STOP WRITING SO MUCH ABOUT WRITING. It says that in my notebook and it has a point. Who wants to read writing about writing? Writers, and people who want to be. I am both of those kinds of people, so it does make some sense that I’d write what I’d like to read. But what about everyone else? What if writing about writing kills writing inch by inch and bit by bit the way humans are killing the earth? I don’t want to be part of that. I don’t want to be part of writing—and I mean literary writing—becoming yet another hyper-specialization practiced and appreciated only by the devout, yet another lane to stay in or piece of turf to protect, outlined by demographic assumptions and browsing data and dead to the rest of the world like a lonely strip of rainforest. 

Today I had what they call an “interview” but it was really a lunch meeting with two people I likely would not have lunch meeted with under different circumstances. The two people seemed to like me and my job talk and I only spat food at them once, as far as I noticed. We talked and ate and talked and ate, in a restaurant way the fuck out in the north suburbs, not California, that was amusingly full of people just like “us”—that is, lunch meeters, some meetering for the first time, some surely for the more than first time, talking job talk and of the businessy things. Picture lots of blazers and trainers and button-downs tucked in jeans and families and disposable income and investments and such. That lot.

Should I write for them, too, about writing? Or about them.