So I’m thinking about literary citizenship and its vicissitudes; that is, how paying dues is both necessary and fraught.
Words Count | Tanis MacDonald | Issue 44
Unread: A River
Maybe you’re like me; for decades I have remembered to pay my literary dues. To read, to review, to mentor, to teach, to praise the work of others with a glad heart, all while writing, re-writing, learning and unlearning bad habits, fostering better habits, thinking well and less well, and generally not worrying about making an impact on the literary scene because any opinion that an impact has been made is always the decision of other people. Like many of us, while waiting for eyes on my work, I just due it.
And I’m not always – let me extend that to not often – read.
So I’m thinking about literary citizenship and its vicissitudes; that is, how paying dues is both necessary and fraught. I’m also thinking about genre fluidity, and how all these energies work together.
*
At literary events, after I have read my work aloud and talked about writing, I usually move through the crowd searching for a breath of air or a snack. This is when people stop me and say something like this: “That was great! I’ve never heard of you or your book!” The first times this happened, I thought nothing of it. Of course I was obscure – I was just starting. But after four, five, six books, such exclamations began to get old. It’s a curious moment, in which I know someone is expressing their excitement to have “discovered” me but what a backhand. I appreciate it when someone sticks to the first comment and swallows the second before it leaves their mouth. I know, I know: no one knows me.
That last is an overstatement, of course; people know me, and someone’s reading me right now. (Hello!) And though admitting to a small readership is taboo, I’m tired of pretending.
There are all kinds of essays about writing I could cite that would, and have, wagged their proverbial fingers at me as they say that we don’t write in order to be read, but all of those essays are written by writers who I read, defeating the purpose of Milosz or Heaney or Ruefle arguing for their own obscurity amid their international fame, which I know is not rock-star fame, but still, ironic.
A book should be an axe for the frozen sea within us, wrote Kafka. But he also told Max Brod to destroy all his manuscripts after he died, which Brod did not do, which is why I can quote Kafka today on loneliness and isolation and literature and why you probably recognize that quotation. If Kafka continued to be as unknown as he was the week he died, then no one would be quoting him on his obscurity, his loneliness, his inner ice.
I could write about literary isolation, but if I did, how would you find it?
*
Maybe it’s because I don’t write fiction.
I also take long breaks from reading fiction, and I often think I’m breaking up with it. I have large and bruised doubts about what it is supposed to do: not the good doubts, the kind that make my thoughts shoot off into the stratosphere. This is doubt that spreads like fog through my brain, seeps under doorways, makes me wonder if there’s smoke in the house.
But then I read some poetry or nonfiction – or even better, some hybrid forms – and the fog lifts, gets sucked back outside, whiffles under the door and backs away down the block, and I stand for a long time in that watery and transformative space between poetry and essay, using poetry to draw out what is hard about an essay, and using the essay to find different congruencies of the lyric moment, to strengthen, to beautify, to shout, to nudge.
It’s rising on its banks, that riverine surge between poetry and essay. For years I wrote essays about poetry – let me be clear, other people’s excellent poetry – and I liked doing that except the more I sat by the river, the less time I had to wade into that moving water, to feel it eddy around my ankles and shins as I step in and step out of the current, sometimes cold, sometimes muddy, often happy.
Same river, many chances. Time passes and life allows me or she does not; the river has sometimes been dammed and often diverted.
Poessay or essem: stones in the river, sometimes slippery, sometimes secure, places for my feet in the cooling waters. I always have hot feet and the centre of a path of running water (creek, stream, river) is my best place on the planet.
The river altered by a foot’s insertion into its wide and capacious current is a Heraclitean proposition that I can’t ignore, though I know that it’s most often Plato quoted on Heraclitus, and not Heraclitus himself. I’m no scholar of Greek, but that one-philosopher-removed business seems like a big foot in a river. In Canada, all kinds of bigger things disrupt rivers: hydro dams and sewage and violence. But droughts and floods are as nothing to the river, despite the human cost. No one should take history lightly, but we might wear our search for presentness with grace and compassion, like it is a scarf to warm us and not a boulder we push uphill. As Haudenosaunee scholar Richard Monture says in his book of the same name, “we share our matters”.
To share my matters, and ask after the matters of others, I come back to my river practice, back to hybridity and the shape of unreadness in a long arc of isolation, practice, and community.
*
I know writers who write bestsellers. I sit next to them at events. There is always a moment – at a bookstore or festival – when my signing line finishes. Ten or twelve folks chat with me and get their books signed and sometimes walk away with my card so they can email me something later, and the line for the other author remains long and serpentine: readers holding stacks of books in their arms, willing to wait and wait.
I can’t say envy doesn’t enter into it – of course it does – but whenever I see this, envy isn’t my primary feeling. Mostly I feel a bit stupid for all the times I thought, “It’s okay – I am just paying my dues. My Big Book is coming.”
But the Big Book is not coming. And I’m starting to think that this is okay.
The idea of literati is a literatease.
This truth swims towards me, brushing its iridescent sides against my cold, wet, river-loving feet.
*
We seem to be giving up on defining the prose-poem and postcard story against each other, or maybe it’s only that no one’s talking about it around me any longer, and if that’s so, thank you for taking that rut-making exchange elsewhere. I was never going to get in harness and pull your car out of that snowbank.
I love genre and teach it all the time, mainly so that genre-defiers (like me, like you) can know enough about genre to defy, blend, smush, suture, spindle, and fold like they’re made of it.
Poessay sounds like poésie, but they are not the same. Essem sounds like a sneeze.
Those poessays, those essems, are lyric and ludic, rhetorical in scope but not in shape; they rehearse undoing so that they can traffic in narrative but spin it fine as fishing line. This is not news, but in my isolation and obscurity, I stand in the river, feeling my leg hair waving in the current, let my wet knees and icy feet dictate the next moments.
*
A handful of bad years seemed as though they might have the force to build a wall between me and the flow of words to which I have had an unlimited springy access since I learned to read. Even with the patriarchy and my poor education followed by my good education and the life-long task of telling the difference between them, my chosen misdirections and not meeting a writing role model until I was in my thirties, encountering instead full-on way-too-proud-of-it misogyny and classism and violence, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It was the thing I couldn’t lose.
That writing wasn’t always good, and it wasn’t always published.
It’s important to admit to being wrong or having half-baked ideas sometimes, because vulnerability to misapprehension or the occasional persuasion of bad people is very human. It’s a relief to recall long periods of time when I didn’t write for readers because I couldn’t picture any. For many years, it was just me and the words.
I chafe against admonishments that we shouldn’t write with the hope, or desire, of being read. Those admonishments will not bring eyes to your page in any case. I have done my time as unread as any teenage diarist, as any memoirist with a story but no method, as any emo-angsty poet, and I can tell you that the philosophy of the unread is not to give up your desire; it’s to re-direct it. Please yourself.
If writing to please the self is masturbation, then writing to please others is either sacrificial selflessness or egotism, and I don’t think I’m interested enough to parse the shapes of these.
In the classroom and the literary world, I am (like everyone else) routinely vulnerable to all kinds of bullshit, human and computer-generated. But I’m also subject to plenty of good, and there’s no ignoring the correlative between low expectations and high satisfaction.
I wade over to a different part of the river. The hem of my dress is now pleasingly waterlogged and will slap, limp but propulsive, against my legs on the walk home.
I gave a reading a few years ago at a small bookstore and an even smaller audience showed up. Since I wasn’t from that city and the store was laissez-faire about advertising – meaning that they did none – I felt sanguine about the headcount. That tiny audience in that barely advertised event in that cold-shoulder bookstore turned out to be the best, because all of us scheduled to read that night undid our writerly personae and read our favourite poems – the strange ones, the long ones, the ones that didn’t fit our books’ arcs or advertising copy or the set we usually did. I let myself listen the way I couldn’t have or wouldn’t have if the venue had been bigger. When I was my turn, I read five of the least sympathetic poems in my book, ones I couldn’t fully explain and didn’t try to: poems that needed extreme listening. I saw a smile the size of a city block spread across one of the listener’s faces. This was my final event of six months of promotion, during which I had read in bookstores and pubs, large theatres and university classrooms, hotel meeting rooms and cafes, and I felt like finally, finally, I could hear myself.
Please yourself.
I’m no longer a young writer who plans what she wears to readings, whom men and women hit on sometimes nicely and sometimes aggressively. I pretty much show up in jeans and a sweater with my middle-aged hips and belly and exactly no one macks on me.
That is not regret; it is puzzlement, for I have grown more and more interesting. I would mack on me.
*
Instead of “No man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” I prefer this Heraclitean river statement, which I gleaned from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and can’t stop thinking about: “Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.”
Poessayists know it’s true. We swear by our tranquil feet.
Tanis MacDonald (she/her) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books of poetry and nonfiction. She is twice the winner of the Open Seasons Award: once in 2021 for her essay of female friendship and music fandom, and again in 2025 for her forthcoming essay on adoption and ancestry. She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and took an honourable mention in the Pavlick Poetry Prize in 2021. Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on Haldimand Treaty land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario, where she teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press.
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Such an intriguing essay. I love this part in particular and find it very relatable: “For years I wrote essays about poetry – let me be clear, other people’s excellent poetry – and I liked doing that except the more I sat by the river, the less time I had to wade into that moving water, to feel it eddy around my ankles and shins as I step in and step out of the current, sometimes cold, sometimes muddy, often happy.
Same river, many chances. Time passes and life allows me or she does not; the river has sometimes been dammed and often diverted.”