The Problem With Creative Non-Fiction

The blog is a bust because you’re afraid she’ll read it? You’re Jim Motherfucking Trainer! You’re a bad ass. You wouldn’t edit yourself for anyone!
You’re an artist-you take inspiration as it comes, its part of the process. Without sharing, you pretty much have a diary.
You’re promoting your work, it’s part of the business. This is your career. You gave her your heart, don’t give her your career.
Write. Publish. Blow the fuck up, and she can stay home and smoke pot and pretend she’s Anaïs Nin while you’re out there doing it.
-My good friend Red

Aho good reader. Been a minute. Only took me 13 false starts and a shit ton of self-flagellation but, here it is-a long overdue missive from the iconoclast. “False starts” is a bad way to put it and “13” is weak on the outside. I’ve penned allot more than 13 posts since the last time we met on here, but they’ve only sat in the draft folder. I’d love to try and bring it back for you-it’s good writing-but it’s out of context and, in some cases, months old. A diary indeed.

The Problem With Creative Non-Fiction is the very thing I have found it most useful for-its transparency, its immediacy and its honesty. These things assured that I would never run out of material and never have writer’s block again. As long’s I got up in the morning there would be something to write about. And it’s done wonders ridding me of the enemy, be it my own agony&blues or the myriad of unreasonable tyrannies thrust upon sensitive souls like we. Aho. Bosses have met their end here, and phony rock&rollers, goodtimers, pols, police, any and all comers but especially the Big Business of News Reporting and my ex-girlfriends. And therein lies the rub, good reader. ‘Cause sometimes I don’t want to be seen, and going to war with your enemies only esteems them.
Perhaps the Buddhists are right, the best living is done with compassion and the ultimate expression of the human heart is a flowering. Not a stonewall or with venom, but in love. That’s a fine vision and a noble path. One I hope to really be making tracks down someday. But in the meantime I couldn’t find anything equally true and suited for the public. And I was sunk in hatred. Pocked with it, tell you the truth. I had the blinds down for 90+ days of a hateful season. My cocoon swelled like a cyst with venom but I had no release. I wore out my friends and it rained all the time. The fiction didn’t stop, mind you. Neither the movable feast and parade of beautiful women passing through my life and my days here. Point is I was swoll with rejection. I had it streaking down the boulevard like a scavenger and striated on my abdomen, lying destitute on my big red bed. But I couldn’t report on it. I was fucked.

“You know, you get up there on stage and talk about how all these crazy bitches did you wrong, but you’re the one who’s crazy. You know that, right?”
-Madi Distefano, Co-Curator, PoTTy Mouth

Aho, betty. Ain’t lost on me. A couple things, though, sweetheart, and here they are:
I’m a Pisces, I’m squirrely. And I was born in the Year of the Wood Cat. We rabbits avoid confrontation at any cost. We’re always nosediving it back into our holes, and quickly. We’re he luckiest sign of the Chinese Zodiac, although, again, the rabbit’s luck is less his divine providence than his diligent and meticulous work ethic.
I’d rather be a rabbit than a snake-but I’ve shared more than a glorious summer with a fine woman born under that sign. She was svelte, naturally, and she had the ability to molt off the world and its petty concerns. She was a Gemini as well so she had that mutable magic working for her. Weekends with her are etched on my heart. I won’t be soon forgetting her as she is tied with Papa for number of poems written in tribute. Ah but I was so much older then. But I’m not 25 anymore. Christ I’m not even 35 anymore. And the summer is over.
The other thing is I never explain my work. I might talk about it, in the right context, such as with my Editor or good friend The Reverend. But I will never, ever, EVER explain my work. Why? Well, first and foremost, it’s writing, and it’s meant to be read. Now, if you hear me reading it on stage or on the air or whatever, then it’s the same thing except you have the benefit of nuance, and subtlety can be ascertained.  Basically there is no difference except you are entreated to an even better reading of my work if you see it performed live or on film. The key word here is reading. As mentioned, it is writing. And as such it is meant to be read. Not discussed with you or anyone else. I can’t think of anything more simultaneously gratifying and utterly insulting than someone asking me, about my work,
Did that really happen?
Of course it did. You read it, didn’t you? The other reason I will never explain my work is because. Motherfucking because. Keep in mind that this goes both ways. I’ll never explain my work but nor will I ever use my writing as a dishrag and be petty and with “computer balls”. I assure you, if we have a problem we will discuss it in person. Unless you’re not really worth my time-which is the real reason I haven’t been posting to Going For The Throat these last few months. It just wasn’t worth it.

Stay tuned to Going For The Throat for further installments of “The Problem With Creative Non-Fiction”, including Trainer’s contributions to RawPaw and its PLOG, his lecture at Texas State last June and missives from the Terrible Summer while out on the road in Hot Springs, AK, New Orleans, LA and Hostile City, USA this winter.