Happy Accidents for Hire
On the ickiness of intentional inspiration
My head is full of random thoughts these days.
For instance, do you need inspiration? Do you seek it out? Of course you do, we all do, but when I say inspiration in this context I mean words or images or sounds that are meant to be inspiring. Intentional inspiration: the love child of self help and creative instruction.
Those two words together—intentional + inspiration—make me feel kind of gross in a way I suspect is attributable to a combination of Catholic damage and Gen X cynicism. Though shalt not worship pagan idols, and all that. In other words, I’m against it. I feel like the sky or a scrap of poetry should be enough to produce the happy accident of inspiration.
Intentional Inspiration™ is like paying for sex. You can do it, but it’s just not going to be the same. It’s always going to be a transaction.
On Friday I was packing my things for a quick trip to LA and I couldn’t find my notebook. Of course, this happened two days after broadcasting to the world that I don’t go anywhere without one, and here I was going somewhere without my notebook. So I brought a new one along and rather than pick up where I left off, or thought I left off, I started a brand new story in the Philz Coffee in Mission Viejo while we were charging the car at the charging station.
I hadn’t planned on writing a new story but early last week a short story was accepted by a magazine. Unfortunately, this story had already been accepted (and published) elsewhere and I forgot to withdraw it. I felt terrible about this because it’s such a rude thing to do and also because short story acceptances are so rare and I felt as though I’d poisoned the well for no good reason at all. (If you’re going to burn bridges, which I’m all for, choose a worthy target and have a blast.) I apologized to the magazine and they were so nice about the SNAFU that I was even more embarrassed. So I decided to write a story just for them. Now here was the notebook and along came the story like a package in the mail.
I want to tell you about this story, but my instinct is to hold onto it until it’s finished. It’s the story of a creature, a misunderstood creature, a monster that doesn’t mean any harm but causes great harm nonetheless. The creature came to me while I was in Chile and I incorporated a film about the creature—a monster movie—into the plot of the novel I’m working on, but it wasn’t until the blank page presented itself that I realized I needed to write its story.
That’s the kind of low-brow, Dollar Store, unintentional inspiration I’m always on the hunt for. Maybe that makes me the monster…
On Friday I drove up to LA to participate in a panel celebrating the release of Razorcake #137. The event was held at The Pop-Hop Co-Op after it was bounced from North Fig Bookshop for some reason. The panel consisted of me, Melissa Cody, Kiyoshi Nakazawa, and Todd Taylor. I’d interviewed Melissa about how punk rock has shaped her practice as a fourth-generation Navajo weaver and she graciously appeared on the panel and blew all our minds. I mean just look at this.
Kiyoshi is an old friend, another artist whose work has inspired me immensely over the years. He created the Drunken Master Zine and the comic Won Ton Not Now for Razorcake. He’s also done some bad-ass book covers and album arts, but this is still one of my favorites, and I’m not saying that because he gifted me a poster of the image.
is another old friend who attended the event and we talked about our Substacks, which we thought was ridiculous, so I’m completing the circle by writing about it now. (And, yes, you should subscribe to his Substack.)A few of Nuvia’s friends also attended the panel, including one of her former students, who is now somehow 26, and we all went to a bar down the street afterwards. I’d been to this bar on a couple of other occasions, usually after a Vermin on the Mount event, and the vibe there keeps getting stranger and stranger.
On Friday night it was a weird mix of women dressed for a wedding party and dudes in Lakers gear and flannel shirts with a DJ playing dance songs from 25 to 30 years ago. The kind of night you can score an eight ball and a venereal disease without trying hard. I was very happy to sip my Guinness 0 with Nuvia by my side and ignore the desperation all around me.
My favorite moment of the night came when Nuvia’s former student started asking Melissa all kinds of questions about her art practice, questions that would have been a bit too bold for the Q&A or too personal for the bright lights of the bookstore. But in a Highland Park bar with Tupac on the sound system, they were perfect.
This line of questioning emboldened me as well and I asked Melissa if she thought there was another artist alive who was doing what she was doing. “No,” she said, without hesitation, and explained how her experience and determination have brought her to the pinnacle of her practice, a place where she is all alone.
I found this hugely inspiring. Now, I don’t think I will ever be at the pinnacle of anything. That kind of misses the point of what I’m trying to express here. One can be inspired by someone who is more talented or more successful or works in an altogether different medium. Melissa is a genius. She’s transformed an under-appreciated art and elevated it to the global stage. I will never be able to grasp how she does what she does, much less replicate it. Not in a million years. I can, however, relate to her passion, her determination, her confidence.
I especially loved the way she spoke about how personal her work is, because each piece tells the story of who she was and what she was going through when she created it.
When I look at my work, especially my fiction, I see stories in which my own experience is woven into the story. Whether it’s Pemberton circling the drain or Melanie struggling with his sobriety, I see aspects of my own experience as a flawed human being. As I find myself in the middle of another strange and deeply personal book, I find comfort in knowing that this isn’t new for me: I’ve always pursued stories that only I could tell.
I’m grateful to Todd and Daryl for putting the event together and to everyone who came out on a chilly Friday night in LA. Don’t sleep on this issue because Razorcake #138 is about to hit the stands. This one has Michael T. Fournier’s interview with Al Barile of SSD and my story about how San Diego’s The Tower Bar has become a lightning rod for vehicular mayhem.
Also, thank you to The Pop-Hop Co-Op, which is a great little indie space in Highland Park full of unusual books, arresting art, and zines, zines, zines. I picked up a beautiful new illustrated chapbook by Ingrid M. Calderon-Collins called Sleepwalk and a bilingual edition of Colombian poet Vanessa Torres’s Miniaturas/Miniatures. Plus, Daryl gave me a copy of his new zine The Hermit Thrush.
Thanks for reading and see you next week when hopefully I’ll have some book reviews for you.