In General

It starts here. It's not a discreet bit of information or some sort of clever talk about impending fatherhood. It's about writing fiction, the above link, and I'm interested in doing that, and thinking about what it means to do that, and I kind of hope that you are too. Though it is our lot in life to constantly hope for the unseen, the unknown.

It's a fairly thought provoking article, though the death knell for literary fiction has been ringing for quite some time now, probably since the arrival of network television. Aka, a far more accessible loosely defined type of art that doesn't exclude a whole sub-class of the uninitiated. And, it takes a hell of a lot less work. In general, most human beings are lazy. Myself included. The arrival of the internet just pushes the art form from the margins to some side street where only a certain group of people still go to party. All that said, I'm not certain that I buy the premise that the form is culturally irrelevant now. I know a number of people who are profoundly affected by works of fiction, though certainly the ubiquity of the non-fiction form in magazines like Harper's, The New Yorker and The Atlantic signal a shift in forms. Which is where I'd say the form is headed, somewhere new. I don't know what fiction will look like, but I doubt it will be exactly what James Woods recommends. I think Zadie Smith makes a compelling case that the very style that Woods trumpets is necessarily on the decline. And change is good, change is necessary. Anyhow, this could seemingly go on ad infinitum. I guess I just haven't yet been convinced that fiction is necessarily mired in irrelevance. I don't read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky to find out about the machinations of political intriguing s many of the above listed non-fiction pieces do. I don't even read them because they are from a foreign country that is currently all the rage. I read them to be reminded of what it means to be human.

To prove my point here is a piece of non-fiction that I wrote

THE PEOPLE I LEFT BEHIND

She has no legs. What am I supposed to say? I am struck by the gravity of having no legs, of it being a pain in the ass to roll over, to go pee, to do anything.

“Hi, I’m a chaplain, my name is Andrew. What’s yours?”

“Beth,” she responds.

I ask if she wants to talk.

“Oh sure, I’m in here because I got a bed sore,” she says.

I nod knowingly. I know nothing about bed sores.

“My girlfriend and I just broke up,” she says. “I’ve had a hard time getting around.”

Beth has no legs. Beth had a girlfriend. Beth shares with me that her companion now is a golden retriever. “What’s his name?” I ask.

“Shami,” she says.
“I’m leaving today; my mom is going to pick me up.”

“Well, that’s good,” I reply, edging towards the gleaming hallway floors.

“Bye,” she says, and waves, still sitting up on her left elbow, her hospital gown covered by fractals of light.

I did not know how long a hospital chaplain was supposed to stay in a patient’s room. It was hard to sense when a person was done unburdening themselves, to know
when I had listened enough—alcoholism, divorce, cancer, homelessness—and the anti-biotic was kicking in, coaxing the patients into that indifferent sleep of the drugged,something pre-mortem, beyond sleep, and it was time for me to let them rest, or go back to staring at the blank wall and contemplating their mortality, God’s handiwork. Some patients asked me to leave, and that always felt worse. I will never know which rooms I left too soon, what doors I should have stayed in. I will never know what burdens I helped them carry, what burdens I dropped. I will never know if I carried any of their burdens at all, mine were heavy enough.

I was twenty-one years old when I became a hospital chaplain, a junior at a fairly conservative Christian college, and still learning about the world. I remember Beth vividly because she was the first patient I visited alone. I remember the surge of excitement coupled with confusion as I exited the room, the reality of her living body in place of an abstraction: a woman that liked women. To Beth—shaved head, prosthetic legs—propped up on her elbows, waiting for her mother to come. Maybe she was waiting for something else, for the light to shift through the curtains, for its warmth to spread on the remains of her legs, waiting for her girlfriend to appear in the doorway, waiting like me, for some long silent voice to return.