Writing in the Shadows

As a high school English teacher, I have the tendency to immerse my literature classes with the writers I love. I find myself creating units around novels that I want to spend more time reading. Once, I assigned Beowulf (the Seamus Heaney translation) to a class just because I had bought the book and had yet to read a word beyond the first page. But being a student of literature has handicapped my personal writing. I have found that I live in the shadows cast by my favorite authors.

They serve as monuments of literature, and I’ve created golden calf idols out of them. In my literary trained mind, they are testaments of authorship. These monuments of writing cast sunset-length shadows over my personal work. I often feel like the protagonist in “The Raven”—drowning in the shadow cast by a symbol, and this shadowy death has given me the excuse to put down the pen and notebook and pick up a novel. Living vicariously through others’ works, I label myself an “avid reader.” What I really mean is that I’m a clandestine writer, a writer too afraid of failing before my imagined canonized audience. Thus I become a widow-shopping writer. Window-shopping writers have tons of favorite authors. We bask in the style of a well-composed sentence, and we jealously consume other people’s works. Often, we never move past our jealousy. We let our admiration scare us into never writing a word.

For example, when I read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, I marveled at his organized fragmentation, his form, his meta-narrative about his form. And I wondered: How much did it cost him? What was the price tag on his narrative? What did he sacrifice to create this? And in the back of my mind, I have an idea of the price—the time, the revision, the Vietnam War, the work put into clearly breaking a narrative apart and reconstructing it by losing all the excess—and I assume the price is too much. My craft’s wallet is too thin. I haven’t and cannot work hard enough. So instead of looking to save my money, I read more of O’Brien’s works. I consume novel after novel and begin chiseling the marble for his memorial. I place him on a pedestal and his bust scoffs at my writing.

And when I read Yusef Komunyakaa’s Neon Vernacular, I drank in his use of the ampersand. When he carefully drops it in his work, it’s like he is rocking a pair of Ray Ban aviators (a humorous thought if you know what Yusef looks like), but I’m too afraid to ever use it for fear of being called out as a knock off. When I replace my “and” with the ampersand, it feels like I bought a pair wannabe aviators from Wal-Mart and everyone knows. My internal editors call me out. They point and laugh and tell everyone that I’m just a knock off. I’m the Prado to Yusef’s Prada.

O’Brien and Komunyakaa are just two of the imagined editors in my mind. I could rattle off lists of writers and their techniques that I admire, but I won’t waste your time. It’s much easier, and I won’t have to stretch my metaphor, to say that I find myself without any currency on 5th Avenue. And the New York setting is just one part of the problem. I don’t belong on 5th Avenue. I belong in a mom-and-pop store in North Georgia. I belong in the Home Depot where my dad bought me my first hammer and my first pair of concrete boots. I belong at the Quick Thrift that was walking distance from my house on Cheryl Circle. These are places where I have cash in my writing wallet. At these locales everything I buy is the genuine—the Estwing hammer my dad bought me isn’t a knock off. But I have to be willing to see the idols for what they are. I have to step out of their shadows and see the light of my experience.