Letter To A Young Poet
Loyal reader Paul Winthrop wrote me last week with this question: "Could you elaborate about
the relationship between your revelation and the petering-out of 'Neal Pollack'?"
By my "revelation," Paul, I assume you mean my happy decision to focus on more traditional short stories over the satire that got my knee in the door of the publishing world. The "Pollack" persona gradually died as I lost interest in it, and, more importantly, as readers lost interest. I also got tired of receiving emails like the one I got on New Year's Day 2004 that called me a "cancer on the corpus of American letters." Some of the reactions I received were so violent that they couldn't just be chalked up to envy or schizophrenia. Friends told me that I must have been doing something right because people hated me, but I felt just the opposite. This wasn't hate based on my politics or my ideas. It was just plain hate.
Since I was a boy in OP cordouroy short pants, I've wanted to be a writer, but not necessarily the kind of writer I became in those early days of McSweeney's, when the world was young. Once I realized that my "punk rock" literary revolution had few adherents, I saw myself getting older and fatter and louder and the assignments growing fewer and fewer. It came time to check the clowning, because I had some real stories I wanted to tell. All I needed was the mental clarity, which started to come into focus when I wrote short stories for two anthologies that came out last year. It hit me full on in the face about three weeks ago.
I'm not ashamed of my books. They were fun to do and I acheived most of my objectives in writing them. But they were also the work of a young guy, and suddenly I'm not so young anymore. Like a fine cheese, I've come out of the plastic to ripen. That metaphor doesn't really work. But I do love cheese.
Anyway, Paul, I hope that answered your question.
I'm currently reading three different books, so I'm not exactly stalled at four in my personal 50 Book Challenge. One morning soon I'll wake up and seven books will have gone down the memory hole. Also, this weekend I finished my fourth short story of the year. None of them are anywhere close to getting published, but I think they're all pretty good.
Finally, if you ever wanted to read fan letters from writers to the creator of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie, here they are, including notes from John Steinbeck, Thornton Wilder, and James Thurber. Amazing. It's as if Salman Rushdie, Phillip Roth, and August Wilson had written letters to Spongebob Squarepants. Not like Spongebob needs any additional attention these days.