Why do you write?
Last summer, I coached a high school student through the application process for the Iowa Young Writers’ Studio, the most prestigious high school summer writing program run by the country’s most prestigious MFA program. In guiding the student through several drafts of her personal statement, I posed a series of questions to her that helped her identify the nature of her pull towards writing. Drawing on the novels of Barbara Kingsolver, her answer ran something like this: “I write to explore the places I call home.”
Impressed by her introspection, I had no doubt that she would be admitted to the program. Surely enough, she soon wrote to inform me of her acceptance.
If you’re an educator, you have no doubt experienced the same elation I felt the moment I learned of my student’s victory. There is something ineffable about passing your own life experiences on to another person who will soon follow in your footsteps. I had been able to help her precisely because I, too, had viscerally experienced what it meant to consider “Why do you write?”
I’ve been mulling over this very question for perhaps the past two decades of my life, but unlike my student, I have failed to come up with a straightforward answer. Why did I write? Certainly, it was not to achieve fame or fortune—if I wanted either of those, surely I could have found a more efficient way to attain them. Did I write because I wanted to bring my ideas into the world? That seemed closer to the truth, but what ideas—and what precisely set those ideas into motion?
The simplest and, perhaps, most cliché answer for many writers including myself is because I have to. A writer writes not of his or her own volition but to parley with the demons, so to speak. As Faulkner tells us, “’An artist is a creature driven by demons. He doesn’t know why they choose him and he’s usually too busy to wonder why.” Undoubtedly, I had lots of demons—existential questions circling my mind like idle teens in a skate park—and while they never failed to fuel my writing, there was, presumably, a larger end goal for my toils. Perhaps I did wish to wrestle with my demons, but that reason itself, though addressing the potential source of my musings, did not account for their purpose.
Did I write simply to talk about myself? Such is also the case for most artists—we tend to be more vain or narcissistic than your average human being, whether we like to admit it or not—just take a look at Richard Wagner or Lord Byron. But if Byron and Wagner created art simply to talk about how great they were, then we would have gotten bored of their ideas long ago. Yes, both Byron and Wagner might have been somewhat egomaniacal, but their art transcended their own selves by presenting larger, more universal claims about the world around us—and by bringing Beauty into our world. Art, after all, must mean something beyond one’s own personal experience, though personal experience is often the vehicle through which an artist attains those universal truths. Certainly, I wrote to bring Beauty into our world, and, certainly, I wrote to touch lives that reach far beyond myself. For the artist, there is no better feeling in the world than to read a message from someone halfway across the world that contains the words, “Your writing moved me.”
I wrote, then, to touch individual souls by crafting universal messages from particular experiences. But what were these messages? Every writer in human history has always had a set of topics—obsessions, if you will—that he cannot help but continually revisit.
What were mine?
I can immediately summon a clear-cut answer for my non-fiction essays: I write about literature, art, culture, publishing, the ills of the modern academy, education, Judaism, and politics. If you’ve been reading Pens and Poison for a while, you’ve probably read at least an essay or two from each of these categories. But though my essays borrow elements from “creative writing,” as we like to call it, they do not comprise the spine of my artistic sensibility in the same way that my novels and poems do. When I think of myself as a writer, I first consider myself to be a poet and a novelist before I label myself as an essayist. And though many of the aforementioned themes appear in my novels and my poems, my creative writing is a different beast entirely.
My creative writing is more intimately linked to my soul.
As some of you may know, I currently have drafts of two novels—The Lilac Room and The Leverkühn Quartet—sitting unpublished on my computer. I’ve been on an extended hiatus from querying literary agents this past year after running into some frustrations, let’s call them, with literary agent wishlists, but several weeks ago, I decided to bite the bullet and head back into the querying “trenches,” as they are aptly termed. I’ve been looking for an assistant to help me research best-fit agents,1 and throughout the interview process, I’ve had candidates read either one of my two novels and send me their thoughts.
One young woman, choosing to read The Leverkühn Quartet, had this to say:
Elise’s reflection on the beauty she wanted to preserve on page 101 made me weep.
Made her weep! There it was! A variation on the comment, “Your writing moved me.”
Frantically, I flipped open the novel to ascertain what sort of sorcery I had come up with on that particular page to figure out what precisely had moved her.
Scanning the paragraph in question, I realized that I unwittingly had known the answer to “Why do you write?” all along—I had given my own thoughts to my protagonist Elise Goldberg, a young violinist who shares my Russian-Jewish cultural background. Throughout the novel, Elise develops an aptitude for composing and starts to write tone poems that capture the uniquely Soviet Jewish moments of her childhood to preserve the Beauty of her cultural memories.
On page 101, Elise comes out with the following observation:
It was a strange phenomenon—Soviet Jewry. It was a phenomenon uniquely positioned for extinction. And I—a lover of tradition and the preservation of all things beautiful—felt that it was my duty to preserve a cultural tradition that—for good reason, of course—had been obliterated. But I was not here to promote authoritarian regimes—I wanted simply to preserve that Beauty of the snow girl dress, those cut-up apples, and the secularized Christmas tree. I wanted to preserve my happy childhood and to give it to my kids.
Inadvertently, the young woman I had interviewed, pointing out the thoughts of my own fictional creation, had guided me towards the answer to the very question that had been plaguing me for decades. Each of the memories that Elise puts to music, after all, was inspired by memories from my own life. In many ways, Elise was the musical counterpart to the wordsmith in me—and she knew precisely why she made art: she wanted to preserve the memories of a unique cultural tradition.
The examples that Elise draws—the snow girl dress, those cut-up apples, and the secularized Christmas tree—are all related to Noviy God, a unique Soviet holiday that secularized Christmas by moving it to New Year’s. In anticipation of the new year, we put up Christmas trees2 and dress up our girls as “snow girls” (hence the snow girl dress in Elise’s description). Similarly, Elise remembers eating diced-up apples3 on Noviy God and connects them with renewal and rebirth. Apples, of course, are the typical stand-ins for the “forbidden fruit” in Genesis, where they symbolize loss of innocence. Apples are also traditionally eaten with honey on Rosh Hashanah in the Jewish tradition to symbolize the coming of a prosperous new year. In both cases, apples symbolize growth and regeneration—movement towards adulthood and movement into a new year. When Elise remembers the apples she would eat as a kid, she knows that she will have to lose a piece of herself by growing up, but she nevertheless chooses to preserve the last vestiges of her Soviet childhood through art.
To me, then, art is about preservation—preservation of memories and culture through the unique act of storytelling. And, indeed, I am not alone in harboring an interest in telling stories for this very reason—storytelling has been about cultural preservation since the Ancient Mesopotamians came up with Gilgamesh and since Homer recorded the voyages of Odysseus in the eponymous epic. Russian culture has been preserved through Anna Karenina and Crime and Punishment, for instance, but in my unique case, Soviet Jewish culture in particular is fully obsolete. By the time my future kids grow up, they will be unlikely to think of themselves as post-Soviet Jews in the same way that I characterize my identity. Nevertheless, I hope that they will at least recognize that they come from a unique line of tradition—and I hope that they, too, will choose to preserve our unique culture by either passing it onto their own children or by, perhaps, making art from our distinctly Soviet Jewish memories.
To me, then, writing is the act of preserving tradition to prevent it from falling into extinction. I write to touch individual souls and bring Beauty into our world, but I also write because I love telling stories. And for me, storytelling has always been intertwined with cultural preservation.
So when I return to the question “Why do you write?” I think again of my student who declared that she wanted to explore the places she called “home.” I admired her clarity back then, but only now do I see that I’ve been grappling with a variation on that very idea myself.
I write to preserve the places I call home, but for me, these are not physical spaces but rather memories that compose the essence of a broader cultural tradition. My own culture may be shared by just several thousand people, but all of us wish to preserve a piece of our own little worlds in some way or another because the truth is that one day we won’t be here—but the art that we create will outlive us all.
When that young woman told me that she had wept at Elise’s reflection on Beauty, I realized that she was not necessarily crying over Elise’s particulars but over the more universal version of what Elise represents: preservation of Beauty through art.
I write because I cannot bear to let my world go—not necessarily to immortalize myself but to ensure that the pieces that make up my universe—those snow girl dresses, those diced-up apples, and those New Year trees—do not fade into oblivion.
So whether through Elise’s violin or my own pen, I will execute my task upon this earth with dignity: to preserve the unique facets of my world that time wishes to erase.
Because I refuse to let it.
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Primarily because if I have to read, “We are looking for stories from LGBTQIA+ BIPOC voices” one more time, there is a non-zero chance that I will leap headfirst from my balcony into the abyss.
There are Russian Jews in Israel today who, to the chagrin of their Jewish neighbors, still put up Christmas trees every December.
The cut-up apples are also uniquely Soviet. There are many little quirks that mark a post-Soviet home—an unlimited stock of empty mason jars, a pile of used plastic bags (usually stored under the sink), and an array of slippers strewn throughout every room—but there are also many smaller details that many post-Soviet kids have in common. The apples are one such example.
The cut-up apples scene, where Elise remembers eating diced-up apples on Noviy God, was inspired by an otherwise insignificant day in my life several years ago. I was sitting in an airport garage waiting for an Uber with an old friend. We hadn’t talked in years and happened to meet up at the airport, so things were a little awkward, and the Uber was about 10 minutes away, so we had propped up our suitcases as chairs and were waiting silently for the car to come when all of a sudden my friend—who also happened to be from a post-Soviet Jewish background—brought out a Ziploc bag full of diced-up apples that his mom had sent along with him on his journey. That gesture immediately broke the ice between us, bringing up my own memories of my mom and grandmother sending me off to school with Ziploc bags of diced up apples. I don’t know when all Russian moms collectively decided that they were going to cut up apples and put them in Ziploc bags for their kids, but this quirk made me think of home, and I gave it to Elise.
Very impressive love to see young people like you writing so beautifully
I write to give future life to a past or present experience. That was my thought easing into your essay. By the end, you validated that beautifully as being at the core of most if not all writing that is meaningful, in whatever genre, at whatever level.