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| Rock Point Boardwalk Picnic Area, Ash Meadows National Wildlife Area, Steve Brown 2025 |
1:07 p.m.
I sit at the Rock Point Boardwalk Picnic Area in Ash Meadows National Wildlife Area. When I arrived, there were a few large families here, and they were having so much fun. It's great to see kids enjoy themselves where there isn't much to do other than visit a few Caribbean-blue pools; listen to small, clear streams gurgle; and watch for birds and other wildlife, most of it small, like lizards and jack rabbits. Trails here are boardwalks, and if you abide by the rules, there is no getting off them. It's hardly Disneyland, but I'm glad some families raise kids to enjoy such places. I hope somewhere in their young minds, the children are forming notions of the sacred. Ash Meadows was almost cropland; it was almost a housing development; it was saved by people who believed in the sacred.
When I first came here four years ago, I was slow to appreciate its beauty. I thought it'd be a palm oasis, something like the grounds of a Vegas casino, only a bit more natural.
It's not like that at all. It's straggly and wild, with lush greenery crawling in, around, and over the dead bones of previous trees. It's not some manicured forest you walk through, nor is it a lush green pasture of soft, meadow grasses. It's thick, tangled, wild and chaotic, like the hair of a homeless hippy on heroine.
I'm probably going to get hell for that simile above. I'm keeping it anyway. A mind can form a good metaphor based on an imperfect, biased view of reality. One can be repulsed by a homeless person at the same time one is learning to see the humanity in everyone in every situation. One can know how addiction works, how hopelessness feels--maybe even from having gone through both yourself--and still have such a flash-comparison between homeless-hippy and the wilds.
Good literature swims shallow and dives deep. It's not removed from life. It takes shortcuts, smashes things together in crude and/or beautiful ways. It isn't polite. Nor is it intentionally rude. It crawls over bones. It's not manicured. It's thick, tangled and chaotic--alive.
I fear a world of politically manicured literature as much as I fear a world without wilds. There is a difference between intentionally exploiting stereotypes for political gain and exploring the human condition and all that entails, including personal prejudices.
I once had someone tell me she didn't like the voice of something I wrote. She said the person who wrote it was sexist. I didn't think so, but who knows? Maybe. What I do know is that that voice was mine. Not my only voice. I have many. But it certainly was one of them. It came from my mind, perhaps even my soul (which I guess she thought black). Basically, she was saying she didn't like me, or at least not the me who wrote that piece. I may not even be that person anymore. I'm constantly changing. There is no static me. I don't exist. And neither does she. But our souls do, and they don't judge. That's the preference of the ego.
I didn't remove her from my life. I really admired her as a writer then, as I do now. I've actually always believed she is much stronger writer than myself, one of the best I've ever read.
However, I did distance myself from her influence because I know the difference between writing that is manicured for a particular audience and writing that crawls out of the deep and trapses across the red velvet carpet with muddy feet while looking up at you with turquoise eyes that claw deep down into your soul and leave you forever transformed. That's what I think her writing does. But that's not what her influence would have had on my work. Although in college, we seemed to push each other creatively through a sort of healthy competition, many years later that was no longer the case. As an artist, or as anyone seriously wanting to grow, it is important to recognize not everyone is good for you. It doesn't mean they are bad people. It doesn't mean you have to dislike them. However, it's vital to recognize whether those around you shut down your creative energy or expand it. I knew if I continued to workshop my writing with her, my writing would no longer be authentic, and that is the only type of writing I'm interested in.
I have no idea if I've accomplished that here in these pages. That's for others to decide. But I'm not interested in anyone telling me to trim my lawn and tidy up my mind.
I forever want to write from places where things are wild. You don't cultivate great thoughts from neat rows laid down between do's and don'ts. You let them grow out of the soil wherever they are rooted. That place is wherever you are now, the moment you pick up your pen.
Whatever this book is, whatever it accomplishes, wherever it falls flat--this I know: I wrote each page from the moment of its creation. I stood there, looked deep down into the now, and I saw what I could see without any intention other than to record images and thoughts as they slithered out.
It's the same writing process I believed in and articulated when I took my very first creative writing class way back in 1990, and after all these years, it's still the only one I truly believe in. I've expressed it multiple ways over the years, including like this:
Writing for me has always been an associative process. I sit down with a single image, thought, or feeling, and then rummage through the equivalent of old magazines in my mind, ripping out bits and pieces, like a collage artist. Then, I assemble them bit by bit, hoping they'll lead to some sort of semblance. Perhaps this sometimes leads to layers and complexity that wouldn't develop if I worked more linearly.
I want something that shimmers like the world through a rain-dappled window at night--blues, yellows, reds and purples pocked and streaked in sub-narratives that mix and mingle and diverge again.
The best writing is a fossilized trail of discovery, a record of energy. If the writer knows exactly what they think before hand, that is not the book they should write. It'll be dead from the get-go. A good book quickly moves away from the writer's intention. And if it doesn't, it probably shouldn't have been written. Nobody wants to read an endless lecture. But witnessing someone attempting to think--to see thoughts reach out and grab for something solid to attach to and wind around and grab something else, again and again... That's exciting! And I think a reader can always tell the difference between a book that regurgitates what the writer already knew and a book that records a writer discovering something new for them. Poetry, fiction nonfiction--it doesn't matter: the best writing grows wildly beyond the writer's intention.
May I never write a book that says exactly what I mean. If I do, I'll be the first to burn it.
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