Letter - December 27, 2021

I wasn’t going to write another letter so soon. I have an immense drive to write new articles, and I am working on three of them right now, the one on Jack Kerouac that I promised you, and two others on contemporary artists Amanda Mathis and Bill Durgin. You will see one of these two sooner than the literary essay, as I still have a few books to read before I’m ready to expound on the greater theme. My essay for Kerouac is in some ways an attempt to salve old wounds. I did my Bachelor’s thesis on him way back in 1993-94. After I graduated it was my full intention to carry the seed of that work over into extensive scholarship, but as I became involved in that world, meeting the writers and biographers, I began to let doubt creep in. Now I’ve never felt like an imposter in anything that I do or attempt to do.  I’m willing to accept temporary failures without having to justify them with some idea that I was never meant to be the sort of writer I intended. Why go so far as to demean one’s own intentions? It seems a cruelty done to ourselves is more acceptable. I’d rather bury the effort and come back to it when the time is right, like now. If there’s one thing I have learned about life as I grow older, it’s that we can reinvent ourselves. We can be reborn in our own image without knowing what it may become.  This was true of Kerouac, a truth that emerged from his engagement with the fabric of his life and its depth of intrinsic meaning. Such is also true of any creative person. It’s said that looking at something changes it. If that ‘thing’ is our entire life, then it can be transformed, though the looking takes more time, and more choices down the line. That’s what jibes me about these kids worried about being imposters. There’s no faking the will to create. It either lives and breathes or it does not. If you’re alive you are in a state constant change. You look, you learn, you grow. There’s nothing to fail.

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