Leaving NYC...

For most of my life, the world I cared about revolved around NYC  As an artist/writer I was required to live there and I spent a lot of my life explaining why I didn't.  Because even when I had the chance--which was basically right up until 2009 or so when it became prohibitively expensive--I never made the move.  I visited, sure.  I made long stopovers on my way from Boston to Philly but never brought a potted plant with me.  I just didn't like the noise, the dirt, the inability to hear myself think amidst distraction and see anything that moved me--besides the human condition of course, but you can see that anywhere even in solitary confinement--especially in solitary confinement..  NYC is majestic, empirical, monumental.  Isn't that part of its mystique? Yes.  But I am not a monumental writer.  My settings are small, the better to see you with, my dear.  I am better at building towns in the sandbox than recreating monumental NYC in literature.  But don't you miss the culture? my friends ask.  No.  How can I miss culture when I produce it?  And yes, I know what my peers are doing.  It's impossible not to.

 Still, I always knew, still know, that things would have happened faster if I lived there and had drinks with the folks who ran my world.  The gatekeepers.  I probably would have turned into a gatekeeper if I lived there.  It was only recently that I realized that the gatekeepers have deserted their posts.  And then I realized--much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz--that the power to create, to make things happen for other artists resided inside of me all along.   Click those ruby slippers, baby, and get out there and promote. I started my own publishing company.

And then I noticed that little by little, I was dropping NYC as a reference point.  If my books were set elsewhere--and they were--I didn't have to explain that in Pennsylvania, as in probably the rest of the country, we do things slightly differently than NYC and that doesn't make us either less sophisticated or a freak show.  When I read other ethnic writers (and I am included in this lot like it or not) I always get mad that they spend half the book defining themselves against the dominant culture.  Their characters don't live in their own world as much as apologize for their difference.  If there is a little arrogance in their perceived superiority, it's always with a bow to the king.  I believe academics would call this colonial writing , The first book my publishing company produced was Last Call by Paul Heller which is a politically incorrect, brutally honest account of a man taking care of his mother in the hell of Alzheimer's in PA, after leaving the inhospitable world of NYC to do so.  The second book on the starting block is a thigh-slappingly funny account--if you can imagine--of an ex-steelworkers days in that dimly remembered world of heavy industry. Neither of these books need a metropolis to exist.

And then I dropped my subscription to the New Yorker.  I have nothing against the New Yorker.  They mentioned my first book favorably.  I like the cartoons. Good fiction.  As I say, I always know what my peers are doing.  The rest of the stuff, increasingly less.  The world of the New Yorker doesn't include the joy of having a cup of coffee on your back porch even in the worst winter morning possible.  You always have to go somewhere to have an experience in NYC.  With other people.  Shelling out money.  Lots of Starbuck coffee cup gazing in the New Yorker.  Okay, I drink Peet's French roast coffee in a french press at home, but I can walk outside in my slippers and robe and drink it without fear of  being not cool.  Definitely  being not cool.  Because I am not a cool person by NYC standards.  I'm not saying I'm a a good person or a better person than New Yorker people, but their interests aren't mine.  I really don't care who is running the New York Ballet or if it is defunct.  I'm mighty interested in how the morning light looks on my fifty year old pine trees and if my cat is terrorizing the rabid skunk because we'll both have to live with the consequences if he is...

TO BE CONTINUED....