I.

I started hoarding cash.

I needed about fifty dollars that could not be traced back to me, so I stashed bits here and there: $3 change from the ice cream shop, $4 paying for a round of drinks, a small cash birthday gift to my son Jack went in my pocket.

Once I had enough, at Office Depot I used the cash to purchase 9”x12” envelopes and 2”x 4” address labels, and to make ten copies of The Story. I drove to the post office to buy stamps, then home. I left everything in my car and popped into a bustling house to play out the rest of the night: dinner, silly-huggy-Daddy, baths, bedtime. 

II.

In college I played baseball. Also, completely by accident, I started writing. My year was filled with practice, travel, and long spells in the training room, so I often selected classes by the times and days of the week they met more than for their subject matter. After registration for Fall 1991, I was a class short and visited the registrar daily to flip through the physical book that was fresh-printed every morning with the classes, times, enrollments, and availability. One day, I found a class that was the perfect fit. Living Writers. I handed my slip to the registrar. She laughed.

“This class isn’t open,” she said.

“It says here that it is,” I said.

            “It’s not,” she said.

I turned the book towards her and pointed to the class.

Living Writers; Professor Frederick Busch; Prerequisites: None.

“This class is never open,” she said. She turned in a huff and walked to the back office, carrying the book. She returned a few minutes later.

“You’re right,” she said. “You’re in.”

III.

Like many devious schemes, mine began innocently. I was forty years old and there was a blank space in my identity, one that I would have liked to label “writer,” but because I wasn’t getting published and I wasn’t, in any real sense of the word, actively writing, I couldn’t call it that. I was a lawyer, a dad, a husband, a coach, a carpool driver, and a familial crises specialist—and I used to be a writer. I wanted to be a writer. But writing, I was not, and the crumpled-up ball of pain and frustration and resentment that I felt over this defeat was not fading with time—if anything, it was metastasizing.

So I poured over all the short story collections I owned, but differently this time. I wasn’t reading for pleasure, or for craft. I was looking for something specific. I read the writers I emulated, but not their stories from The New Yorker or the Best American Short Stories. I wanted the ones that filled out the collections, the ones that would never have name recognition like “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or “Hills Like White Elephants.” The right Story had to be obscure and had to be me. As I embarked on this rigorous independent study, I examined tone, vocabulary, and theme. I looked for stories of lost opportunities and of small victories, like the ones I used to write. It took months, maybe longer, of concentrated effort, but once I found The Story, I knew.

IV.

Six months past graduation, it was 1993, and I was fighting to be a capital W writer. I sent my college writing teacher, Busch, a short story of mine and asked him if he would read it. He sent it back with a handwritten note which I still have. He did not offer feedback. He questioned, gently, how I could even think that he could give me any attention. His words were kind, but sharp and pointed. “Delighted to hear from you,” he wrote. “I’m tickled that you’re writing.” He went on, “I’ve no time for former students’ work–if they expect critiques…because I’m so busy w/ the work of present students and—no small matter to me—my own work.” That he even wrote me back tells you what kind of a man he was, and only heightened my admiration of him. He remembered one of my stories from college and mentioned it, which gave me hope.

I kept it up. I waited tables and tutored and taught and wrote. I got a master’s degree in English Literature solely as an excuse to keep writing. I taught English and writing at local colleges, adjunct-style, to do the same. Feeling I needed to grow up a bit, I got my teaching certificate and became an high school English teacher and baseball coach. I wanted to keep writing.

I submitted for publication when I could, but splitting my focus between writing and the business of life proved difficult. Rejections followed. Worse, the rejections felt less like literary rejections and more like holistic statements of personal failure. I started tracking a bitterness in me. I began to damn the successes of others. I read the magazines that rejected me. I couldn’t figure out why them and not me? Jealousy raged.

Busch published his book A Dangerous Profession: A Book About the Writing Life in 1998 and I read it and was inspired. I wrote to him again, this time an email. I read his short polite response with different eyes; eyes that made me feel like he did not believe in me as he did before.

V.

“My wife is in the habit of telling me her dreams when she wakes up. I take her some coffee and some juice and sit in a chair beside the bed while she wakes up and moves her hair away from her face.”

Those are the first two sentences of “Dreams” by Raymond Carver, published in Call Me if You Need Me: The Uncollected Fiction and Other Prose. As soon as I finished the story, I ripped it out of the book. It was –The Story.

In the secret dawn after silly-huggy-daddy, I collated The Story, attached cover letters with my email address, slid each into an envelope, and sealed each one. I carefully wrote the submission addresses of the magazines onto the labels and affixed them to the envelopes. I stacked the envelopes, fastened them with a large binder clip, and put them in my work bag. Outside, I slipped the leftover material evidence in a rusty green dumpster behind an apartment building near our house. I gagged at the smell of dirty diapers and rotten food. The next weekend found me dropping the envelopes in a mailbox hours away from my home, one after the other after the other.

VI.

Busch was a hulking bear of a man. His beard covered all the skin on his face and neck and his thick rimmed glasses hid his tiny eyes. He spoke in short clear sentences and did not ramble on in performance like so many professors. He chose words carefully and they hit with force. He was a Writer. Among his many accolades were the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fiction Award in 1986, and the PEN/Malamud Award in 1991. Busch was named the acting director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop during a break in John Legget’s long tenure in the 70s. Legget preceded Frank Conroy: writing royalty. Busch rubbed elbows with seemingly every writer of note in the US from the late 60s until his death in 2006.

I took three classes with Busch at Colgate, Living Writers, and two sections of Fiction Writing. His teaching style was gruff but thoughtful. He often silenced students with his comments, and there were sometimes tears and storming out. No easy let downs and no easy flowers either. You worked. Hard. He could tell when you hadn’t and didn’t hide his displeasure upon discovery.

I loved it. I was a gnat, constantly buzzing around. Never satisfied. I asked questions, I got out of my comfort zone and pushed everyone else out of theirs. I went to office hours and hung around after class just to be in his space. I loved him. He tolerated me. I thought he maybe even liked me because, though I felt talentless, I followed his edicts to the letter, and he rewarded his students that pushed hard with extra attention and care. I’d see the notes on my pages vs. the other students, they were conversations, not comments. The class would gossip about Busch’s level of commitment to neophyte students, but I never had a word to say.

VII.

I carried The Story with me everywhere. I retyped it in fits and spurts towards completion. I stole moments of time from the rest of my life to peck out a sentence or a paragraph. Every theft was a test of my commitment to the decidedly asinine plan that had solidified, without my intervention, in my head, and was carried out by my body.

When thoughts of what the fuck am I doing? would surface, as they often did, I’d go to the basement and open the large plastic bin where I’d crammed all my old drafts, journals, and rejection letters. I was powered by anger, and reading the rejection letters, the serial dismissals of my best efforts, stoked it. Other times, I would forgo pressing on the bruise of the rejections and instead I’d reread my own work. I believed in this work—I was proud of it, and perhaps the hardest part of failing to become a Writer was the cognitive dissonance of looking at pages I knew to be good, and then looking at pages of letters saying they were not good enough, or good in the right way.

VIII.

This was the syllabus for Living Writers:

For Tuesday, read book by writer.

On Tuesday, discuss book in class. And you better be ready.

By Thursday, read it again, and write 4 multi-leveled, researched, nuanced questions that you would like to ask the writer, if you had the chance.

On Thursday, writer shows up on campus, reads from book. Class asks questions. Conversation ensues. Get your book signed, maybe.

Repeat.

The year I took the course, Tim O’Brien, Tobias Wolff, Bharati Mukherjee, Lorrie Moore, Reynolds Price, Andres Dubus, and Ethan Canin were among the participating writers. Each week, I was drunk on the idea of interacting with these mythical characters. I wanted to be one of them.

IX.

When I dropped the envelopes through the slot, I felt relief. It was a sweet moment of freedom as I stepped out of the liminal space of wondering whether I’d do it, into the solid ground of having Done It. Since hatching the idea for my literary social experiment, I’d been stuck in a state of anticipation—would I do it? When? How would it feel? Now I knew.

I’m not afraid of a lot. I can trap mice, handle spiders, and ride roller coasters. I love thunder and lightning storms. I don’t mind crowds, noise, or silence. I’m okay with turbulence and even enjoy clowns. But as the envelopes skidded down the painted steel maw of the mailbox, my relief was replaced by fear. Because what I am afraid of are consequences. So I don’t have to face them, I work hard with the goal of ensuring that nothing I do fails. But here, with The Story, I had built an experiment that all but guaranteed consequences. The only thing left to find was what form they would take.

X.

My attempt to straddle a writing life with one foot in work and family and the other twisting further into creative envy wasn’t working, so my wife Elizabeth and I made the Plan. The Plan that worked. The Plan that gave us our lives as they are today. I would become a lawyer.

I quit teaching to attend law school in 2003 and became a practicing attorney in 2006. I stopped reading and writing creatively. It was over, and the smartest thing for me to do was close it all up. So I did, without fully facing the degree to which I was taking my bat and ball and stomping home. Writing didn’t want me in the starting lineup, and I had no interest in riding the bench.

XI.

What I will always remember about Busch and the writers that came to Hamilton, NY is that they weren’t superheroes. That’s how I fell in love. Actors, athletes, politicians, and musicians seem larger than life. But not these writers. These writers were casual. Brilliant. Regular. They did not possess the storied charisma of the film actor or the moody eccentricity of the studio artist. They embodied the traits that go along with success, but up close and personal they were just people. People with worn blue jeans, scrunchies, flannel shirts, and coffee mugs. People that ran late and wore sneakers and glasses that fogged. People who I idolized, though not one of them positioned themselves as an idol. I don’t remember a hint of arrogance. There was much more self-deprecation than self-indulgence. The Living Writers were thoughtful, kind, and particular in the modes and methods that led to their successes. And they were willing to share. The same was true with Busch, who was intimidating, but he answered to the art, not the other way around. That’s what I learned in that class, and that’s what I forgot when I mailed the envelopes. I’d become so jaded that even with my scratch and claw attitude, which had always served me well, I couldn’t see that in this case it was the wrong way to go.  

Once the envelopes were out there in the world, I wavered for the first few weeks. Should I write immediate follow ups, withdrawing the work? Say it was published elsewhere? Delete my new writer-email and forget it all? The situation was out of my control. Instead, I refused to allow myself to go into the what ifs. Now, helpless, if something happened then I’d deal with it. I had taken action that was un-take-back-able. Instead of feeling afraid of the consequences, as the weeks turned into months, I lapsed sideways by default into radical acceptance. My failed writer’s life was now complete.

XII.

After the envelopes, it would take me over ten years to get back to writing.

XIII.

In every other label–lawyer, father, husband–I was in a good place. The Plan worked. Elizabeth taught and tutored on the side. She was an indefatigable Mom, and she got us through. We were buried in debt from years of overspending on our teachers’ salaries. Credit cards, mortgage, student loans, car. Debts that for years constricted my heart and startled me from sleep. Finally, we were paying them. And fast.

We had a young family. Two healthy kids and a dog named Finn. We had made it. We were exhausted, but finally, it was good. We were there. I could breathe. I enjoyed being a lawyer more than I had expected. But I lamented the writing failure. I was angry at myself for not being a better writer. Angry at my parents for raising me to value possessions and status while wrapping me in the single-minded pursuit of security. Angry at myself for not recalibrating my values and finding a way to stick the artist’s life out. Angry for the time I spent thinking about writing, or about why I was not writing, and for even daring to think that I could’ve made it as a writer. Angry that I’d set my family behind and that I’d disappointed Elizabeth, who was the only person who believed in me as a writer and who single-handedly gave me a shot to make it work.

Even still, the writing would not die. Occasionally, I’d unearth my journal or dig carefully through the bin. I’d get that tingle for a day, or a week. Then–snap–back on the train downtown, rumbling along with the rest of the dry-as-dust workforce, with my task list, my hours sheet and my lawyer phone ding-ding-dinging.

XIV.

I felt entitled to the Carver caper because I was resentful and disappointed over my inability to “make it” as a writer. I wanted to be that author invited to bookstores and college campuses, the one who went on retreats in the woods or the desert and had an office piled with books and papers where no one knew where anything was but me. I wanted an MFA. I wanted a byline, then a published collection of stories with a matte-finish cover and my name on the spine. I craved permanence, I worked hard for it, and I had failed. I was angry. I did not stop to consider the real time—their own writing time, perhaps—magazine readers spent on my “submission.” I did not think of anything except my desire to be a Writer, or, if that wasn’t possible, at least to understand the system of publishing as flawed, maybe even rigged. My desire was bigger, more sincere, and ugly.

With The Story, the design was in the preliminary execution, which ended when I slid the envelopes into the chute. I’d let the anger stop me from considering the repercussions of my “plan,” but now, with the heat of my urgent indignation cooled to a simmer, I saw that I had initiated a process that had real consequences. What if an editor reached out to me and asked to publish The Story? What was my plan, then?

 

XV.

In the spring of 1991, I walked into a door that opened easily. That class, that one open spot. I spent years trying to walk further through that door, and to stay in that room. But I was blocked, largely by my lack of patience, and then, the door slammed in my face. In 2011, having achieved the security that licked at my consciousness at night, my purpose was to break that door down.

XVI.

After submitting the Carver, I received seven form rejections via email. These rejections proved my point, a loosely conceived thesis about in-grouping, access, and privilege in the literary community. Raymond Carver’s prose – rejected because my name was on the page.

Thank you for submitting. We are sorry to report that we have decided

against publishing your work, but we wish you luck placing it elsewhere.

Etc. Etc.

Time passed. Only occasionally did I check my “writer” email. When I did look, I found nothing but newsletters and junk. Until.

XVII.

After seeing the email subject line: Your Submission – Follow Up, it took me almost a week to open it. My radical acceptance, gone, was revealed to be something far less durable. I was wrought with anxiety. I had carried this plan out like a crime, and now it was set to conclude, one way or another. I could no longer ignore the incredibly obvious question (Why didn’t I channel the time and energy I spent on the Carver heist into actually writing?) that had been staring me down since the mailing. I had created a situation where even if I won, I lost, and in the space, a wildly uncomfortable truth: it was me. I was the one standing in my own way. I was the one writing stories in my head about the writer I could have been–if only, if only–and I was the one positioning myself in my mind as an oppressed outsider when really, I had done something far more shameful than failing to be good enough. I had stopped trying. The magnetic pull of deceit was hot, fast, and easy. The labor of the early-career writer is tepid, slow, and arduous. I could have gone back to my file of rejected drafts, taken something out, and worked on it with the same vigor I applied to putting together the envelopes. But I didn’t.

On my train ride home one day, I settled in my seat and opened the email.

Dear Seth,

Thank you for sending your story “Rich Man, Poor Man” for our consideration. We found the story well written, complex and the main characters filled with issues that plague many of us day to day. You should be proud of this work. Unfortunately, after careful consideration, we will not have space for it in our upcoming issue. We did not take this decision lightly. However, we are interested in seeing more of your work. We hope that you will consider sending us other work. We are sure you will find a home for “Rich Man, Poor Man” and we look forward to more from you in the future.

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