Long time, no see. At least here.
If you’d told me that I would have a child and it would be almost three months before any mention of it appeared on this website, I would have thought you were bonkers. Or, perhaps, that I just hadn’t slept in all that time. But here we are. My wife, Alex, gave birth to Graham Caspian Clayton on December 14, 2020 at 9:43 in the evening, Morgantown, WV time. Everyone is doing quite well. Indeed, we’re sleeping a fair bit, pretty close to my pre-Graham average of six hours a night (though he rarely does that much at a stretch).
One of the culprits for the decline of this blog’s content is, of course, my burgeoning career (slightly exaggerative word, but let’s put that out in the universe, shall we?) as a creative nonfiction writer, somewhere between an essayist or a memoirist (these labels are all hazy and debatable anyway). I’ve talked about this phenomenon before, how the desire of the literary journals I’m periodically appearing in to publish things never before online, including on a personal blog, has made me feel compelled to avoid making even the slightest interesting or profound comment here, lest it be something that would have been better polished up and saved for an “official” essay. And at least recently, I’d been doing a decent job of keeping up with the data on those in this space, making a punctual post every time a new essay came out. But nope, even that’s proven too challenging lately… I missed the chance to post for my last three publications: “Week Eighteen” in Issue 25 of Blue Earth Review in December, “Crossing Bourbon” in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature in January, and “On the Dotted Line” in Sepia Journal in February. These pieces show my range of late, from a new piece addressed to Graham in utero to an old sardonic Uber piece to a somewhat old take on a very old story, when I was detained in February 2000 on the US/Canada border.
Of course, I’ve talked about these things – all these things and more – online. So really, I’m not sure how much I can blame the publication-potential chilling-effect on my lack of diligence in this space. The real problem, as it always has been for blogging, is social media.
The issue is this: in the old days (listen to me, talking about 2005 like it’s the old days!), people used to regularly check websites. They would bookmark their favorite blogs and content sites, make the rounds of these spots every day, sometimes even compile them into automatic feed-readers that would alert them to new content or even fold it into their daily report. The Internet was largely democratic and people organically selected what they liked and kept coming back for more. There was not a lot of direct engagement per se, but people consumed a lot of content.
Now, with the rise to supremacy of Facebook and, to a lesser extent, Twitter and Instagram, all content is filtered through social media. And there’s a very natural reward-system behind why: everyone you know is already there. The goal of writing pieces on a blog is not to write them for the sake of posterity (I mean, sure, that’s a small part of the enterprise, but it’s not the real point). It’s the same as the purpose of literally all writing: to reach an audience. So if your choices are between writing for an immediate audience, many of whom will let you know they’re there by promptly “liking” or “loving” your content, and writing for a vague possibility of a future audience that will be filtered there through social media efforts, maybe, if they decide to click through and read, and even then might not let you know they did so because they clicked so long ago that they forgot to go back and like or comment… you get the idea. It’s a neat little replica of the phenomenon that led me to write quizzes instead of novels for much of the first decade of this millennium (trust me, that content is in that post even though it looks like it’s just about Trump).
So it’s understandable. It’s human. It’s even a manipulated reality, since these social media titans have spent billions of dollars researching exactly how to extract maximum time and attention from users, thus displacing and ultimately supplanting all other corners of the Internet (at least those not dedicated to buying things — and they’re working on that). But it’s also a shame. Even though I adore Facebook and especially my experience with Facebook and my ability to immediately converse with hundreds of smart intriguing people who have thoughts and opinions ready a moment’s notice, I miss writing freely in longform. Even the longest Facebook post struggles to get past 250 words, maybe 500. Of course that’s a veritable Tolstoy work compared to Twitter. And yes, yes, you can link posts on these sites, and yes, yes, I do, but it’s the quick-hit of engagement the sites promote and prominently feature. People aren’t in the habit of using the medium and thus the medium is withering.
It feels somewhat notable as well, since I’m on the eve of sending my thesis to the printer. The thesis is entitled Forty Weeks in 2020: A Future Father Faces his Fears and is a 342-page book-length (~105,000 words) manuscript that I intend to start pitching to agents and publishers as soon as it’s in the hands of my committee. There are only 36 weeks of essays, since we didn’t learn Graham was coming till the official week five of the pregnancy. But two of them have core components that were taken not from carefully workshopped original essays, but from blog posts in this very format. They are Postcards from the Poker Table, written in 2011 after a marathon 20-hour poker session at Parx and Letter to My Unconceived Child on the Occasion of Your Shooting Death, written in 2018 after the Parkland shooting. The last one is, of course, a little on-the-nose with the thesis project theme, as something I wrote to Graham well before he was conceived, but it dovetails well with the epistolary conceit of the collection. The book is addressed directly to Graham and grapples with a year of pandemic, political upheaval, and high anxiety as I face my own challenges in becoming a father while looking back to various points of my past. It was a deeply emotional experience to write and I hope it’s that to read as well.
I feel like I’m writing a letter to an old friend who I haven’t spoken with in a year. It feels good.
Of course, an actual year ago, COVID-19 was first hitting the United States. I was about to head to San Antonio for my first-ever writers’ conference, AWP, which they almost cancelled and one of the conveners resigned her position of power in the organization over getting outvoted about cancelling (maybe that would have spared me a lot of grief had I done that after 9/11 with the APDA Board, eh?). In any case, Alex was already at her own work conference in Dallas and had been in the hospital the night before I was to fly out to San Antonio, so my tiebreaker was that if she was really sick, I’d rather be in the same state where I could easily get there than in a different time zone. As it turned out, it was a fluke 24-hour bug, she was fine and flew home, I enjoyed a thoroughly depleted conference where I got to actually have good shop talk with writers, publishers, and especially magazine editors, and before long we had gone to our last dinner out, our last movie out, and my last day of in-person work in what proved to be a very long time indeed.
At our first Zoom workshop in mid-March, people were complaining about how hard this was and that they couldn’t wait to get back in person. Horrified, one person asked “Do you think it will be more than a month?” The other person shook their head. And I cut in, “Oh, come on, it’s going to be at least a year.” I was almost booed out of the call for my pessimism. But my April graduation was long ago committed to Zoom only, making me, as ever, too optimistic for reality.
In that December 2019 post, I said “I realize I don’t want to neglect this blog.” I essentially made a “dance with who brung you” argument, that this was the tool that got me this far as a writer and it still has purpose in its own rights as more than practice. I think what I may have forgotten to observe there is part of what makes writing here, once I actually sit down to do it, feel so comfortable and easy and free. Unlike in an essay for publication, I don’t have to reintroduce myself each time. I don’t have to put in those little details and descriptions to those who’ve never met me, who don’t have a touchstone for what it means to be Storey. I can safely assume that if you’re here, you know me (“if you’re here, you’re family”?) and thus launch right into any sort of knowing self-referential or past-referential discussion without fear of reprisal or, worse, misunderstanding. And I can do that on Facebook too, but there I can both say less and expect retorts. I’ve never allowed a comment here and that is its own form of liberation.
Since writing that post, I’ve written exactly fourteen posts in the intervening fourteen months prior to this one. (That’s awfully misleading though, because the 14th post was in July and it’s been all crickets since.) Six of those fourteen posts were just publication notices.
No promises.
