Writing for Living

The first time we talked, my dean asked if I was the same Josh Shenk from The Crimson. He had been offended, he told me, by an editorial I wrote criticizing resident tutors. He is a tutor himself, and works for Harvard summer school June to August. This was the summer just past--I was a summer school proctor and he was my boss.

I enjoyed talking about my writing. Sometimes it seems that the printing press flows only to a deep, black hole. Besides, we had a good discussion and arrived at the precise points to disagreement.

That conversation, though, set an uneasy tone for the summer. To my colleagues, journalism wasn't considered just another career interest. I was The Crimson and The Crimson was me. I sometimes sensed the feeling that editing a newspaper precluded my being human. When I took my camera to a picnic, the other proctors playfully resisted--asking, half-seriously, if the pictures would be printed. This was funny once. It wasn't funny the second time, nor the sixth.

What possess people, I wondered, to think in their wildest dreams that a thousand-some readers care in the slightest about their their leisure time, Still, it didn't seem right to be indignant. The comments has struck a raw nerve.

This summer I was working as a freelance winter and I contributed a piece to an edition of The Crimson sent home to the class of 1996. The section, called "My First Year," intends to breathe life into the skeleton images provoked by admissions guides and brief visits to campus. It's also a chance for senior editors play Wise Person, reflecting on our trails to the as of yet uninitiated.

I was pretty damned scared to write that piece. My first year was a tough one. The ghosts in my emotional closet got up and stalked en masse through my Grays West room. The prospect of coming to terms with the year in print I found ironic. My troubled identity as a writer was the most ominous ghost of them all. Writing (trying to write is more accurate) was a tremendous source of pain. But it was also the way I survived.

The paradox creeps through literary history like a specter: Edgar Allen Poe and Ernest Hemingway killed themselves. Jack Keroauc drank himself to death. My case is not so extreme, either in talent or depression. But the urge to write, and the emotions that fuel good writing, stem from a deep sensitivity to the world outside. A writer's conscience is like skin so sensitive that the air hurts. You've got to dance with the dark side, my brother always tells me.

By the time I came to college, my fragile ego was already enmeshed in my identity as a writer. But eventually, illusions of grandeur succumbed to enormous frustration. My friends' wiring overwhelmed me. I spend anguished hours staring at a computer screen. Expos assignments were tortuous. Even news stories at The Crimson took me hours.

My Expos teacher drove me to a breaking point. One project was so haunting that I considered withdrawing from the College. But he got pissed off when I told him I was going to quit. He taught me what he did himself: to blend personal experience, including the misery, with a narrative that transcended the personal. That's how I survived that year--by saying something beautiful about my pain.

I wrote that piece about first year as if that experience settled some things inside. Really, though, I was just coming to terms my identity as a writer this summer as I wrote. Stimuli about my writing life were coming from all directions. I had the leisure to research and write and to little else. I earned paychecks (a radical concept) this summer for writing freelance.

So my conclusions in the "my first year" piece shouldn't have been a surprise: that my philosophy of writing had become a broader philosophy of life. In the glow of the summer, I wrote that I would give a shot to a career as a man of letters.

When the paper rolled off the press, I was shocked by that "career" stuff. I have always resisted all quires as to my future plans. The piece made my decision for me. But that's how writing seems to go. Feelings are so complicated that they don't exist in any form I can understand. Then I write and the feelings become true. Period.

The jabs I took from my dean and other proctors over the summer underscored my apprehension about writing. I dreaded the image I seemed inextricably tied to--that of a reporter hunting for stories, collecting anecdotes like the homeless collect aluminum cans. But the label only hurt because I feared it was true.

Earlier this summer, Chuck told me he got a call from Bob Greene, a big-time syndicated columnist who he grew up with. Greene has written about Chuck before, even though they have barely kept up over the years. NO surprise that, a few weeks after the unexpected call, Chuck was the subject of Green's column: "I talked to a friend the other day..."

For writers, experience dwarfs imagination in importance. Even purveyors of fiction and screenplays mold real-life friends and family into characters. In the case of writers like kerouac, novels are memoirs with the names changed. I have romantic images of the "research" that drives fine writing--images of the writer ambling down a narrow city street with a well-worn notebook in his back pocket. But I've upset friends before by referring to them in print. Ironically, to be honest about my life in print requires a certain callousness about the people I am closest to.

Bob Greene is a classic case of a writer whose life is so absorbed with his material that he can no longer distinguish between the two. If he brought a camera to a picnic, even I would wonder.

As much as I care about striking the balance between life and art, I have more immediate anxieties about becoming a writer. I've always been driven by an urgent desire to press my feelings onto paper--to take them away from myself, understand them, and have others understand me. The paradox screamed through my consciousness when I re-read what I wrote about my first year. Sensitive, reflective writing--stuff that's real and human and not manufactured like a last-minute Crimson feature page--doesn't come from taking notes and making phone calls. It comes from within--less inspiration, more desperation.

But if I make writing a career, I'm making a contract with that pain. I will flee from it, but I also need to cultivate it, understand it, stay closely tuned to my feelings. I've always thought the happiest people are those who shut off what doesn't feel good. They build defense mechanisms--arrogance, dependence, whatever--to make themselves whole.

I don't think that's an option for me, though. I suffocate inside myself. My problem is not keeping people out; it's letting people in.

My dean this summer thought I was a reporter. He was wrong, though. Good reporters challenge stubborn bureaucracies. They weave through lies, exaggerations and insults to find the truth. Good reporters are arrogant, but they're also selfless in a way. I'm an editor of The Crimson and I spend 90 percent of my time there working with these reporters. But in the end, I'm too busy navigating through my own emotions to commit fully to the world of news.

The answer, it seems, would be just to stop the whole business. Shut my eyes and slump away from the writing thing--find another pasttime that's more gentle on the soul. But I am, like Tim O'Brien writes, "too frightened to be a coward."

I realized this summer that I can't shut my eyes to my writing. Fantasies about latching into the easy spirit of the American dream are slowly losing their lace in my imagination. I've tried therapy but, with Norman Mailer, "I wonder if their ends are essentially different, the artist a rebel concerned with Becoming, the analyst a regulator concerned with Being."

Writing and journalism, however flawed, are all I've got.

I hope my friends understand.