What Does Success Look Like To You?
"There's a place some of us choose to live / gated community cops can't come in / a neighborhood for punks over the hill" - NOFX, "Mattersville"
Nazis unwelcome: here’s my post about moving this blog off of Substack soon. I might put this stinger on every post until then to try to irritate Nazi Sympathizer Hamish McKenzie. I might forget/get bored and stop. Not today though!
Cotton Xenomorph’s “Cryptids and Climate Change” issue continues, with “Los Nímbulos” by Angie Loveday trying to get people lost in our literary Nostromo just for fun.
This is not Jordan Belfort asking you to sell me this pen. This will be me talking to myself. Hopefully it maybe helps you, too. We’re not talking about money, though let’s not downplay it—most artists don’t make enough to live off their art, and that sucks. No, we’re going to explore something less measurable: when do you feel like you have what you want?
How many M names can fit in one paragraph? I was lucky enough to get coffee with
recently, and at one point, I said that my biggest goal was being a poet/novelist with a blog—to which Matt said “you are.” Rewinding back to AWP, I mentioned to Maya Williams how Bob and I really try to keep The Line Break from being a cis-straight white boys’ club—to which they said something encouraging and something along the lines of “you have a platform.” Rewind all the way back to 2022, and something said in ‘s blog with a similar theme has stuck with me ever since. Here’s Matt’s full answer:MATT BELL: “Long ago, I decided success would be getting to live a literary life. To write books or edit them or teach them. To be surrounded by people who made art and cared about it. To try to think deeply about stories. I’ve had all that for a long time now, no matter what else happens.”
It often feels like, in the day-to-day bustle of school dropoff, work, school pickup, parenting, cooking dinner, then watching movies with my wife until we fall asleep, that I lead a more dad life than literary life (that is not a complaint about my family, my family rules). Maybe I don’t feel like a poet/novelist because I don’t have a book out (non-self-published division). Or maybe I don’t feel successful/like a I have a platform because I don’t make money off of my work yet—but we said we weren’t going to talk about money. Maybe it’s that the Shipwrecked Sailor blog and The Line Break podcast hasn’t yet cured every warmongering bigot in the world of the violence and hatred in their hearts and brought about a lasting peace where the government gives out free small press subscriptions every year after you file your taxes. That’s achievable, right?
Nah, the year 2020 disabused me of any notion that writing or podcasts can bring about the kind of revolutionary change the world needs. That’s okay! You know what else is okay? Putting your art out into the world, using that to bring you into conversations with other artists, and nurturing the relationships you all form until something like a True Community emerges. Because Maya and the Matts (free band name) are right—I might not have reached the bestseller list or created my own little version of the Combahee River Collective, but I do feel like I’ve been living a literary life these last 3 1/2 years.
We know that art saves lives, otherwise there wouldn’t be so many artists who say that making art either gives life meaning, makes life livable, or has been a way out of general trouble/addiction/suicide. We know that the current state of the world is terrible—genocide in Gaza, Trump-Biden II, the threat of techbros, lingering COVID, rising fascism—but we also know that there are ways we can help each other. Maybe it sounds like I’m talking about two completely different things, but I do think that life doesn’t have to be so awful, and art can help. Sometimes, we’re all we got and we’re all we need. Increasingly, I feel completely out of step with the world, and I’m grateful for the connections—which can be friends, family, or lines of poetry—that keep me grounded.
Sorry you got an email,
Chris
storytellers are the keepers of human memory. grateful you stick with blogging out emails, and what you do, look forward to new site.
Love this. I remember on the Scrubs podcast people would call in and if they were someone in a financially lucrative career or started that big kombucha company Zach Braff would always talk about how “successful” they were, how their parents must be so proud of how successful they were, etc. Never said that to the nurses, teachers or whatever who called in, which I thought was really telling. I’d say I’ve only felt “successful” career-wise since becoming a teacher! Finally getting what I want out of my work life, you know?