Disenchanted Grimoire staffer riffs on writing

By Francesca Lo Basso
Collegian Staff
March 1, 2006

You know there’s a problem when you mention the Grimoire and people ask if it’s the anime club. There’s something about literary magazines that make them lightning rods for post-goth, prepubescent crazies. My literary magazine in high school, aptly named Pen and Ink (because apparently, ingenuity doesn’t occur until after adolescence) had the same exact problem. It’s as if there’s some invisible neon sign demanding that lit magazine writers must stand on mountaintops wrapped in tin foil screaming, “All gods are impostors.” Are artists and writers insane? That’s like asking if the Pope’s Catholic. But there are levels to madness.

I write because I have to. Judge me, love me, hate me, envy me, pity me, mock me. It’s all the same when it doesn’t matter. I write because it gives me peace in a way that’s more substantial than alcohol, and less transient than the effects of Golden Girls reruns. Being a writer is the classiest way to say you’re a narcissist. I am validated when I see myself in smudged black and white print. I don’t want fame, fortune, my name in lights or an honorary degree (although anything that doesn’t require having to finish my honors project is tempting). In the words of Conor Oberst, “I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you.”

It’s remarkably satisfying to know that paper becomes art because a writer marked up a piece of compressed tree bark. They can discuss literature like they know it, drop Latin and French phrases like cigarette ash and people nod because they wield pens. But the joke’s on you. We know just as little as everyone else—probably less, because the fulfillment that comes from knowing you ran that half marathon or caught that ball or learned Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” does not come when you print out one page, or 115. Not only are writers narcissists, they’re masochists, too. There’s only a small window after you write something when you still like it, and after that 10 minutes or 10 weeks, you pick it up between two fingers and wrap it around the toilet paper dispenser.

Writing is not gratifying. It’s therapy for the frugal. There are two three-by-five note cards taped above my desk that I make sure to look at before I start writing. One is a quote from William S. Burroughs that reads, “When you stop growing, you start dying.” Because you are a writer only as long as you keep writing, but if you stop, you only were one.

The other note card is a quote from a book I read for a fiction writing class. It says, “I do have a choice—I can either write, or kill myself.” Writing isn’t a career, a money-making scheme, a hobby, a game, a pastime or a decision. It’s not a far-fetched venture like tights and hiking boots (shut up, it was middle school). Writing is just another addiction for the self-deprecating.

This is not a pro-smoking ad or an anti-Truth.com mission statement. I’m not saying it’s okay to be self-destructive. I’m saying you merely are or are not. You’re a writer or you’re not. I’m not judging you, nor am I pretending to have the authority to make the call myself. You are simply the only one that understands what it means when a writer says “assuming the Lotus-position in the aisle of St. Pat’s,” because you’ll do anything for a moment’s peace.

That’s what I had hoped to find when I came to college—people who understood me without expecting an explanation. Literary magazines—whether it’s Pen and Ink or the Grimoire—should be places you can go and say “lack of inspiration” without having people think you’re trying too hard. There are some people out there who just get that elusive “it” – whether they’re Pete Doherty and Carl Barat or Rebecca and Zach from high school or Bright Eyes or Kerouac, Ginsberg or Palahniuk. You see these people, you read these people and your soul aches because they are writing to you.

That’s what I want the Grimoire to be. Actually, that’s what I want the world to be, but the office of Supreme Being isn’t up for election yet.

lobassof1@lasalle.edu