The situation of an independent writer

At the bus stop my childhood exploded, leaving fragments all over the rest of my life; I'd seen something I shouldn't have seen and would spend the remaining days of my time on earth asking my parents what had just happened.

I was a member of the first generation to be brought up under the auspices of television. The experience wasn't all that terrible--there was Bozo the Clown, Engineer Bill, and Sky King who had a pretty daughter named Penny. Mr. Rogers explained nuclear frisson to me. I graduated high school and went straight into poetry.

As a poet I carved out a career made of beginnings, learning to write by always starting over, re-writing the same poem that either began or ended with the words, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. To support my poetry habit I took a job in an advertising agency; there I learned that cliches are what make us feel good about ourselves, and that original language is an enemy of the state.

Years passed. I wrote a number of books under my original name of Brooks Roddan and the pseudonym of my sidekick, Thomas Fuller. As Brooks Roddan I was finally awarded a prize for one of my works, "Line Caught", which the judges said "teaches people how to think."  Is "Line Caught" poetry or prose? a reporter for the local paper wanted to know. "Only the reader knows" I replied. As Thomas Fuller, I wrote the novel "Monsieur Ambivalence" and was one of three finalists for "Indie Award", 2014. One reviewer of the novel called it, "poetic."

My younger son asked the other day, "are you writing anything new, Pa?"

"Yes, but under an assumed name," I answered.

"Poetry?" he asked.

I told my son I couldn't write poetry anymore no matter what name I wrote in, that poetry was the art of compression and that I'd forsaken compression for elongation. I now wanted my writing to last as long as it could last and was presently writing a book about a man who tries to write a novel on a typewriter. He said that maybe he'd read this one, if I ever finished writing it that is.

Later that same night, watching an Alfred Hitchcock film festival on TCM, toward the end of "Rear Window", I had a Joycean epiphany: Ah, I now see the mistake I've made! That all this time I've taken literature seriously!