The Uses of Obscurity

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The Uses of Adversity Obscurity

Dear pals,

Well, it’s the first week in June, which means my email inbox and Instagram DMs are full of other people’s anxiety. My own anxiety is low these days—it’s summer and I’ve been walking in the woods and heading out on my kayak and helping friends with household chores and sleeping in until like seven a.m. I spent some time up in Madison and in Mineral Point, two towns in Wisconsin full of people that I love. It’s been a glorious first few weeks of summer.

Mineral Point’s High Street as seen from my desk in front of the window in the late, great artist Bruce Howdle’s old place on Commerce Street.

But the start of summer always seems to bring anxiety to my former students. The most common message I get are from students that have just graduated two or three weeks ago; they are sending me emails wondering about the next steps in an uncertain arts career. I mean, I’ve already talked with them about all of this, just a few weeks earlier, as have my colleagues and a fair amount of distinguished guest speakers, but there is something strange about actually being out in the world without the identity of student.

I remember being out in the world those first few months after college. I couldn’t find a steady job, so I was writing local news articles for The Capital Times in Madison for $40 a pop and working as a farmhand for a farm out in Hollandale, clearing trails, stacking hay, shoveling shit. I had just gotten married—yes, I got married at the age of 21, two weeks after graduation—and my wife, an artist, was working part-time for a local nonprofit and waiting tables at a Chinese restaurant.

I had lived in Michigan all my life at that point, and during my college years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I always felt, fairly, well visible. My professors and fellow students knew me, and I had the good luck of being accepted into a small group known, back then, as the creative writing sub-concentrators, six poets and six fiction writers hand-selected to do a senior thesis in creative writing. I had a weekly column at The Michigan Daily, the student newspaper for which I also wrote book and film reviews. I had lots of friends and when I went to a literary event or a campus gathering, I knew plenty of people.

When I got to Wisconsin, I knew almost nobody besides my wife and her parents. Nobody cared if I was still writing and when I did write something that other people read it was usually an article about the growing problem of goose poop in Monona (my first cover story) or a summary of a local school board meeting that nobody read. Certainly, nobody paid much attention to these bylines. The information in the article was important, not the author. In short, I went from being a well-known part of a literary community, to being, well, obscure.

I have always loved the word obscure, which I glommed on to after reading the novel Jude the Obscure in high school. I loved that novel. (In fact, one of the nixed names for my Michigan Daily column was Dean the Obscure, but the reference was way too, well, obscure, for most people to get.)

Anyway, here is some of what I wrote to a recently graduated student this week, and I thought I would share it with you all as well.

Dear [former student],

Look, the truth is if I had grown up in the era in which you grew up, I am not sure I would have become a writer. The reason I read so many books and wrote so many poems and stories in high school in college was largely boredom. When the video rental shop was closed, there was not much else to do but read and write. So boredom played a big role in my life my first summer after college, when I was working manual labor kinds of jobs and writing before work and reading books on my lunch break and after work reading and writing some more.

But you know what was more important for me, and most writers of my generation, than boredom? Obscurity. Nobody knew what I was doing. I was working alone much of the time, and when I finished a new manuscript and printed it out, I couldn’t post a picture of the manuscript pages and type finished!!! and post it to my story. (No shame in that; I certainly have done it!) If I went to a cool literary event or film screening, I often did so alone, and didn’t take any photo evidence to post online and get a bunch of likes (again, no shame in that; I also have done that!). And I didn’t have any sort of online presence as a writer—no brooding photos, no rambling Instagram posts about craft, no Substack (again, no shame, for I am guilty on all counts!).

My point, however, is that a lot of the cheap dopamine hits you can get online and via social media will satiate the art beast within you, which is particularly dangerous if you are an emerging artist (or a re-emerging one!). Because it won’t satisfy the art beast within you. It’s a temporary quelling. Only making great art will, or at least attempting to make great art can satisfy your hunger. And so, my best advice, if you can swing it—is get whatever job will help you make rent and then ENJOY THE OBSCURITY. Don’t post about your work too much. Don’t worry about what other people are promoting and finishing and celebrating too much. Don’t spend a lot of time reading the trade publications or listening to the professional podcasts.

Obscurity—and the desire to be seen and known that eventually comes from obscurity—is the greatest muse. Feeling adrift, rudderless, broke, and completely forgettable is actually an important and unavoidable part of the artistic process, and your generation can often use social media, podcasts, etc. to avoid these feelings. But in avoiding these feelings, you can often also avoid the things that will yield your very best work. Look, my generation is just as susceptible to all of this now. But when we were young, that feeling of toiling away in obscurity gave us time and space and the struggle necessary to make good work.

It's hard to be out there in the unknown as a complete unknown, to quote Dylan, who definitely came out of obscurity. But, given your high anxiety, I would suggest you get obscure af for awhile, and see what happens to your work. If the anxiety fades away, feel free to come back into the limelight again, if you miss it, but a summer of obscurity may be beneficial to you at this stage in your creative development.

A rustic shelter in the woods outside of Oxford, Iowa. I am essentially suggesting you live here for a while. In this shelter.

~

I should say that a few of the high anxiety emails I’ve received in the past few weeks come from former students or friends that have already published books and made successful work; they’ve won awards and fellowships, sold film rights and foreign editions. I think the start of summer can cause some feelings of panic in a working artist—HOW DO I NOT WASTE THIS GLORIOUS SEASON? WHAT SHOULD I DO WITH MY ONE WILD AND PRECIOUS SUMMER? They sorta wanna know what they should work on, what they should finish, and I have to tell them I honestly have no idea.

So maybe my reminders on the sweetness of obscurity applies to a lot of Gen X writers and artists like me, right now, at midcareer. For example, I realized today that last novel Summerlong was published ten years ago this week. I’m proud of that novel, and that novel took a lot out of me, and yet, where have I been for the past ten years? In the geological time of the New York book publishing world, ten years is forever. I am sure, if anyone out there ever thinks of my work at all, it’s mostly, “Gosh, whatever happened to that guy?”

I mean, I know the honest answers to that—I was teaching a lot and working on movies and TV scripts a lot because I needed the money. The work you do teaching is ephemeral; all those critique letters could fill several novels, but they are not novels. The work you do in Hollywood is like playing the lottery; you can get paid for scripts that never get made. Also in that time, I got divorced, then remarried, then divorced again. (Part of why I needed all that money.) I also moved a bunch of times; for awhile, I divided my life between Iowa and Los Angeles. I changed jobs. My father developed dementia and got sick and died. I did some heavy lifting in the parenting department. Because of all this upheaval, I started therapy and trying to take better care of myself physically and mentally, which, strangely takes a whole lot of fucking energy. (Who knew? Besides pretty much everybody else but me!)

And so sometimes I feel like I sort of slipped into a kind of mid-life obscurity. It wasn’t intentional. And it doesn’t mean I wasn’t working. This summer, I am presently going through about 1,000 pages of writing I’ve done the past ten years and shaping them into books. I’ve just about finished revisions of a novel (the title of which I change every week); I’ve just about finished a book of memoirish-craft-essays based on my lectures at Warren Wilson’s MFA program (which has a virtual open house for prospective students on June 8). And I’ve got a messy autofiction non-linear sort of project which I am sculpting into something unlike anything I’ve ever done before.

So whether you are one of my recent graduates worrying about obscurity now that you’re off campus and outta the classroom, or you’re one of my former students who feels like they’ve slipped into obscurity somehow at midlife, this is your message from me: embrace it. Make work while you feel obscure, forgotten, at sea. Pretend, if you must, that you will die in obscurity. It’s the best time to make new work, believing nobody will ever see it. Eventually, you’ll make something you want the world to see and, on the brighter side of the technological coin, there are hundreds of ways to get it seen that don’t require a gatekeeper’s okay.

I guess I am asking you all to rethink your relationship with obscurity. No great art has ever come from an artist who hasn’t felt completely obscure at some point, or several points, in their working lives.

The central thesis of my forthcoming book of essays (also called No Soul, No Dark Night) is this: the artistic life—the inexplicable and relentless impulse some of us have to create— can either be a burdensome and terrible affliction or an enlightening and spiritual blessing. I have only recently, at midlife, realize that I prefer the latter. While I can’t predict or create commercial or critical success for the students I teach, I can try and steer them down this same path. Only recently have I realized that this may be my main skill as a mentor—helping my students convert an affliction into a blessing.

Your pal,

DB

p.s. Later this week, I’ll be posting some summer “homework” assignments for those of you that need a little nudge!

And before you get all obscure for the summer, feel free to share this newsletter on social media or forward it to someone who might find it useful!