My friend Marcia’s a writer who gave up on her publishing dreams in 2019. Her work got tossed into the recycling bin somewhere between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The great American novel, poems of her youth, Marcia’s short stories and travelogues are now an oeuvre of Whole Foods shopping bags, Captain Crunchberry cereal boxes, and a warehouse of Quilted Northern. (If you lived anywhere near Seattle and had a Costco membership in early pandemic days, chances are Marcia saved your butt from chafing.)
Marcia says she’s pulled her literary milk teeth to make way for permanence: choppers that’ll grind up meat and potatoes, raw carrots and Swiss chard, the heartier stuff of life. Do all authors purge their early works to make way for something better?
I, too, pulled out my pint-sized periodical pearlies some years back. Spiral-bound notebooks, hard-back journals, locket diaries, college binders, trapper keepers, floppy disks, and flash drives ditched at the Chateau de Ville Apartments trash compactor. Good on Marcia for recycling! My first 29 years were compressed into an apropos melange of Kentucky’s Best cigarette butts, bedbug-infested linens, overdue parking tickets, styrofoam to-go boxes, and tampons soaked in dumpster juice.
Have you thrown out any of your art? If so, why? Was it …
- ‘Sigh, never going to be a great artist.’
- Reading any of that stuff mostly left me sad and bored.
- Squeezing any good writing out of those stacks felt like pulling a nickel’s worth of ingested baby teeth out of a turd.
Are these extractions a sign of a great writer? Or are we just masochists? Pulling teeth hurts.
Discarded Poem —found in Sunshine Canyon Landfill, 2041 Dumped my body of work into An old rotting mouth where Book spines and childhood cracked open.