080318 I’m going to call her Audre, because I don’t remember her name. She said four things I really remember: 1. “I’m not going to attempt a science-y answer, but...” 2. “My rejection of the canon is another whole conversation.” 3. “I’m not overlooking the awful things he did, but....” 4. “There’s not one right way to write. Everyone should be true to their own process.” OK, so the first one first: Because she’s a black woman, my white man self automatically assumed that disclaimer was coming from a place of ignorance. The problem with grabbing hold of the term “anti-intellectualism” (as, probably, with any “-ism”) is that it can turn into a personal narrative witch-hunt mythology. You get so eager to sniff it out in others, you create blind spots in your own awareness of your lack of data and context. “I’m not going to attempt” it doesn’t necessarily mean “I’m not capable of it because I’m a complete butterfly!” Second, as much as I like to reserve the privelige to reject, selectively, the canon myself, I always in some corner of my mind defend the canon a little bit. I’m just too fond of those fuzzy old guys like Shakespeare and Chaucer and Milton and a host of others that I never read and probably couldn’t sort out on a quiz unless I studied for it for a week beforehand. It’s like when Chris said that even though we very effectively no longer resembled anything like actual Catholics, he always had an inner twinge of defensiveness any time someone started bashing Catholicism. And then I follow up the twinge with rationalizations like this: You should be at least a little familiar with canonical works, because it can help you learn to be a better writer, because so much study and discussion and thought has gone into these works, there’s a rich abundance of insight and example to be explored, and you’re limiting yourself—you’re creating deficiencies in your own skill set if you opt out altogether. However. Let’s be honest. As of 2018, there is a surfeit of scholarship and discussion about whole great other ecosystems of literature as well. Understanding the traditional, European canon *will* probably help you understand traditional European culture (from its own point of view, so to speak), and its place in The World. So there is that. And it *will* help you sound educated in classes and cocktail parties that are founded on traditional European culture and values. And it *will* help you pass the Praxis test, if they still have that, which is only important if you’re going to graduate school in some English-related field, like literature or teaching (English). You don’t even need to know anything about specific texts for the ACT. So really, read what you want to read, and delve into whichever text helps you enjoy and understand whatever is linked to what you’re interested in. The third thing was about Sherman Alexie. She was talking about something she had learned from him about poetry or essays, and she prefaced it with this acknowledgement of the sexual-harrassment allegations that had come out about him. That’s a whole big thing, and the girls are almost done with swimming, so I don’t have time to sit and wrassle with it right now, but suffice it to say it’s definitely a thing, and it sucks, and I get it. At least some of it. It reminds me of when Felicia (as she was called at the time) started listing off all the authors that she “couldn’t read anymore”—and that was just because their content was “chauvinistic”—never mind any knowledge of anyone’s personal crimes! Finally, the thing about no one right way to get the job done. This is the one I like the best, and it was oddly timely, or maybe I sculpted my time because I had just read that. I am awfully *labile* about stuff like that, after all, which is a dimple in my writing face I like to think of as feature not a tic. She even specifically said, “If you don’t want to write at the crack of dawn, if that doesn’t work for you, you don’t have to.” She said she doesn’t even write every day. But so I realized a couple things, after skipping yesterday’s fifteen minutes (don’t fire me, Dorothea!): One, it’s OK, it’s not the end of the world. It was Megan’s 16th birthday, and the day really did turn out to be a little bit of a party, thanks to her awesome, devoted, creative sisters, and to Ivy. Two, I really do need to do it the crack-of-dawn, every-day way if I’m really going to do it. It’s like that teacher in that interview (one of many dull nightmares) that looked at me drily and said “I use the rigid rows” after I had effervescent about how I would break out of the rigid rows—it just so happens that what works for me is exactly what she was citing as the thing you didn’t have to restrict yourself to. OK, no problem. But for me, it’s basically reverse alcoholism. I can either drink plenty (and sport the gut to show for it) or not drink; there’s no in between for me. That’s just something I’ve learned about myself, and there’s no point in wasting any more of my “youth” running more experiments to try and prove otherwise. Likewise, I can either write plenty or trail off and not write at all. And she also said (I’m paraphrasing of course) “WHy do it if it’s not fun?” And that’s true, I agree, but the thing is you have to look past the veil of addiction and lassitude, and realize and remember and re-experience that truth that it *is* fun if you actually *do* it, and so it behooves you to find the way of working that makes you actually do it. For me, for now, that’s still *doing everything Dorothea says!* But I’m going to keep “the Audre proviso” in my back pocket anyway, just in case, for the odd day when I need it. Because I’m not a rigid piece of, after all, and you never know, and (as the index cards taught me) you gotta reserve the right to throw things away, too.