My audience of one, or, "Brains can't save her now!"

     It's quite true that being smart, or generous or funny or happy, or pretty or wealthy, or devout or even centered and mature, holds no sway over cancer. Yes, studies show (apparently) that educated people with health insurance have better prognoses than underprivileged people; it sucks five ways from Sunday to be on the wrong side of middle class in this country. But I'm talking about the individual, cellular level here. Cancer doesn't care how well I did on my SATs.

     Which brings me around to that "audience of one" I've been thinking about for a week, since an anonymous commenter posted the provocative idea in response to my extended whine on writing. The connection whacked me in the head by way of a quiet email late last night, barely three days after I'd sent a small batch of poems to the Virginia Quarterly Review: rejection, of course, and not even the typical "though your work shows obvious merit" line they usually give me when they decline my fictions after stewing on them for over a hundred days; I heard the unmistakable sound of the door slam and the lock click on this one. My head spun.

     I like smart; I strive for smart. I want to be in that club so damn bad. Among the literary publications and magazines I submit to, I consider several to be whip-smart: VQR, Paris Review, The Atlantic, Harper's, Boston Review. Certainly there are others I'd love to get into -- Missouri Review, AGNI, Tin House, Ploughshares, actually there are lots of them -- but I am drawn to the first set due to what I perceive as their intellectual prowess. They are on the pulse, taking on the giant issues of the day, publishing thoughtful essays and critiques alongside accomplished fiction and poetry. Politics is more than a fictive theme in these publications; it's a driving force. They have that big-picture perspective that tags them as brainiacs, the ability not only to see societal patterns in individual acts, but to embrace existing in this most unforgiving space, willfully (rather than haphazardly) presenting a cumulative commentary on the world as it turns in the moment. They live outside their own precious heads.

     I suppose it would surprise no one to learn that my parents put a premium on smarts. Or that they were not just politically involved, but prescient, moving their young family from their hometown of Montgomery to Washington, DC in 1965, eschewing the mindset they'd grown up with and making a difficult, determined reach for change, for the future, years before it was even remotely acceptable. They had vision. The acted on it.

     I often wonder, if I'd been born in the Depression-era Deep South and come of age under Jim Crow, if I'd have had the vision and the will my parents demonstrated. I do not believe I would.

     My mother worked on Capitol Hill for Sen. Mike Mansfield's Democratic Policy Committee, got a law degree, and worked at Treasury. A young up-and-coming Washingtonian, everyone said, smart as a whip and ready to do great things. Her trajectory was abruptly reversed by illness; in 1983, she died of cancer. She was 48.

     My father ran an association on alcohol and drug policy, and became an international expert on the failure of prohibition, and an advocate for the disease theory of addiction. He was endlessly gracious and had impeccable manners, but privately, he made it understood that he did not suffer fools gladly. By the end of his life (he died in 2004), he refused to suffer them at all -- it seemed he had little tolerance for most people. I understand that to be a classic pattern of aging, where one becomes more oneself as the years go by.

     Anyway, hard acts to follow. 

     I've spent my life trying to live up to the level of smartitude so clearly valued in my family, and feeling out of my league. Trying to compensate, I stacked up achievements instead, as a kind of proof that I was worthy, that there were brains between those ears, even if, during family trips or holidays, I was the clown. I went to an academically middling but artistically competitive university and won every acting award they gave out. Afterwards, I wormed my way in the back door of a TV newsroom and got hired as a reporter, and scarcely three months later, was promoted to anchor and producer. (I was 22 years old.) Lookit, see me, interviewing the people who make the world go round? Telling other people what's news? I would repeat this pattern twice more, in advertising (copywriter to associate creative director within a year), and in the cradle of intellectualism itself, the University (adjunct to fulltime instructor, even lacking an advanced degree, in one year). 

     All the while, writing. And now, I'm doing what my own mother did, though in a manner decidedly less intellectually robust than law school/Capitol Hill/family: I'm back in school, for an MFA.

     It's pretty clear to me that I'm trying to get my father's ear. There's no way he'd be interested in this novel, but the act of completing a novel itself would impress him. My mother loved fiction and poetry, but I didn't get a chance to know her as a grownup, and so any speculation about what kind of novel she might admire feels fruitless. 

     The motivation behind my achievements thus far has been to prove that I'm smart. I choose smart friends, I married a smart man. I genuinely like smart. Maybe I can write a smart book. The lessons my parents instilled in me help make living artful and worthwhile, but they do not help with simple survival. Where can I go to learn how to fuck with cancer's plan?

     I've heard or read more than one writer say, in effect, that they write in order to save their lives -- in order to live. I like that, but I don't think it works that way. Cancer won't care when VQR comes calling. On the other hand, this weekend I recklessly submitted some stories (and a batch of poems) to a bunch of journals, many which are notoriously slow in responding. Six months is a lifetime; who knows if I'll be in any shape to accept an offer of publication? A small act of hope.

     Meantime, I'm still trying to envision my audience of one.