You Don't Need To Publish (Or Even Write) Everything.

Art Monster: Lesson One

Photo by Art Institute of Chicago on Unsplash

I was delighted to see the enthusiastic response to my post last week introducing the Art Monster project, a still-amorphous initiative designed to help writers figure out how (or whether) to put their most dangerous or taboo thoughts out into the world. Since this is all about honesty, I can tell you that I have no real idea what shape this project will take or what it will entail. In large part, it’s an effort to force myself to write more. Given that I'm juggling two podcasts, intermittent teaching, and the ever-evolving behemoth that is The Unspeakeasy, it’s easy to let writing fall by the wayside. (Especially if you’re like me and, as soon as you type a cliché like “fall by the wayside,” you interrupt your flow and spend 20 minutes trying to think of another way to say it. Unsuccessfully.) 

I was also trying to channel my chronic self-reproach into something positive or at least productive. In writing about the guilt I carry around for publishing my essay “Matricide,” I hoped to open up a conversation about what you, the reader, might be carrying around as a result of something you wrote or, moreover, are afraid to write.

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Because Substack is a plushly upholstered safe space where “content creators” can reliably count on praise and bias confirmation from their built-in audience, I wasn’t too worried about the response. I expected a few of you to agree with me about being terrible — and you delivered! But I also knew that those of you who were familiar with “Matricide” would mostly register support and say you appreciated the essay on its own terms and were glad I published it. Needless to say, I was grateful for that. But even though I winced at the comments telling me that publishing the essay was a crappy thing to do, I was grateful for that feedback as well. That’s because both things are true. The essay was worthy of appreciation. It was also crappy of me (arguably worse than crappy)  to publish it.