On What It Really Means to Live the Writing Life: The Good AND the Bad

In June 2002, I was on summer break, and about to enter my senior year of college. I spent those warm months working back home at The Seeing Eye, the guide dog school. It was a leisurely landscaping gig that included free lunches and ample time to read Andre Dubus and theology books on a Steiner tractor parked in a freshly-mowed field. I had already learned to count my blessings.

One afternoon I opened my email to discover a note from a writer—a real writer. I was studying creative writing and philosophy at Susquehanna University in Selinsgrove, PA, and I was surrounded and taught by real writers there, of course, but this was a note from a writer whom I’d never met.

His name was Jack Garrett. He’d met my older brothers the week before, and they’d had a beer together, and talked about traveling in the same region of Italy. They told Jack that I wanted to be a writer, and he shared his email address with them. My brothers had always been such big supporters of mine—whether I was on the basketball court, or behind a podium, reading from my nascent work.

Jack’s decision to share his email with my brothers was a nice gesture. Nicer still was the message that he sent back in response to my introductory note. He could have been pleasant but perfunctory. Instead, he was generous and ruminative. It was less an email and more a true letter—the type I would receive from my sister or mother while I was away at school. It’s the type of letter that makes a young writer believe that all of this is worth it.

*

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of the phrase “literary citizenship.” In its best and perhaps purest form, it is the desire to create an authentic literary community of writers and readers. At its worst, though, it smacks of reciprocity and transactional relationships. I bought your book, so you better buy mine. Don’t expect me to share your work if you don’t share mine.

“If I write, life is good. If I don’t, the drift into the void.”

Writers, of course, are a bit more subtle and sly. Yet my skepticism of literary citizenship often arises from it being rather public. Like prayer, I wonder if it is best to take a book, go to your room, close the door, and offer praise unseen.

Jack’s letter arrived before I had Facebook, and well before I had Twitter, a website, or any other significant online presence. It was a note from one person to another, who had an art in common.

Right from the start of his letter, Jack was humble. He didn’t know if he was the best person to answer my questions about the writing life, but he shared his story. His path “has been pretty winding, right from the beginning”: a youthful ambition to be a writer, a GED, and early jobs as a radio DJ “at small stations in the southwest.” Writing still tugged at him, though, so he enrolled at the University of Iowa as a freshman at 26, and studied English and Theatre, which included playwriting workshops. He said those years changed his life: “I got a lot of encouragement and gained some confidence, as well as the time to write, and you can’t ask for a lot more than that.”

He passed on MFA programs and instead spent a few months in France (“where I failed miserably to get any writing done, but had an interesting time”) before moving to New York City. His girlfriend was in grad school there. He wrote, but it was not easy: “I sent stuff to the usual quarterlies, got some encouraging rejections, but ultimately floundered without an audience.” Jack returned to acting, and started a theatre company with some friends. “By then,” he said, “I was writing like a mad dog, knowing I could soon put it on stage: I had my audience again. Felt good.” But that only lasted a few years: “we burned out.”

He added a parenthetical aside (like me, Jack is syntactically drawn to them): “This is an ongoing struggle, one I now realize will not end. It is the center of my life. If I write, life is good. If I don’t, the drift into the void.”

Jack had been making money through a variety of jobs, including paralegal and voiceover work, “meaning I have foregone a ‘career’ or any real chance at one, while trying to make it as a writer. No regrets on that count. As I said, the writing itself is the struggle, but it’s the only one that gives my life much weight. I can in no way be considered a success, except in that I have not quit. I’m 47.”

He ultimately ended his note with this line: “I wish you good luck and joy in your work.”

In the years that followed, I would often return to Jack’s message. In 2009, I wrote him with a bit of an update. I had published fiction in The Kenyon Review and Esquire. I was teaching. I was in the MFA program at Rutgers. But mostly I wanted to thank him for his kindness.

My email bounced back. The account was closed.

*

Our inboxes accumulate thousands of messages. Digitally archived, they don’t take up space in drawers or cabinets. More arrive every day, and the older messages are buried, often invisible to paltry searches. Among those emails are unsent drafts, abandoned because of distraction or hesitation. We often leave our conversations unfinished.

“It’s hard work and hard play, miserable and exuberant, to live a good life. At 71, I feel like I’m still getting started.”

I always wondered what happened to Jack Garrett. A few months ago, I looked him up. In the years since he wrote to me, he’s been a prolific audiobook narrator of westerns, science fiction, and fantasy. He’s published some great short fiction in The Literary Review, The New Orleans Review, and other journals.

Spurred by those discoveries, I decided to track him down. A few emails later, I heard back from Jack. At first, he thought my new inquiry “was some kind of phishing scam, clever though preposterous.” (I’d written his audiobook producer).

One of the first things he said surprised me a bit: “I can’t look back on these 23 years and say much has changed. Maybe writing this will help me reckon with that and move me to do something about it.”

Although Jack has published around 20 stories, one of his favorites “has been rejected (I just counted) 91 times, another over 70, many others dozens of times, mostly one-line boilerplate.” He returns to those stories “once a year or so” to revise them, “increasingly only finding a sentence or two to change, a few words—which still gives me great pleasure—and send them out again.”

Jack tells me that he sometimes wonders if he should have kept writing “for theater and performance.” There, readers and audience are a bit more immediate. Yet he finds himself eternally drawn to prose fiction, and he “won’t stop trying” to publish.

“But I haven’t been trying enough,” he says.

These last few years especially I’ve been finding any excuse to step away from the desk, to give up too easily when I’m stuck, to give in to easy distractions, to hate the work or myself for not doing it. It’s an old story, hardly mine alone, but that’s cold comfort.

He continues:

I remind myself that I made a choice. To live as a writer, to be indiscriminately and playfully curious—whether quietly observant or relentlessly engaged—is a privilege I haven’t yet worked up the courage to fully own. It’s hard work and hard play, miserable and exuberant, to live a good life. At 71, I feel like I’m still getting started.

I want to thank Jack. I also want to tell him that he’s a writer of profundity and continued inspiration. Sometimes private correspondence should be made public, for it offers hope to others. If you write—if you make any type of art—you need to keep going.