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Richard Price: Lament
Wednesday, January 6, 2010
"I ask myself, What kind of writer am I that I write something and then I don't want to take ownership of the final product? It's nauseating. I don't mean nauseating in a condemnatory way, I mean that you actually get a feeling of vertigo and nausea about who you are." -- Richard Price, 1996
Posted via email from rattlejar's posterous
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Nausea....Took me back to something I wrote a few years ago, an annual appeal letter for a nonprofit that once employed me as a grant writer. As these things go, it was a very good letter. Later, I learned that the executive director took credit for it with the board of directors.
I've been paid to write off and on since 1992 and am used to the fact that I don't actually own anything I write, yet earlier today I mentioned this episode to someone and felt my stomach constrict.
Yah I worked for her, yah it was her name at the bottom of the letter and yah I was paid for my words.
Yah Yah yah, it speaks volumns about the character of the ED.
And yah yah yah I know that attachment causes suffering, but I am not the Dali Lama. I wanted the credit, damnit, not so much because it was good, rather because I put some of myself into those words.
I feel Richard's pain with the opposite, to suffer the toll writing takes, then feel self-loathing or, worse, indifference. One way or the other, I haven't figured out how to write without the visceral, its exhausting. Maybe that is why I don't want to write anymore. -EM in MN