An excellent day!
After submitting my column for this month’s Horse Fly, the head honcho and publisher emailed me in his usual terse manner and said, “Your piece isn’t good, it’s damn good. Thanks.” Someone else reported the boss also said, “it’s Taos!” and I kinda thought it was.
There are many different kinds of writing. This was driven by the need to transmute a sack of pythons into art, but I also had to pay attention to the craft. For a couple of weeks, at least, I’ve been needing to express something important that has to do with other people’s psychic landscapes. I think I nailed it in the 743-word column entitled “Compulsion,” which I’ll post here when the paper comes out next week.
What makes it work is less holding back. It’s risky, but the time is now. The all-too-common foibles of a few unidentified people (as well as my own) get gracefully skewered, and they’re going to have feelings. But as my wife said, “You have a right to be a writer.” Now that’s an interesting way to put it, but I thought of something I could do: whenever I caused offense that mattered, I’d give the injured party a rose.
Ignoring the obvious flaw in this approach, my wife said it was sweet. But what about pre-emptive flowers?
“Look, Farr sent us a rose. OH NO!”
No related posts.
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
I got a good laugh over that one – “preemptive roses” is damned good. Also the horror on the face of the recipient. Coming from Farr it’s like the fatal kiss of a mafia don!
I think of poor Truman Capote. Roses wouldn’t have been enough, preemptive or otherwise, to get him out of the soup. He had invited all his friends to the biggest social event of the year, the “black and white ball”, a very hot ticket. Then most of the invitees ended up in lightly fictionalized form in the piece he published in the New Yorker, revealing all the facelifts, the abortions, the drug addictions, the infidelities, etc. They never forgave him, shunned him, sent him to coventry. It was death for a guy as social as him – more importantly, his material dried up. Some say it was the beginning of his own descent into writer’s block and terminal alcoholism. In a drunken musing he was heard to say, “They knew I was a writer, didn’t they? A writer is a cannibal: he devours people.”
Gee, on reflection, it probably IS dangerous to get close to someone of that tribe. Nevertheless, I like forward to reading your piece, Johannes.