Facedoxing at my first literary reading in New York City
Back from hiatus!
You get a little bit older and there’s a guy on Instagram who’s telling you that free testosterone drops by 2-3% per year after the age of 30 and then you blink and you’ve lost 1-2 plates off your deadlift (depending on how many discs you’ve herniated) and you find yourself becoming more sentimental at a seemingly physiological level. What we might call the sentimentality of aging is really just a form of acceleration: fundamentally, it’s a function of the movement of time. Senescence is a progressive phenomenon whereby the particles of experience start streaking past you in increasingly blurry bright lines that smooth out into the rim of your peripheral vision, embracing you like a warm halo from the void.
That is to say, you realize you are slowly dying.
Not quite dying in the terminal sense, per se, but in that living-is-a-kind-of-dying sense, an incremental pruning of the various possible branches of the future that remain traversable by the increasingly broken vessel of your body.
This, in turn, breeds a kind of gratitude that is hard to grasp from the halcyon goggles of youth, meaning you appreciate everything a little bit more than you did previously.
One of my favorite memories of New York was getting day drunk on July 4th at a rooftop party in Brooklyn, passing out from trying to keep up with my childhood Russian-Jewish friend’s exceptional pace-of-drinking, and waking up a couple hours later on a bean-bag (or was it a large pillow?), rehydrating from a table of overpriced water bottles, and dancing to the sunset while Lee Burridge played some kind of trancelike house music in the background.
A decade later, I spent another beautiful night on a rooftop in Brooklyn, this time having returned to the city as a writer.
I’ve been away from the blog for a couple of months dealing with life stuff—nothing terminal, thankfully—just a compressed sequence of epiphanies unloading themselves into my brain like shockwaves crumpling various foundational moorings (“yeah im good bro haha”, etc.).
Anyway, all that is to say, I’ve been meaning to write a thank you note that’s somehow lagged behind me.
In July I participated in a 3 x 3 reading with
and . Since I like to keep a low profile as a (highly marginal) pseudanon we did a no-camera thing (Matt’s clever idea!) at the Brooklyn Center for Theater Research.1 This was my first reading as a novelist and the first time I’ve attended any kind of public event under my authorial identity, and it was an absolute pleasure to do so. I’m extremely appreciative to both of these guys for letting me share the stage with them given my status as a relative outsider.I understand now—with much greater, experiential clarity—the benefit of connection, community, and physicality in the world of literary fiction. It’s become such a small, marginal past-time—one that will plausibly die off with with this final cohort of millennial wordcels—that the energetic boost of physical communion feels necessary to keep the flame alive.
Relative to the digital distance of writing and speaking over the internet, I felt a sense of connection with the other attendees that both surprised and moved me. Probably this is because I’m not conditioned to being around other writers (or even readers) in my daily life. Where I live, I sometimes feel like I’m the only person I know who still reads novels, and having a group of like-minded people cohere into a single evening felt very special.
Meeting people who’d deeply connected with my novel—G, for example—is something I’ll deeply treasure for a very long time. Sincerity, I think, is very important to me, particularly in my writing, and it’s these moments of gratitude that sometimes keep me going when I feel like giving up outright and throwing in the towel on writing altogether.
For someone coming from the outside—I never studied creative writing in college, I never did an MFA, I never had friends who were writers (until relatively recently), I never even knew anyone who had written anything professionally—sufficed to say, it was an important personal milestone, and one I’m extremely grateful for.
It was nice, also, to connect with other people from Substack and various friends from New York. It’s always a pleasure to chat with
about our experiences as Asian-American writers trying to distinguish ourselves from our peers (as an aside, I’d suggest that everyone keep an eye out for him, as I truly believe he’ll break out in a massive way within the next year or so). also made an appearance at the reading—who, in addition to writing extremely thoughtful and thoroughly researched book reviews, is an absolute unit of a human being who looks like he deadlifts about 500 pounds (possibly more). was kind enough to review my novel on Goodreads and I found his MFA journey to be very interesting (like me, he also has an interest in the convergence of philosophy and fiction). I briefly ran into , who I hope to see more of, particularly as continues its rapid ascent and blistering pace of quality (check out his novel Glass Century, which I wrote about recently). I also enjoyed chatting with , whose novel was recently reviewed in TMR. To cap it off, I learned about some exciting new projects that have recently gotten off the ground—’s , and , a new magazine from and Matt Gasda.The bottom line is that even for literary anons, network effects matter and geography matters. The density of talent in NYC when it comes to novel-writing really is important, and even for other faceless avatars like me, I’d strongly encourage you to attend some events in the city just to absorb the energy from your peers.
Thank you to everyone who came to the event, and thank you to Matt for giving me a platform to share my novel with the good people of New York.
It was an immense privilege, and I look forward to coming back again.
One of the things I’m noticing about connecting with other writers is that I really click with guys who’ve independently built up their own platforms and charted their own course (Gasda, Noah, Ross, Chris, Paul etc. all fall into this category). I love the idea of bootstrapping a writing career via something like BCTR - an idea which most people wouldn’t even imagine being possible - “you can just do things” isn’t just a meme!
Really resonated with this, wow. Congrats man, keep that feeling alive
What a gracious thank you note! I tend to agree about Chris Jesu Lee, but we shall come to know, and I very much agree with your footnote. Wish I had been at that reading.