A tale of two (3 really) literary events

One of the joys of my life is in navigating the balance between working with my brain and working with my body. Writing, to me, is essentially a working-class pursuit. I do it sitting down, but I’ve found that the toll it exerts on my body, though different than manual labor, is just as real. Writing, like gardening—which is currently my main gig—is a craft. Both require offering great attention to the natural world, exercising critical thinking, and putting a certain trust in magic and mystery.

That said, working as a landscape gardener has recently been kicking my ass. I’ve been pulling long days, coming home tired, dirty and spent and crashing out early. I love it. My social life has also been full of theater, music and literary stuff. But today I’ve got the day off for rain so I’m excited to catch up on some writing.

I attended the PEN Literary Awards a month or so ago with my friend, Eric Borsuk, who had been tapped as a judge for the Jean Stein Literary Award. The ceremony at Town Hall was weird and kind of annoying. As I work in the dirt all day with Guyanese immigrants, my tolerance for liberal pieties is pretty much zero at this point. This ceremony was full of that stuff. But I love books, and it was fun to dress up. We hit the open bar and walked the red carpet.

At a bookstore event earlier this year, I’d felt a similar resistance within myself during a long-winded land acknowledgement by a well-meaning (I guess) white lady. The soliloquy had me wishing that one of my Native buddies, guys I worked with moving oil rigs in the Bakken, were around to roll their eyes with me, or ask the woman to stop. To put it in semi-academic terms, land acknowledgements, to me, sound like all the more Euro-centric bullshit. Yes, in Manhattan, the Lenape were displaced by the Europeans, but they’d displaced the tribes that came before them. So, we’re only honoring the tribes the Europeans met? Why? And what about our own ancestors? They got us here. If we’re gonna honor ancestors, we should honor our own, too. Most of them also died horrible deaths! Also, many Native groups generally referred to today as “tribes” were no such thing. The Sioux, for instance, were a confederation of different tribal associations who shared variations of the same language. English translations of Native tribal names are often insults once hurled by neighboring tribes. Apachu, for instance is the Zuni word for “enemy.” The tribe we now call Apache called themselves “Nde” which means “the people.” No one ever called themselves the enemy. And isn’t a land acknowlegment a weird way to honor people who thought the idea of land ownership was a kind of sacrilege? Brooklyn and Manhattan belong to the Earth, not to nerds sitting in a bookstore. Should we thank Natives for the sky, or is this whole thing really just a way of praising capitalism? I’m bored of people who pretend that words are actions and don’t even use the words properly. In decidedly non-academic terms, I’d just say I didn’t come to a bookstore to hear how fucking virtuous the manager is. A current goal of mine is to try to get more working-class people (of whatever color or race or gender they happen to be) to go to more shit like this with me. It is difficult because it is hard to imagine most of these friends feeling welcome in spaces like this—spaces so often and so deeply intent on announcing how welcoming they are.

In contrast, a few weeks ago, I attended the first Trace to Trail writers’ retreat in southern Indiana hosted by my dear friend Shawna Kay Rodenberg. I took the first writing class I’d ever taken (outside of English Comp 101) led by the inimitable Robert Gipe. I performed a reading from a novel I’m working on and led a question-and-answer session that lasted over an hour. As a guy who has written a book and done some journalism without any formal writing education, this was a wholly inspiring event. I’ve never taught, but this made me want to do more of that. It was a blast.

The retreat was populated mostly by rural writers, some hobbyists, some professionals, some folks who certainly leaned conservative, and a handful of what I’d describe as left-wing Appalachian radicals. I meditated on the difference between my reaction to some of these folks and my experience at the PEN Literary Awards (and that bookstore event), and a few things occured to me. I never felt anyone was talking down to me at Trace To Trail. I also felt like I could have invited my friends to the retreat, and I knew I wouldn’t have to explain anything to them. The Guyanese guys I garden with would have had a blast there. They would have been treated like the funny, fully weird human beings they are. At PEN or at the bookstore event, I’d have been embarrassed to bring them because I think they’d have been uncomfortable. They’d have been treated too preciously, like symbols of something the wealthy liberals there feel they need to defend. At a certain point, aren’t liberal identarian politics just fucking racist? I think so. My conservative friends also would have had a great time at Trace to Trail, because they were represented there and nobody gave a shit. In contrast, a conservative or pro-tariff exclamation at PEN would have led to an uproar. Finally, when it comes to my own openess to folks who hold more radical political ideas than myself, I am just more open to political opinions when they are relayed to me by people who engage in physical actions that help people. Prison abolition sounds kind of nuts to me, but, if a person who works as a social worker, who goes door to door in the city or the mountains helping poor people keep the lights on wants to tell me about prison abolition, then I’ll happily shut up and listen.

On a different but similar note, I recently began re-reading Will Bardenwerper’s book Homestand (Small Town Baseball and the Fight for the Soul of America). Will has become a buddy of mine and I wrote a blurb for his book. His writing is exactly the kind of writing I think we need now. Writing that can’t be replaced by computers. Writing that requires boots-on-the-ground, bare-knuckle-style reporting. I’m not much of a baseball guy, but Homestand transcends notions of the sport itself. In it, Will details the results of MLB’s decision in 2020 to shut down 42 minor league teams by spending a season in Batavia, New York with a local team called the Muckdogs. In many ways, the book is a critique of this specific stage of analytic-obsessed, hedge-fund run, MBA brained post-Capitalism, but it isn’t an academic treatise or a political screed aimed at an audience of bubbled yea-sayers. It is a story about people that any person might enjoy reading. Like a country song that happens to espouse good ethics like loving your spouse, taking care of your kids, and working hard, it is plainly stated positive populism of a kind that I think we need more of.

Speaking of which, I saw Beyonce play the Meadowlands and it was off the hook. If you haven’t read my piece on Cowboy Carter, the long version was posted on this substack a couple months ago, the somewhat goofier version that ran in the Times with some nonsense about the Grammys is here.

I also recently signed up to direct a workshop for a new play called Signs and Wonders by Matt Gasda which will be presented by the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research. The play is about a Catholic priest experiencing a crisis of faith. We had our first rehearsal this past weekend. The workshop opens in Manhattan the last weekend of June and I will send more details shortly.

When I started this essay, it was to maybe semi-defensively explain that while I love writing, I also love not writing and over the past few months I’ve barely been writing at all. Truly, it has been wonderful for me and for my brain. But gardening slows down significantly next month and I’m looking forward to longer hours at the keyboard. There will be more essays soon and I think they will be burnished and reinvigorated by my time spent, not only at getting annoyed by bookstores, but also by sticking my hands in the dirt and carrying bags of mulch all day until all I can manage when I get home is dinner, a tall boy Coors Banquet beer (or two) and lights out.

Until next time and with affection,

MPFS