Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting

This is a nice thing to say as a compliment—“I wish I’d written that”—but only a plagiarist would say it seriously, and plagiarism is boring. The only thing worth writing for me has 1) never been written, and 2) only I can write. Yet every now and then I read a paragraph by Torrey Peters that expresses a facet of trans experience so exquisitely, nails it so well, that I feel she’s beaten me to it. That rascal!

Thoreau’s Walden. I was a schoolteacher for 21 years, and I always did the reading with the kids. When Emerson said, “Cut these words and they bleed,” he was speaking of Montaigne, but I still associate the quote with Thoreau, and it’s become a motto when I write prose.  

I suppose this trap can be called “wrong conversation.” All writing is in conversation with other writing, and the vast majority are writing things that are in conversation with their peers in the college workshop, or the MFA- or community workshop. Unless that workshop is one of the great writing circles, such as the Bloomsbury group, you’re having the wrong conversation. Be nice to your workshop peers, go to the parties, make friends, fall in love, have good sex, etc. But let your writing be in conversation with Whitman or Shakespeare or Woolf or Bishop or Yeats, or the great contemporaries. Don’t succumb to the workshop ego. 

Two years ago a woman who’d studied with me for a week in Iowa mailed me a check for five thousand dollars with a note that said she trusted I’d use it to help write my memoir. I booked a cabin by a lake in Maine for two weeks, during which I wrote the hardest chapter of This Body I Wore. There was enough money left for two other writing trips, one to a Sisters of Mercy convent outside Detroit, another to an Airbnb in San Marcos, where I wrote two other chapters.