Garrett Saleen is a writer and visual artist from Southern California. His work has appeared in Citric Acid, Santa Monica Review, PRISM International, The Collagist, Funicular, and elsewhere. He has recently completed his first collection of short fiction. He lives in Seattle and can be found @jan_homm on Instagram.
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Meredith: How do you keep the faith—or whatever you call it personally—when acceptance doesn’t seem to be coming? And by acceptance, I mean self-acceptance.
Garrett: Total self-acceptance seems impossible to me. Maybe something along the road to self acceptance, like a degree of self-awareness, is possible, even required, for the writer. Literary writing seems to be a midlife art form, with most of its practitioners hitting their peaks in their forties and fifties, and maybe that has to do with developing the sense of self and patience required to really listen to your subconscious and interpret it through whatever characteristics make you unique as an artist. Maybe it’s something to do with stillness. I know that as a really young writer I was paralyzed by not knowing “what kind of writer” I should be, as if it’s a choice. I think this process was more a reflection of being young when we are often doing that with every part of our lives––trying on different masks and identities, collecting pieces and collaging ourselves. I tried on all different sorts of literary disguises, attaching myself to different writers or books in search of something to just tell me “what to do and how to do it.” I never found it. And one day I realized that who I was as a writer was going to be an extension of who I was everywhere else, that the writer’s voice wasn’t some transformative costume I threw on that somehow wholly separated me from the best and worst aspects of myself, but instead had to in fact come from those aspects entirely. For better or worse. So, slowly, after exhausting all other options, I became myself.
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Meredith: Homeostasis is a concept I learned on my first day of graduate school. It means the desire to revert back to the familiar, for things to remain the same. As a writer, how do you remedy this type of stagnation which can thwart creativity? Or, do you believe there’s a time for it?
Garrett: Some of my favorite writers churned out versions of the same slop over and over again. Bolaño, Bernhard, Sebald, Beckett. God-tier writers, all of them had like four interests they pureed in a blender in different measurements for each piece of work. So, yes, I think homeostasis of a kind has its place and can even save your life. In my late twenties, I wrote the first story where I thought, “Ok, now I’m getting somewhere, this is my voice, this sounds like I wrote it.” It must have scared the shit out of me because I spent the next few years in total paralysis trying to convince myself that I could inhabit other voices, and didn’t have to just settle on one, but in fact it was all theoretical and I wrote very little. My personal life had unraveled a bit, the whole decade had been a kind of long unraveling, and to make matters worse I had an insanely lenient work-from-home job at the time and spent most of that period playing ping pong, watching movies, and wandering around the city at all hours. I found my way back by retreating to the familiar, the firm ground it provides, by writing a very similar story in tone and structure to the one I had tried to run away from, and suddenly, everything sort of clicked and I became very productive, producing a large batch of stories quite quickly, at least for me, and managing to push into new artistic territory. The tides change, so don’t reject the periods of homeostasis necessarily, just work through them to get back out to the place just past where your feet can no longer touch the bottom.
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Meredith: Are you ever frightened of your own ideas, or what’s inside you? Or maybe the question should be, are you scared of putting them down on the page?
Garrett: Whatever weird things I come up with, the stakes are pretty low in that most of the people I encounter who have read my published work are those who already know me personally and are well aware that I’m a little bit off. In some ways it’s the best time ever to be a writer because the truth is no one has time to care very much and that can be massively liberating if you accept it on its own terms, and those who do care a little more are very cross-pollinated with genre and medium, so you really can go pretty far out and readers will follow you, either because they possess the openness of not knowing any better or because they’re pretty scrambled and hard to shock at this point. I say that affectionately. Scared of putting ideas on the page is an interesting one. In some ways, I think some respectful fear is healthy here. These ideas get spat up from the black pit of your subconscious: they’re images, they’re evocations of feelings, they’re unnamable and, in being so, convince the writer of their perfection in that they carry with them the knowledge that they can never be fully expressed because the writer only has language to express it with, and your language can only be a semblance of what the idea first evoked in you, and will never feel as good as when it was just sitting there in your head daring you to realize it. In other words: these ideas of yours, you’re going to ruin them, but the question is how much? That’s humbling and maybe even frightening and all you’ve done is sit there by yourself. But over time you realize the ways in which we try to work through, outrun, or submit to these feelings and limitations are what make art interesting. We are all of us united in our unknowing and insufficiency.
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Meredith: Have you ever had to betray your original idea for a piece of writing in order to create the work it becomes? How about your view of yourself as a writer—Have you ever betrayed an image, dream, or hope?
Garrett: All art is a constant series of negotiations, compromises, and strategic retreats between your conscious and subconscious. Sometimes the original idea doesn’t make it very far on the page. The story of Gustavus Adolphus and the warship Vasa comes to mind––even ideas that seem perfect or indestructible might just sink the second they’re out of you. Betrayal of ideas is baked into the artistic process, which sometimes depends on it for its very existence. For myself, not a story gets finished without me first having a moment, usually very late in the game, of totalizing doubt, where I suddenly realize: This is all crap, this was never going to work, I’ve hit a dead end that I can’t escape from, and I just need to give it up. This is a betrayal of the idea, something I’ve worked through and explored for months and suddenly I’m ready to pitch it overboard. But it almost certainly has to happen if I’m going to finish the story. I have to have the Moment of Doubt, where I convince myself I could just walk away if I want to and probably should, and I always believe in its power and its truth––that the story is dead in the water, that I’ve failed. Of course, I know that this has happened with other stories, but every time in the moment I think: This time it’s different, this time I really am screwed. Soon after, usually like, within hours, I’ll get the last string of ideas one after the other, boom, boom, boom, and the end of the road is revealed to me, the way out. The story is resurrected. Hannah, my partner, once told me that she feels a strange sense of relief when I have these crises: “Oh good, this means he’s finally almost done.”
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Meredith: Some people refer to their creations as their children. Some view them as entities entirely separate from themselves. Sometimes it feels to me like our creations are more as an extension of our own biology. In other words, our words are who we are, just expressed in an alternate form (kind of like how water freezes to ice and then melts and flows again). How do you view your creations and how did you come to seeing them this way?
Garrett: Each piece of work itself becomes a kind of snapshot of a certain time of my life. I can tell you exactly what was happening in my life during its construction, but what has always been strange to me is that I have almost no memory of writing any story, ever. I can summon flashes here and there maybe, but nothing else. Why does something that I claim is so important, that fulfills me unlike anything else, and that I spent hours and hours doing for months while maintaining a high degree of intensity leave almost no impression? So instead the finished story stands in for the whole peripheral experience while also being a sort of miniature black hole that has consumed the physical experience somewhat literally, as well as its memory. So like a blind spot filled in by the surrounding nerves, so too the other features of my life outside of writing, if such a feature exists, fill the memory void left by the work’s construction and therefore come to represent, to me, the work itself.
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[Thank you, Garrett.]
Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash