In this class, I became infatuated by Moby Dick. Shocking, I know; I hate it when the canon proves itself to be part of the canon for a reason and isn’t merely pretention (here’s looking at you Kurt Vonnegut). Probably I loved it so much merely because it had a discernible plot amongst all the whale lore, and almost nothing else we read did (the class was called The Unnamable for a reason). But also whales became a near constant presence in my life while we were studying it (I accidentally made a whale collage, the coffee shop I read in is boat themed, someone gifted me a little whale figurine… etc). The inescapable whale became my inescapable whale. I really got Ahab there for a second.

Well maybe not quite to that degree, but I certainly got the whale’s all-consuming presence.

To that end, my flash fiction for Moby Dick was about my white whale, the impossible pursuit of perfection in art. And it is inspired by a very specific, very short line within the novel itself. “But go to the old Galleries, and look now at a great Christian painter’s portrait of this fish; for he succeeds no better than the antediluvian Hindoo. It is Guido’s picture of Perseus rescuing Andromeda from the sea-monster or whale. Where did Guido get the model of such a strange creature as that?” (Melville, 252).

Because of my Art History minor, when I read this line, I googled if this was (and the other paintings mentioned after were) a real painting, and it turns out it is! Melville did nothing by halves. This is Andromeda by Guido Reni.

First of all, it's fascinating that Reni, painting in an era dominated by religious iconography, chose to paint something inspired by mythology. Obviously there is precedent for this (hello Botticelli, love of my entire life), but it was a rarity that ties back to the religious uncertainty that Melville was exploring in the novel. Also, it’s just a sick painting, prompting me to wonder, as I sat before my blank screen, what Reni must have felt sitting before his blank canvas. Thus enters

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On the Way to Masterpiece

Guido Reni sat at his easel, a mere apprentice in the Calvaert studio. To create was the edict from on high. They were meant to be painting in his master’s style, pulling the light and shadows through his work to show the glory of their God. But Guido’s mind was on the sea once again.

It pulled at him. The way it did for many of those around him. But he was also pulled by the paints. Pulled to revelation. If only he could actually reveal anything. But more often than not, the canvas sat blank, and Guido stared towards the sea.

If only Jesus had spent time underwater, he thought, though he also supposed there were episodes from the Old Testament he could try. Maybe Noah?

He lifted his brush, dipping into the grey green of his underpainting, sketching along the skyline, pushing harder to reveal the underneath of a rock taking up most of the painting’s center… Well, there weren’t any rocks when Noah was at sea. That was the whole point of the story.

Guido leaned back, pausing to cock his head to one side and biting his lip at the vastness that stretched out behind his fledgling rock. What swam underneath it all? Undulating in the depths. Stretched out over miles of water, of life.

He picked his brush back up, remembering a story of a girl, and a monster, and a rock. He could barely grasp it, wiggling on the edge of his memory as it was. A story too big to comprehend. A tail, a jaw, teeth, and a chain. They were pieces of a whole, but not the whole in and of itself.

What existed between the jaw and the tail? He sat entranced by the potential of waves, and a story unbound by any testament he knew, the wood end of his brush clenched between his lips. Could he create the whole? Would he dare?

He startled, dropping the brush to clatter between his feet, as the wooden door clanged open to the Bolognese streets outside Calvaert’s studio. Stumbling his thoughts back to the task at hand, mimicry. His daring would have to wait until the sea of creativity was purely his own to sail.

As always, let me know your thoughts, counterpoints, and interpretations below. I hope you enjoyed!

I used to be 100 percent sure of myself; Or at least I pretended I was. Internally, I was about one second away from full-on breakdown at any given moment, but one thing I have always been good at is faking it. I was, and if we are being honest, still am, a full-faith believer in the edict about faking it until you make it, and so to the outside world I was sure. Sure I belonged, sure I was smart, and most importantly sure I was right.

I lived for in-class debates, for dunking on others’ inability to get their rhetorical legs under them. Certainty was my middle name.

But, in the last 10 years, I was forced time and again to learn hard lessons about how complicated the world is (more on that later), and now I'm the opposite of sure. To some degree I’m pretty sure I don’t, capital-K, know anything.

This lack of surety doesn’t mean that I don’t believe in myself. In fact, I would say that the me of today loves, respects, and believes in herself incalculably more than the me who was willing to throw down at the drop of any hat 10 years ago. I just also don’t think any one person has any answers.

I’ve been thinking about my lack of certainty a lot lately. Around me, people seem to be growing more and more positive that their way of seeing the world is the only right one. And this absolute conviction applies to everything from Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey to the fucking Iran war and back to Taylor Swift’s political leanings. We are all marching around 100% convinced that our view of everything is true.

And to be clear, I have opinions on these topics (basically, Odyssey: good, War: bad, and Taylor Swift… opinion generating), but where is our collective cultural curiosity? Where is our ability to sit down next to someone and be far more interested in hearing what they have to say than telling them the thoughts in our own heads?

This likely has to do with the fact that every person on the planet now has a platform from which to espouse their beliefs, and a lack of surety invites cutdowns and criticisms. But personally, I find navigating this landscape somewhat exhausting.

In my experience, actual persuasion requires listening. The person on the other side has to feel like you aren’t dismissing their worldview outright to even enter a place where persuasion would be possible. But this opens a person up to the possibility of being persuaded themselves, which I guess, in our contentious climate, where being on the “right side” is more important than anything else, is terrifying. But I think (think, not know. Remember I don’t know anything) that if one believes in their perspective enough to be screaming it from the rooftops at any passerby who will listen, so too must they be willing to let that worldview be shaken by an alternate argument.

Lately, I have been spending a lot of time not arguing. Consciously waiting for the person I am listening to to get off their soapbox and ask my take before offering an unprompted insertion of my own beliefs. But the question has not been happening, and thus I don’t say anything.

Hello to the debate-obsessed 17-year-old in my brain. She is quite distressed. Does this mean I am losing my intellect? Losing the ability to hold my own under fire? Do I even have opinions anymore? She is freaking out.

A lot happened to that 17-year-old between graduating college and her sophomore year (dropped out, became a yoga teacher, learned to love herself, traveled around Europe for a year, but more on all that later), so by the time I decided to transfer to Vanderbilt University, I was firmly on the path towards my lack of certainty, but I was at the beginning. During orientation, I met a boy named Craige. We were both transfer students, and we became close in that special way people do during new school orientation. Craige was awesome: a major Taylor Swift fan, loved a good White Claw, and was exceedingly smart. The makings of a perfect friendship, but Craige had transferred from an even more southern and more conservative university than Vanderbilt, where we transferred. And Craige was a Trump fan.

Now, to be clear, he was never a die-hard cult-like Trumpie. But he had voted for him and at this point was standing by that decision. A few of our mutual friends were thrown off by this, but I stood by the fact that Craige was an awesome guy with what I felt were good morals. Maybe I could get through to him.

And thus began a semester-long persuasion campaign. We would meet for lunch, and when the conversation inevitably turned to politics, because it was us, and, to be honest, we remain to this day raging politics nerds, we would debate.

Craige wasn’t callous or cruel. He just hadn’t fully considered that voting on the basis of fiscal conservatism has social impacts both from the financial policies themselves and from the other policies that were enacted when fiscal conservatives are in power. Over the course of that year, which rolled into COVID spring, thus sending all of us back to our parents' house, Craige and I stayed in touch, often sharing political podcasts back and forth and debating issues as they arose.

By the time the 2020 primary was in full swing, Craige was fully identifying politically as “an Amy Klobuchar,” and has since become a full participant in the Democratic Party. I often joke that I am the reason that Craige changed his mind politically, but I don’t actually believe that. I think Craige is a genuinely kind-hearted person who was exposed to different value systems than I was while growing up. What I do think is that by staying curious and not belittling him, we created a mutually enlightening space to bounce ideas and grow as thinkers. My arguments got stronger, and yes, some of my opinions were pulled slightly to the right. But hegemonic thought is the enemy of progress, so I’m not mad at it.

The world is a complicated place because people are complicated. Nothing is clear-cut or easy, and I am increasingly suspicious of anyone purporting to have a clear-cut answer to anything. I know what I think, and I believe what I think, but that is the whole extent of it. But my experience with Craige suggests that there is a line. One has to be both willing to engage and willing to listen. I’m on a pendulum swinging wildly between overconfident engagement and active listening for the sake of learning. I only ever got that balance right sophomore year, and I think it might have something to do with the fact that it’s far more enjoyable to engage in persuasion with another person who is unsure. Certainty kills discussion, kills progress, kills the never-ending pursuit of something greater than we can even imagine.

And all of this is to say that the only thing I will ever be certain of is my own uncertainty, so don’t take anything here as definitive. And, if it’s in good faith, please always push back in the comments.

Oh, and also, I am certain that I have exactly zero thoughts on Taylor Swift’s political leanings; I tried, and I have nothing to say.

A Glass Unnamed

It is sharp and smooth. Cold, and hot, and biting. Stillness inherent to the plop of an ice cube. Let the air fill your chest cavity and hold it until it hurts. A game for him. How long could he go without a gasp? Gasping isn’t allowed. Not in his game.

A gathered audience stands to cheer, out from the wooden well in front of him. He had already explained; explanation wasn’t necessary. They came from his head. For his head. The only rule was control. A life lived by “don’t”s. Wood grain against fingertips, ticking from the well.

Don’t. Don’t eat, don’t cheat, don’t drink, don’t breathe.

The mouth opens a sliver. A slow slip of air over tongue, between lips. He calcifies in his chair. Or he tries to. The end of his game. A blur slides by. Formless? Edgeless, edge of the well.

He tracks it. Wondering. Is this his audience from the depths? Did it catch his hiss? Surely they missed it. Sharp and smooth. Inhale. Don’t gasp.

It heckles. It noticed. The trick. He missed the trick. Messed up the trick. They shouldn’t have noticed.

This isn’t a participation show. That should be a given. But the rules dictate that he respond. He lets a noise go. The easy slide catching on tongue, between lips. A haunting, okay. A click of a tongue on the roof of a mouth. Chest cavity tightened.

Not quite right. It has never been quite right. Close to what he meant but halted by a too slow tongue and air that just wouldn’t come at his call. Something about cats and tongues. That’s the right something. A spectacle. He starts again. Maybe this time the illusion will stick.

Don’t. Or do. What’s one? Or two or three? What’s being a spectacle? A relief. His mouth can be more than a failing, fault line. They’re in raptures at the capitulation.

He wonders at himself. Who has ever seen control like that? Not you. Sharp. Smooth. Cold. Hot. Biting. The don’t is an echo. Because who needs it? He is the master; you see how they cheer? How could he not be?

Where to go now? They’ll come with him; they’re always with him. It’s inevitable. He could stay, though, out of consideration for them. Plop of an ice cube and stillness.

The stillness is fixed to the bar top in front of him. Oh, to cross over. But what would happen on the other side? There’s the air again. Sticking. It always sticks. He returns to the slide.

A Glass

A glass sat glistening under the dim dive bar lights, clear liquid still sloshing from the plop of three ice cubes as they settled to the bottom of the highball. Ken settled himself down in front of the glass. Letting the air fill his chest cavity and holding it until he hurt. It was a game for him. How long could he go without air? Without opening his mouth to gasp.

(Though he never let himself gasp, of course). No one could know the games he played with himself. The challenges he set out. Living his life by don’ts. He traced his name into the bar top, waiting for the clock to run out, letting the grain caress his fingertip.

He followed his name with a mantra. “Don’t.” Don’t eat, don’t cheat, don’t drink, don’t breathe. A game you see, he imagined saying to the gathered audience. A game where the only rule was control. He was finally forced to open his mouth a sliver. Letting the air slip out until his lungs stopped screaming at him. His head fell then, and he pulled his glittering glass towards him.

His thoughts started coming in fits and starts as he started on the second glass. The impulse to condition, not feel, to calcify. All his plans had amounted to nothing. Failed his marriage, failed his work; he had no money to speak of, having dumped it all into getting away from the ghosts of failure.

“You okay, sir?” The bartender asked as Ken continued alternating between chugging and staring at his glass. He heard only taunting.

“Baby talk. Baby talk.” Echoing in his ears, specters, the words were always there. “What issss wrong with your ttttalk, Kenneth? Cat got your tongue?”

Ken was certain he would spend his whole life outrunning that goddamn stutter. “I'm f-fine, thanks,” He bit out in the bartender’s direction.

How did he end up here? Alone at three in the afternoon, in a place that would look the same at three in the morning. He had done everything right and yet…

His kids were all he had left. The vodka swirling in his glass taunted him, a mockery of the man he wanted to be. The man he was. He’d go straight home tomorrow, a vow that he had made over and over for the last six months while staring at this same bar. But what the children really needed was a mother.

Maybe he should hire someone. Just until he met someone new. Someone to help.

Ken looked up for the first time in ages, his neck cricking in protest from the disuse. He gathered his tongue, clicking it a few times in his mouth to practice the shapes before he spoke. “Excuse me,” he said, waving over the bartender, “I can take the check.”

It’s an admittedly daunting concept to place one’s ideas out in the world for consumption. What if I misspeak (mistype?)? What if I come across as dumb? Or even worse, pretentious (one shivers to think on it)? What if I alienate friends, or accidentally entrap myself in a discourse I don’t want to be in? What if no one reads? I’ve told myself these reasons time and again over the last two years as I began the journey towards thinking of myself as a writer™. But the time has come to drop the excuses and stop denying myself the outlet out of cowardice.

So here I am! Hello Substack! Enter the mind of a sometimes delusional, always trying twenty-seven-year-old. Good luck…

A bit about me: I am a bookseller by day, an MFA student by night, and currently 120 pages into the first draft of my first novel (AHHHHHHH!).

You might ask, What is said novel about? And I would be happy to oblige; it is a romance novel set against a backdrop of the zombie apocalypse, and though I think the main appeal is the rest of the pitch, I am going to hold off on sharing out of an abundance of caution, but trust when I say it is freaking fun. It is a story for the late bloomers, the girliepops, and the escapists among us. It is irreverent, self-aware, and, I hope, full of belief in the power of true human connection in the face of… shall we say, certain peril.

Though I’ve been working on this idea consistently for a year (the idea has been meandering through my head since 2020… one might guess at the inspiration), and I am about to start the second year of my MFA in creative writing, it has been really hard for me to fully claim the mantle of “writer.”

You see, though I have always been obsessed with words, it has always been more through the lens of a reader than that of a writer. I was late to reading, only truly unlocking the magic of stories in third grade (a story for another time), but once I caught the bug, I was OBSESSED.

There was one other person in my grade who was equally story-obsessed; we’ll call her Penelope, and SHE was a writer. From third to fifth grade, you could almost always see her with her graphite smudges on the side of her palm, with her nose hovering mere inches from the wide-ruled notebook that carried her stories. I remember one periodical in particular was a vampire saga (such was the time), and I was so invested, I would beg her for more pages every day at lunch. Often ripping the next page greedily from her hand as she finished writing it… Penelope was a writer.

But I didn’t think I wasn’t one. Until the summer after fifth grade. You see, I was never really a fan of roller coasters growing up, too indulgent of my fear of falling. But I have also always been a person dedicated to facing my fears (hence starting this blog… lol), so I was dutifully in line for the gravitron at our elementary summer send-off fair. But let's just say I was a tad freaked out. When I said this to Penelope as we stepped up to the front of the line, she turned to me and said, “Well, that makes sense, Izzy. You’re a reader. Not a writer.” A sentence that drew me up short. Penelope had also been reading my witchy coming-of-age story with what I thought was the same vigor that I was reading about her vampires.

“What do you mean?” I asked in earnest, following her up the steps and onto the circular behemoth that was about to fling us through space.

“Writers want to experience everything the world has. Readers are okay just reading about it.” We stepped up to the ropes that seemed a rather flimsy seatbelt to my 11-year-old brain. I agreed; perhaps I could do without this gravitron experience; Penelope could tell me about it afterward. And by the time I was locked in, the edict had been set. I was a reader. Not a writer.

I went on the gravitron. I had a wonderful time, and have since discovered a rather deep and at times probably alarming adrenaline addiction. I’ve traveled far and wide, taken somewhat insane life risks, and ultimately followed a path that only seems right to me. But Penelope’s words haunted me throughout all those experiences of the world. I believed somewhere deep that perhaps all I am good for is reading about others’ experiences.

Which in some ways is true. I LOVE books. I LOVE words. I love that words are the closest humans have to mind reading. I would crawl into the skin of everyone in the world to understand what it is to live their experience if I could. But I can’t. The only thing we have is words. But I am also a person with a deep desire to experience my own life fully. I got on the fucking gravitron.

Admittedly, Penelope was probably a little fucked up for telling me who I was that day, but I was equally to blame for letting her. For two full years, having started two separate books and thrown myself into the act of creation, there was a part of me that pointed and laughed every time I said, “I’m a writer.”

But recently, I sent out the first 100 pages of my zombie novel (it’s called ZombCom for now and will probably be referred to as such going forward) to a select number of friends and family, and it was only upon hitting page 100 (which happened to align with a pretty big plot point/cliff hanger) that I felt ownership of the lable, “writer.”

And now, in the midst of feedback week from said family and friends, I am finally starting my Substack. It doesn’t feel like a coincidence.

I have realized over the last few months that fun drinks besides silly little novels (be they mine or someone else’s) made up a lot of my days, so enjoy that framework as I figure this thing out. As with most of my life, I have no idea what this will look like, but I’m excited to have finally built the ride. So step right up and trust the centripetal force.