branta

Time is a hard-won tool, but once a writer earns some time they can spend it when they please. Some writers are larks, arriving at their desks before dawn; some are owls and can only work when everyone else is in bed. Some prefer to write just after the lunch rush at their favourite coffee shop. Writers can work at midday or at midnight; at dawn or dusk or only between 3pm and 6pm. Time, once earned, is flexible.

The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of the Imagination is an organization whose name is also an apt descriptor. Within you’ll find a link to a YouTube video (embedding is not allowed) of a roundtable discussion of the title topic that was moderated by David Shields and features the participation of Barbara Browning, Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky), John Cameron Mitchell, Rick Moody and Fred Tomaselli.

Do critics complain that Christian Bök doesn’t use enough rhyme-scheme? So why ignore the serious formal structures of, say, David McGimpsey, for the sake of his hilarious pop references, dismissing a collection that should have won major awards, it seems, as frivolity, and not “serious verse”? Are “flarf” authors, such as ryan fitzpatrick, accused of not understanding narrative storytelling? If books and manuscripts are to be (inevitably) judged, why can’t they be on their own merits, and not on what isn’t happening.

I would never purposefully hurt someone’s feelings in my daily life, but in writing everyone I’ve ever met is just fodder for stories. For reasons I can’t really justify, I think this is acceptable. If creative writing is a merging of experience and imagination, then what do writers really have except what happens to them? All I know to write about is my life, and if other people happen to be present for those experiences - or to cause them - then of course they have to be part of the story too. So I wrote about those people, and I never told them.