Love is for the ones who love the work

on art and labor

The title of this Substack is a quote from the brilliant Joseph Fasano poem, “For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper”.

There are many things that move me every day. Have you ever heard the Frances Ha monologue? Have you ever heard the Robin Williams quote from Good Will Hunting? Have you ever read a Lucille Clifton poem, the one about running into a new year, once, twice, every year, and then, finally one new year’s, understood it? Put all those things into an AI machine, extract the summaries in one sentence, and they flatten into nothing.

The point of living and creating art is not to tell the story right immediately. The point is that we get to tell it in a million different ways until we tell it in a way that matters to us. The point is that we get to see something told a million ways until we finally, fundamentally, understand it. Because someone in the past has miraculously captured in their work just how we feel in the present moment.

It took me ten years from when I first wrote a book to when I published a book. Every day of those early years I wished it would come sooner, that I was a better writer, that I could write the magic words that would make a publisher immediately drop everything and publish me. I now know there is nothing more precious than the decade I spent working, tearing my work apart, self actualizing, revising, rebuilding my craft, playing in the sandbox of my mind and my mind alone. That was my becoming.

Those years of labor do not linearly translate to my popularity, or sales, or critical success. I know any book deal could be my last. I write all over the place and hop across genre. My first book will probably go out of print soon. There is no commercial reward I get for putting in those long and unyielding years of work. There is only the hope that in my attempts, over and over, to write something, that one line, one book, will move someone, across space, across time. That I will have completed the communication. Maybe that’s a sour deal. But this is how I understand art to be. We do it because we have something to say, and we have things we want to share with other people.

My memories are not complete nor perfect. My brain is not a machine. But I do remember when I got my first book deal. It was a balmy August evening in Washington, DC. I got the email and I wept. I walked along the waterfront and I was, for a moment, filled with all of my past selves from the last ten years who had dreamed and worked for this moment and crafted every sentence in that book. The sweetness, the relief, the hard-fought sheer fucking joy. Nothing but time and labor could give me that.