I've got to get more in touch with the life, do the thing that Steve said real artists do: take convention and make it wholly original, my own, unpredictable, and gorgeous. I know that something is happening though, when I recommend a book by Lewis Nordan to a friend who's never heard of him, and have that same friend use a piece of that book to instruct me in my own work--getting reminded of that gorgeous thing I didn't catch the first time, when the coroner is bitching about the shampoo he is using to clean a corpse's hair in The Sharpshooter Blues: an original thing Nordan did, taking convention and turning it upside down, that evaded me because of the time and place in which I read it, the ignorance that I couldn't help but have because of where I was and how little I had written.

I cannot quit the story. I do not want to. It's been about a year since I first gave Howard Bahr a story that he found something worth a damn in, a year since that time and I've gotten my first rejection letter. I want to believe that this is the work that we are promised will be completed in us until Christ's return, and maybe that isn't what that verse means at all, maybe it is strictly about the work of the soul, the mind, the heart, the things that Christ wants from us and wants to change as we keep living.

What I know for sure is that when I was twenty-years-old I started reading, and I did not want to stop. After all of the vile shit that I had put into my head, the novel, the essay, and the short story felt like nourishment to my everything. With time, I started to feel like I needed to give back. I still feel like I need to give back. I want to give someone what was given to me with the language--a thing that wasn't the Word of God, but pointed directly to Him, even if the author had no intention of doing so, and even when Scripture wasn't referenced to at all. I still don't even know if that idea makes a lick of sense, and I suppose I don't care because making sense of the thing isn't half as important as the thing itself, the story, which is all anyone should give a shit about.

Rick Bragg has been breaking my heart with his essays in All Over but the Shoutin'. Such intense attention paid to the life, the details, the stuff of the everyday, but at the same time he's gone for it. He hasn't sat back and been fortunate enough to experience adventure. He's gotten up and made it happen. An active dude.

Ph.D. you've gotta wait.