Remember those long, drowsy Sundays of your youth?
Remember how you used to curl into a favorite chair and read until either the book was done, or you’d dozed off and dreamt yourself into the world of the characters you’d just met?
Remember the piano lessons, the modern dance or ballet classes?
Remember the basketball games that ended with somebody’s momma calling them in for supper or piano /guitar/saxophone practice or to finish their homework?
Remember the easel and canvas you got one Christmas so you could imagine yourself better than Bacon or Basquiat?
Oh, how I used to miss the spontaneity, the excitement of exploring, of experimenting.
How I used to miss the process of wondering, dreaming, asking myself what might bring me joy.
At a certain age we’re told to put away those childish things.
We’re made to tame the creative impulse, to remove ourselves from the mercy of its random curiosities. Adulthood, after all, is about plans, schedules, responsibilities. It’s about achievement, respectability, accolades.
It’s about money.
I realized one day that all the fun was gone from my life. Everything had either become an actual job, or felt too much like hard work. The art I’d so loved creating had become a commodity with branding potential, the need for a marketing prospectus, an audience. Even my words were often no longer my own. Most of my writing that was being published had a celebrity’s name on the byline or book cover instead of mine. Why? Because somebody, or a group of somebodies, in an industry that prides itself on respecting the beauty and power of the written word, decided that my words, though beautiful and powerful, were simply not enough. My appeal had to be wider, my social media numbers had to be bigger for those words, my words, to be attached to my name. Consequently, ghostwriting was the only way I could earn a stable income as a writer. Truth be told, it was more than stable, it was quite lucrative. But it was also soul-crushing.
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Here’s what I don’t understand: publishers, who are in the business of publishing literature, have marketing and publicity offices filled with people who’ve graduated from top-dollar colleges and universities, people who are presumably bright and innovative. Why, then, if a manuscript is well-written, should the writer have to hand-deliver an audience, prove that they have a platform?
Why? I suspect it’s because publishers don’t really know how to sell books if it requires them to think outside of a centuries-old box, one that’s fundamentally Eurocentric, heterosexist, and patriarchal.
As a result, writers, people like me, who are most comfortable in the company of ourselves, are now being forced to figure out how to gain popularity on social media. Instead of sitting at our desks writing novels, short fiction and memoirs, we’re squandering precious moments constructing pithy posts, taking pictures of our chicken parmigiana supper, or snapping provocative selfies while wearing Ruby Woo, a push-up bra and Louboutin pumps. All in hopes of gaining likes and attracting more followers.
What is this way of living that insists on a never-ending cycle of being in service to what sells? Of constantly being told you’re too much this or not enough that? Of having to contort yourself, your unique but underappreciated self, in order to fit into someone else’s small vision of you?
Are there artists of quality who break through?
Of course, there are. We can all cite examples.
I used to hold those individuals’ careers in my heart as symbols of what was possible.
What escaped me for many years, though, was the even more urgent and relevant question: How many artists of quality cannot, for whatever reason, break through? How many with brilliant manuscripts but not enough followers? How many who are single parents working multiple jobs with no time to tweet or TikTok? How many that are immigrants whose work is met with the response, “We already have enough [blank] novels/memoirs”? Fill in the blank with a nationality of your choice: Mexican, Vietnamese, Laotian, Palestinian, Guyanese, African (because Africa is a country, right?). How many with a story that the gatekeepers don’t understand or know how to market so they deem irrelevant? How many who don’t have the time, money, resources, name recognition, or social currency to be invited to this workshop or residency, be nominated for that grant or secret award?
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I’m tired of having to look good on paper.
I’m here to live a real life in a real world; a real life that, admittedly, sometimes involves inventing an alternate world on paper. Not that any of this really means much because we tend to like our artists best when they are dead.
In the mid-1990s, I was a fellow at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California. It was started by Carl Djerassi, an award-winning chemist whose research and discoveries led to the development of the oral contraceptive pill. One evening while I was in residence, Mr. Djerassi came to meet the artists and hear about what projects we were working on while there. During that gathering Mr. Djerassi spoke of his lifelong love of art, how he used to be a serious art collector, paying top dollar for paintings and rare first editions of books. Art by dead people.
Meanwhile his daughter, Pamela was an artist. Though he loved his daughter and was close with her, he never paid much mind to her work, with which she was struggling; he never gave much thought to the life she had chosen as an artist—until she committed suicide. It was then that he vowed to only help and support living artists, and he turned the estate on which she lived and died into an endowed artists’ residency.
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These days I’m trading in whatever has been weighing me down for the things that’ll lift me up, however seemingly minor. I bought a keyboard so I can start putting music to my lyrics. I don’t know who, if anyone, will care to make or buy whatever I create. Maybe I’ll make it myself, go into a studio and record an album. What do I care if at 54 the industry believes, because women in certain professional fields have expiry dates, that I’m too old to become a singer-songwriter? I only know that I’ve always loved writing songs and I’ve always loved making music, so that’s what I’m gonna do.
I was raised in a pretty formal culture. We weren’t really the t-shirt-and-sweatpants-on-a-weekday sort of people, but I’ve always secretly loved t-shirts. About five years ago, I started collecting and wearing them. In 2020, at the start of the pandemic, I decided to express, mostly in micro-essays, the reasons why I’d purchased my t-shirts. I guess you could say the shirts became writing prompts. I also started taking selfies to go along with the essays.
The painter Frida Kahlo once wrote: “I am my own muse. I am the subject I know best. The subject I want to know better.”
That impulse, to know myself better as subject, is what has always fueled my writing. Suddenly, there was this other, utterly fascinating medium of discovery that I was learning to use and love—photography. Through photography, I was able to explore my various habits, addictions and predilections; I was able to consider how and why I use them to create personas. Take, for example, the fact that I own nearly 50 pairs of eyeglasses, over 200 pairs of earrings, and I honestly don’t care to disclose the number of necklaces and bracelets because if you haven’t already started judging me, you certainly will with that info. Still, I don’t think of myself as an especially fashionable person. I rarely ever go to the mall. For me, each item I own holds meaning, is symbolic, because most are collected during travels or handmade specifically for me by artisans. Some of the items represent a particular history—a stone from a sacred place strung onto a necklace; an old coin from a nation that no longer exists used to make earrings. Other objects are gateways into fantasy, like the Maasai necklaces and kikoi cloth that I occasionally wear, or the Moroccan djellabas and Berber jewelry.
Perhaps that’s precisely what fashion is: history and place, memory and homage.
When I started posting my t-shirt essays online, people loved them. I was told again and again, mostly by colleagues with externally successful writing careers, that they should be compiled in a book. I got excited and started thinking, “Yes, it’s a wonderful idea. That is what I’ll do, a book of my best t-shirt essays.” I made some calls and was immediately met with the usual questions about platform, social media numbers, audience, format, etc. etc. It was deflating. It completely shut me down; I stopped taking the photos, writing the essays and posting the finished products. Months and months passed before I remembered that it doesn’t matter if other people love them; the only thing that matters is that I love them. It doesn’t matter if people don’t understand them; I understand them. And, sure, it’d be great if they were compiled in a book, but that’s not the end all and be all; they already exist in the world, and I didn’t need permission from anyone to make that happen.
The t-shirts bring me joy. I have almost too much fun styling and taking the photos. And after so many years of ghostwriting, this writing—which belongs to me and me alone, and is not for any editor at any publishing house or magazine to strike down or celebrate—is helping me reclaim my voice and easing a lot of the extreme anxiety that was greeting me whenever I sat in front of my computer. With that, and without any additional expectations, I returned to writing my t-shirt essays.
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Sometime in the aughts, an English teacher asked her students to write to their favorite authors and ask them to pay the class a visit. Apparently, the only author to respond was Kurt Vonnegut. He didn’t visit the class but he did offer this message in his letter: “Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.” He then instructs them to go home that night and write a six-line poem about anything, so long as it rhymes, and not to tell anybody about it. He tells them that when they are done, they should, “Tear it up into teeny-weeny pieces, and discard them into widely separated trash receptacles. You will find that you have already been gloriously rewarded for your poem. You have experienced becoming, learned a lot more about what’s inside you, and you have made your soul grow.”
How easy it is for us to disappear the certainty of joy, of creating, and all their splendid rewards, the instant we are seduced by the prospect of money, power, or fame.
Not too long ago, I bought a pair of roller skates because I’ve been having visions of myself in an orange satin jacket, gliding down the street with Tracy Chapman’s gorgeous, earnest voice streaming through my ear pods, singing “Paper and Ink”.
I guess what they say is true: it’s never too late to have a happy childhood.
#lovewhatyoudo #moneysonlypaper #growyoursoul #createforyourownbenefit #lifewithdanquah
I love these essays. They resonate so deeply and I find so many interesting insights each time I read. Finding a connection from our own Peter Pan-like desire to never grow up to the money that so often drives joy out of the things we think we love to publishing's narrowing focus and "platform" obsession. Art is joy if only we can find a way to the heart of it.
Right on! Yes to all of this. I’m with you on t’s. Milwaukie made it a thing for awhile. It’s what caught my eye on your social media and lead me to your stories. “Never too late to have a happy childhood.” Oh yeah!