disciples.”

Um, I’m not sure I understand what you’re getting at…Let’s talk about an area where you will certainly face criticism. There have been allegations levied against the charity you founded, Yele Haiti: failure to pay taxes, misuse of funds, etc.

The chase is on, I feel like the bad guy.

No one’s trying to make you out to be a villain, but there are some hard questions you have to answer. Your organization collected a lot of money after January’s earthquake. How much exactly?

Many money, me say many, many many.

You don’t know the exact amount?

Haitians getting money like the streets in Dubai, man. But an OG told me to keep a low profile;  it’s a recession. That’s why in the garage I kept the invisible Phantom. But if you’re making  money, let it rain.

Honestly Wyclef, do you feel like you’ve gotten in over your head?

My inner conscience says, “Throw you handkerchief and surrender.” But to who, The Star-Spangled Banner?

Funny you should say that. Critics, most notably, Sean Penn, have implied that you are  running as a puppet of foreign corporate interests.

Hell no, siree! Wrong emcee. Why should I be a spy, when you’re spying me?

I’m not spying on you, but you are facing a lot of skepticism and some fierce opposition. Your cousin, ex-Fugee member Pras Michel, has stated that he is supporting one of your  opponents. How do you respond to that?

Hypocrite, critic, but deep inside you wish you had the pop hit. It hurts, don’t it? The refugees  come to your turf and take over the earth.

Harsh words.

The fans want the Fugees back together; the only thing they don’t want is the third member.

Seems like I struck a nerve. Let’s switch gears. Extra marital-affairs have derailed more seasoned politicians. It’s been rumored that you love the ladies…

I’m looking at myself thinking out loud, “I’m in love with two women.”

That’s a tough situation for anyone to be in, but potentially fatal for someone in public office.

Never really knew she can dance like this. She make a man want to speak Spanish.

Are you talking about your mistress?

Just “’cause she dance go-go, it don’t make her a ho, no. Maxine, put your red shoes on. We’re  going to the disco. We going to e-e-e-lope. To M-M-M-Mexicoooooo. Called up my mama said,  “I’m in love with a stripper, yo.”

I must say, Wyclef, you don’t seem very focused. A president can’t just elope, especially when he’s already married. Have you even thought of such things as how to bring revenue to the new Haiti? People have suggested legalizing marijuana as a way to stimulate the country’s devastated economy.

Weed for sale. Weed for sale. Ever since the recession, we got weed for sale. The economy is  gonna grow ’cause we got weed for sale.

That’s a surprisingly progressive attitude on a very controversial issue.

It’s the natural la that the refugees bring.

Crime, as you know, is off the charts in Haiti…

Wyclef’s in a state of sleep, thinking about the robbery that I did last week.

Wait, you robbed someone last week?

Some say peace, but on the streets a .45’s my piece!

Uh-huh…And you’ve had very high profile associations with convicted felons.

John Forte!

Yes, Fugee affiliate John Forte was convicted of attempting to traffic cocaine and later had  his sentence commuted by the second President Bush. There have been others as well. I  sense a sort of pride at these affiliations.

If you’re mafioso, then I’m bringing on Haitian Sicilians.

Noted. So, how’s your grasp of the language?

I got the slang to make the chitty bang bang a-rid-dang-de-dang. The nappy head bang.

That doesn’t sound like French or Creole.

Wyclef, preacher’s son ichiban.

Now you’re just mixing English with Japanese.

Another hero want-to-be. Now he sleeps with his friends in the mortuary.

Are you threatening me? I thought we were building a rapport here.

Mr. Author, I feel no vibe.

You’re a pop star, why should I be afraid of you?

Even though you’re buff, don’t play tough ’cause I’ll reverse the earth and turn your flesh back  to dust.

Yeah, you and what army?

A hardcore crowd waiting to see if I break like your first time in jail when you got fucked by an  inmate.

Who told you about that?

John Forte!