Joseph Fasano@Joseph_Fasano_
When I received an email from a young person saying she "wants to be a writer" but wonders "if it's worth it in the world today," I thought for a long time and wrote her this message:
Dear Abigail,
You ask me, in your lovely note, if I have any advice for writers, especially young writers. I don't know what advice I can give you, because every day one tries to write is a chance to be more deeply humbled before the mystery, by the things one cannot do. Maybe that's how it's supposed to be; if we're not trying something impossible, are we really living at all?
But I love you for wanting to be an artist in this world, so I will tell you this:
I only know the life of a writer is a life of wild passion and quiet devotion; it's every day searching for truth, challenging that truth, starting over again; it's finally learning how to write in one way and then knowing you have to abandon it precisely because you know how to do it; it's moving into the unknown, always, taking risks that look from the outside like nothing but that inside the secret heart are matters of life and death, life and death.
That's what it is, I think. It's listening to the dead speak, knowing when to hear them, when not to; it's hearing your neighbors' voices and knowing they have worlds in them, worlds; it's listening and listening and listening; it's finding a great question that can carry you all your life, because you have to ask it with your life, Abigail, you have to.
It's making mistake after mistake after mistake, and it's being willing to say what you have to say even when no one is listening, absolutely no one, because if you say it clearly and humbly and truly enough, even if it takes you all your life, they will.
The world is not over, only broken—that is a writer's hope. Because writing is witnessing, whether what's witnessed is a blossom or a great crime; writing is turning powerlessness into power; it's tenderness and empathy and the ache of them; it's the radical compassion of becoming everyone you pass on the street, everyone who lives and suffers and dies; it's losing your mind at times because you've forgotten who you are, and it's finding your soul because you remember...
...and it's passion, Abigail; it's not apologizing for your passion, because to live without passion is to make the body a cathedral without music; and it's loving; above all it's loving the broken world so hard it hurts, it just hurts, and trying, always trying—to love, to speak, to open, to rid yourself enough of your old ghosts that at least the voice of their going may be your own.
The life of a writer is a life of learning to listen more deeply—to the self, to the other, to the world. And that is precisely what we need in our world today: more listeners. As I once wrote to a student who was feeling the powerlessness of her words, "Let your words be the witnessing, the listening. Poetry can hear the world for what it is, and for what it could be. Wars are made by those who hear no birds."
I believe in you, Abigail, because you've started. And that's the hardest thing of all.
I wish you joy and luck and the right kinds of struggles on the way. Hope, but don't turn from the shadows. Suffer, but don't love suffering. And love the work, the miraculous task. Because to fail at this is better than to succeed at most things this world pretends to love.
And because in a world of destroyers we need every creator we can get.
With love,
Joseph Fasano
