While I finish up the final Kentucky Meat Shower for the “season”, I’ve decided to do some small written ‘fragments’: notes on whatever comes up, non sequiturs, etc. This series will run whenever I feel like it.
David Berman once said he had a credit card roulette that would dazzle the ancients. Likewise, my notebook roulette would terrify the early Chinese empires with its riches. As it stands I have the following:
A draft notebook for when I want to write long-hand. When things are difficult to write, I switch to long-hand. It’s a lot harder to get distracted in a notebook, and the computer screen allows you a level of ironic remove, as well as the anxiety of seeing things as they’ll be when they’re read. Needless to say, the final bit of A Prophet of His Own is being written in long-hand. The entire trilogy has been a pain in the ass, and there’s something primal about digging into a dead tree to finish this fucking thing.
A bullet journal, updated with chores, reminders, monthly goals, movies to watch, tattoos I want to get, etc.
A diary, which I write in entirely on my tummy with my legs kicking back and forth in the air
The next several have two notebooks a piece. I carry an ideas notebook and I carry a verse notebook. The ideas notebook is where i jot down those little squiggly ideas that if you let get away will. The verse notebook is my Berman exercises: David Berman said if you want to get series about writing poetry or lyrics, five days a week, write 20 lines. After a couple of weeks go through and pull out the good stuff and copy it to a notebook. Of course, the easiest way to keep up with something is to write it in a notebook. Which leads us to the next:
The “filter” notebooks. I have two. One is the “inspiration” book. The inspiration book is where all my good ideas go. If an idea seems worth working on, it goes into the inspiration book. When I’m stuck, I look through and see if there’s anything worth working on. The second filter notebook is where all the good poetry/lyrics go. Once I have enough reserves built up, the 20 lines a day practice might be to actually finish poems/lyrics. The importance of the “filter” notebooks is that it forces me to edit my ideas. You have a billion ideas in a day, and one you think is amazing might be really stupid. On the other hand, if one makes you stop and think, “Huh,” there’s probably something there.
Finally the “project” notebooks. I’ve been working on novels behind the scenes, and my strategy is to not clear my plate to write a novel until a series of provisions are met, namely that I can fill up a small Field Notes notebook. There’s more process after that, but I don’t want to waste time on a novel unless it has some real gravity to it.
Here’s a story about the important things in life: myself and basketball. It also deserves a preface so it smacks less of sour grapes: if I had gotten into an MFA program as a 22 year old, it would have been the worst thing that could have possibly happened to my writing and it would have also made me infinitely more insufferable.
When I was doing my round of applications for MFA programs, which felt like I was building a rocket in my backyard to send me to the moon, I got a call back from exactly one school. It was New Mexico State University, which was actually a top tier pick for me. The program was off the beaten path, which means I wouldn’t have to worry about feeling stuck in a prior mode (I didn’t apply to Iowa for this very reason). They also made a point to discuss how they viewed the school’s connection to the outer community of Las Cruces. For awhile, my computer background was even the Organ Mountains. There must be some sort of Appalachian urge to go out to the desert, and maybe it was all the Cormac McCarthy I was influenced by.
The call was from a guy named Rus Bradburd. He called me one Sunday evening. Somebody also applying to MFA programs told me this is how I was gonna get notified, so here it was, the call for the big show. Russ gets on the phone with me. I’m not too sure where he was from, but he had this brusque city accent (maybe Chicago).
The first thing he says to me: “So here’s the deal: you’re a hell of a writer, but we can’t give you a scholarship because your grades aren’t good enough.”I almost hit the floor. I was under the understanding that an MFA cared about your writing sample. I had no idea a 2.8 GPA was going to make me a worse candidate. My GPA has always been a touchy subject for me but considering the mitigating factors (mental illness, general alienation which you can read more about in the A Prophet of His Own trilogy final part coming soon okay bye, learning I was bad at paper writing halfway through college) I could have done a lot worse. And I also had a very naive understanding of what a graduate program really wanted, which is staff you pay through a “stipend”. I thought I was going to be teaching writing and then learning writing then writing. Maybe that should be how writing works in these workshop programs, but applying for one is a lot like applying for a job, except you have to pay to submit an application fee.
But there was a real existential weight put on all of this: when I was applying to these programs, I lived with my parents in Wise, Virginia and worked at Sykes, a third party contracting company that operated a call center. Living at home as an 22 year old isn’t great for anybody because you’re stuck between being seen as an adult and being seen as the kid you basically are, which just pisses everybody off. Living at home when you work at a call center you hate so much you vomit every day is even worse. The choice wasn’t merely, “Darn, I’ll get in next time.” The prospect that sat in front of me was that I was a high school athlete trying to get accepted into the writing NCAA, and I didn’t even get a Division III offer, and then one of my top fives tells me I’m good but there’s one thing that they can give as an excuse. (There’s a fair case to be made it rattled my conscience so hard it put me off of writing fiction seriously for awhile).
There was also a real financial weight to all this. I spent close to $1000 dollars applying for all of these schools. If I hadn’t been living at home at the time and squirreling money away from my $10.00 an hour job spent answering small business psychos about why they keep getting their data throttled (it’s because your little nazi kid is so busy wacking it to porno that would make you feel like you’ve seen an Elder God he forgot to turn on the wi-fi before he dropped his salmon shorts) I’d have not been able to develop a nest egg to move back to Richmond.
I kept talking with him, hoping I could charm him into an offer. I convinced myself forever I could be very charming when I needed to be, because I still believed there was a certain lightness to the world. Being 23, my view of myself was that, while I wasn’t one of reality’s protagonists, I could at least be a scene stealer. We talked a little about my influences at the time-- big ones in that sample being William Faulkner, Joan Didion, and Nelson Algren. And we talked about basketball. At risk of doxxing my stepdad, his name is remarkably similar to Chris Mullin of Run-TMC fame, so he commented on that.. And, wouldn’t you know it: Rus Bradburd coached Tim Hardaway at UTEP! So for a brief moment, I was in my element.
At some point in the call, Rus said, “One thing I’m wondering is if your grades are this bad, how the hell did you learn to write so well?” The smart ass in me wanted to say, “Probably because I was more focused on writing than my grades.” It may have worked. One thing Rus shared with me in a later conversation was that Lee K. Abbott, who was one of their professors at the time, said, “There’s something appealing about that, the guy who doesn’t really care much about academics, but can write like that.”
I didn’t go for gusto. I went for the truth, which definitely showed I wasn’t ready for a grad school program: intense depressive episodes, anxiety, insomnia, a prolonged period of sleeping in the public library, which was open 24/7, on a nocturnal sleep schedule save for the classes I needed to make. He didn’t seem too impressed about all this so we didn’t focus on it.
We got to the final swing of his call: “We could give you a scholarship. But you can’t come in here and screw any secretaries. Like, you gotta come in here and kick ass. So what we’d probably be more likely to do is let you in our MA program. After that, you can apply for the MFA program.”
I knew immediately that I couldn’t do it. I lived in Virginia and already had student loans. The point was the stipend. I didn’t tell him this. I told him I’d think about it.
I elected, instead, to do Americorps. I sent Rus an email telling him that. The response I got was pretty curt, telling me I might not be right for an MFA program. I guess we’ll never know, because when I go back to grad school, it’s to get a Masters of Library Information Sciences, which means I’ll at least be able to get a job.
Years later, I was reading a little known book called Pickup Artists, which is a fun, if occasionally corny, book about the history of pickup basketball when I came upon a story about John Staggers, a Venice Beach playground legend. He was a 6’5 wing who, like a lot of players, got promised the world by a basketball coach. The problem is, when he got recruited, he quit going to school and couldn’t graduate. No issue, the coach told him. We’ll put you into a GED equivalency program in a community college. Once you pass your GED we’ll get you on the court.
John Staggers didn’t think anything about it. He thought this was to be expected. He goes out to this city, thousands of miles away from home. He gets a one-way ticket from LAX. He gets picked up by an assistant coach and driven to an off-campus apartment. But he doesn’t do a great job with his GED. Finally, the college itself puts him into a program designed from migrant farmers and their families. John Staggers is neither. Eventually he gets frustrated and leaves, feeling like another failed contender. He never made it to the league, but his roommate, a guy named Tim Hardaway, did.
You haven’t heard of John Staggers. You probably haven’t heard of any of the coaches, either, except for the head coach that took Staggers high up on a hill and told him the world was his. That was Don Haskins of UTEP fame. But that assistant coach that picked him up and took him to an unmarked apartment was none other than Rus Bradburd.