August 6th & 13th, 2018 - Displaced
Dear TNY,
Rock Springs is in my top five favorite short story collections. It contains my favorite short story. Or, at least, the one that floats to the top most often. The one I go back to when I want to remember that it’s possible to be loved. That I could be loved.
I say this to let you know I cannot be unbiased with this letter because I have a relationship with Mr. Ford, although as you can surmise we have never met or actually communicated with one another. But art is subjective, and his art came to me at a time in my life when I needed it most. And through that art I was saved.
I understand why you published “Displaced”. It fits your requirements perfectly, requirements that I trash weekly. It is not, however, the Best Writing Anywhere…Everywhere. This story’s greatest sin is that is should have been a novel. The voice, the massive amount of summary, all the players, the tone, the way the piece carried itself; it all adds up to novel and not a short story. It is well written. But, it’s just not…it has no life.
Your greatest sin, TNY, was accepting this and not telling him no. I’ll admit, I don’t know how one shoots down one’s heroes. I would have no issue shitcanning all the Nobel laureates that you have been publishing recently. But those stories were pure garbage and I don’t know those fellas. Maybe this week is the week that I admit your job must be astonishing difficult if you truly love art. And I mean love it deeply, such that you understand it’s the only thing that can embody the feeling of love. And it becomes hard, once you fall in love with the author who was graced with rare chance/luck to capture that love and record it for others, it becomes hard not to just hug him when he brings in a story in that shows that, once, when the world was made just for him, it was luck because this new shit doesn’t have that spark. So, that’s what you do. You hug him. You say, “This is great, Richard. Just great.” And he knows it isn’t. And he knows you know it isn’t. Because he was there in the seat before, when the hurricane of words inside him spat the right ones, floating down in an order that was ordained by Jung’s collective unconscious. He knew what it was like, once, to break the fourth wall of this existence and touch truth. He knew this story wasn’t that. And could never be. Even with the keenest edit. So you hug. He hugs back. And he goes back to a world in which he is loved for what he has done. And you, TNY, you choose not to break him. You publish this. Because you know he is already broken. Because how does one go so deep into the fold and come back, only to discover that it is likely something that cannot be repeated. That all those writing classes, all the craft, all those other authors purporting to know how any of this is done…it’s all shit. It’s blind fucking luck and the only thing that any of us can do is keep training in the hopes that one day that luck will warm us with it’s tender light and we will be fit enough to do the work.
I don’t know.
Nick
