REVERSE BIRTH: Notes From the Gnarling Nowhere

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For a schoolteacher or a cop or something, writing out the story of your life might be very therapeutical —but I'm a writer doc, and memoir ain't my style. You're not only asking me to dredge up my past, you're asking me to change my whole voice. Some of the things that I've been through in my real life would never make it into my fiction because they're too corny. I can't turn off the internal critic, and that self-censorship might limit the value of this exercise for me.

I'd hate for someone to find this and think I was attempting some sort of outmoded confessional style, so for anyone reading this: I AM WRITING AT THE BEHEST OF A GRIEF COUNSELOR. Don't judge me.

Winning the Jimenez Young Writers prize was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I was a sad, lonely, overweight kid with a broke mother and a sick cat. Azusa is in California but it's not exactly paradise, and since I didn't have money to shop, and since I wasn't athletic or funny or interesting in any way, I spent most of my time alone at the library. I loved to read, but they also happened to have 3rd gen VR spaces there, and I got hooked. I would obsessively explore every inch of the few Realities they had, which, looking back, were garbage. But I didn't know that. To me, they were like a new world —a place where literally anything could happen.

At some point the library got a license for Shack in the Woods. That was the Reality that made me want to become a writer. I was thirteen.

My poetry was always secret, but I could tell people that I wanted to write VR. It sounded good, and I was far from alone. If you asked three random kids in my class what they wanted to be when they grew up, two of them would say they wanted to write VR. Maybe it's something you grow out of, like wanting to be a ballerina, but for some reason I stuck with it. I think it was because I was drawn to something different about it than my peers. They mostly wanted to make fantasy-fulfillment Realities, whereas I took Shack in the Woods as my model. Being a digital badass didn't appeal to me, I wanted to create worlds that were close enough to the real world to be unsettling. To me, the ideal Reality was always one that put you through some kind of elaborate metaphysical ordeal.

I entered JYW twice before I won. The first two times, I submitted VR scripts. I thought I wasn't winning because no one in my family was in the Academy, but in retrospect it might've just been that there were more applicants in that category. Then I decided to submit a poetry collection I'd been working on for two years. That was the first time I'd ever shown anyone my poetry. When word came back that I'd won, I was terrified because it meant I'd have to tell people I wrote poetry. People like my mother for example. I was pretty naïve —I thought if people knew I wrote poems, they would want to read them.

My mother's violent negative reaction drove me to accept the residency in New Mexico and join the Academy. Mom said they were all dykes and they'd have me eating pussy in a week. She made it sound much more glamorous than it turned out to be.

(I'm fighting the urge to put in a brief sketch of my mother in here doc, which is alarming to me. This exercise might damage my ability to write for real. I mean, who gives a shit about my mother? That's the problem with memoir in my opinion. The assumption that readers can't wait to hear the fascinating details of the author's life. Where would I get the nerve to inflict my reminiscences about my mother on you or anyone else? I think of writing as a form of show business.)

So there I was, writer-in-residence, but I actually had very little time to write. I was up to my eyeballs in first-school assignments, but I couldn't complain because I was getting free room and board. I was finally on my own, but I was in a situation that was just as oppressive as my mother's apartment. I felt like I'd exchanged one jail cell for another. By the time I was ready to go into the second-school, I decided to stop trying so hard. I stopped doing the assigned reading and started writing again.