by Jenny Boully
I was an English major, then I chose to double major in English and physics. Then I changed the physics to philo-sophy my junior year.
When I went home for winter break, I explained Plato’s cave allegory to my then-boyfriend. He said, That’s stupid. Why do you want to think about things like that? I knew then that I’d have to break up with him.
Also during my junior year, I took a course in the eighteenth-century novel, and I read The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. That book would change how I thought about books. I had my own reading in class, which my professor would ask me to explicate. It happened mainly because I kept misreading fortifications as fornications, and partially because I have always had a very dirty mind.
The writer-in-residence during my MA year at Hollins was Brendan Galvin, and he looked us all in the eyes and said, You better be enough for yourself. For the rest of my life, I would puzzle over those words, wondering if I interpreted them right, finding that I interpret them differently during different times. At the time, I took comfort in them, but now, they terrify me.
I remember most vividly the lilacs that spring, the spring of my MA year at Hollins. I remember those lilacs more than the lilacs of any spring of my undergraduate years. I also remember most vividly the dogwoods and the dark cuts of midnight blue in the furrows of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the cows on the hills and valleys formed by those mountains. I remember my thesis advisor, Cathryn Hankla, trying to break me of the habit of always using the present perfect progressive tense in my poems, but I didn’t want anything to end. I didn’t want anything to be ending. I remembered everything so exceptionally well that spring because my heart was breaking, and I carried that heartbreak with me for a few more years until I didn’t know what else to do with it. It was then that I realized what I wanted more than someone to love were those lilacs, those dogwoods, those curls of wisteria, the fat bumblebees, the air and scenery of southwest Virginia, a place that Kathy Acker, when she was writer-in-residence my junior year, called heaven on earth.
In Thailand, the summer after I earned my MA, I watched dragonflies and butterflies and birds pair up and mate in the very air. I dipped orchids in holy water and folded myself at the feet of Buddha.
I waited tables while I applied and waited to hear back from MFA programs in poetry. One of my fellow waitresses interrogated me daily about my fake MA. She did research. She wanted to point me out as a fake. I carried drafts of things in my pockets. The cops I served burgers to asked me what good was learning anything if I couldn’t help people.
Although I got into my dream school, I didn’t accept the offer. I was still feeling sad and didn’t feel worthy of getting things that I wanted. So I said no and went to another school instead. There, at the University of Notre Dame, my professor made us study the modernist poets so thoroughly and scan their poems even. It was quite the opposite of what I would have had to do at my dream school. I was oftentimes quite angry. I was working on a book of footnotes, and my resistance to breaking the line was already making everyone quite uneasy.
I moved to New York to follow a boy from Notre Dame, a new boy, a new heart. I had only two hundred dollars, but I was in the city of my dreams. My roommate made dolls, and she made them talk to her and to each other, and she made me one and told me to keep it in my room. I’d come home some days to find them eating supper or watching TV. Once, there was an invasion of flies. Jenny, do you think something is rotting? She began searching behind the fridge and stove. On the counter was her Thanksgiving turkey from a week earlier, where it had sat since Thanksgiving.
I took a course in Dante; I took a course in Ancient Greek. I temped for Avon and Sotheby’s and a woman who funded her Village apartment and upstate home on million-dollar grants from a shady nonprofit she was running. I worked as the lowest rung on the ladder in publishing. I began work on my PhD at CUNY’s Graduate Center.
Doing my coursework, I tried to fill in gaps that I saw in my poetry education. I studied Victorian and metaphysical poetry. I took literature and arts of the 1850s, fin de siècle literature, and many courses with my dissertation advisor. I wrote a dissertation not on poetry but rather on the entrapment of girl children through enchantment, focusing on J. M. Barrie’s Wendy, Lewis Carroll’s Alice, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, and Henry Darger’s Girls.
I tell my students, at the end of the term, that they must have hobbies, because if they don’t have hobbies, then that means writing is their hobby, and it shouldn’t be that way; writing should be their life and not their hobby. I tell them to learn new things, different things, things that have nothing to do with writing. And not just learn them, but be good at them; master them; impress others with them. What I have learned about great writers: they were always obsessed with something, but they were very seldom obsessed with writing.
Writing Betwixt-and-Between
In J. M. Barrie’s The Little White Bird (1902), Peter Pan is referred to as a “betwixt-and-between.” It is in this book that Peter makes his first appearance in the works of Barrie. We will see him again, each time a bit different, in several more texts. How Barrie delivers the Peter story to us is already, in its nature, hybrid: Peter exists as a beginning in The Little White Bird, a play in Peter Pan (1904), a new beginning in Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (1906), and finally as a novel in Peter and Wendy (1911), which happens to be my favorite.
In all these Peter texts, what I adore is the intermingling of fact and fantasy, real and pretend. Dream-life, death, existence, play, and make-believe all comingle, and one’s position in any of these existential states is of grave and serious importance.
In Neverland, death can be performed, but it is also very real. By way of illustration, the narrator of Peter and Wendy reminds us that Hook can kill a pirate just to show us, the readers, how easily death is done on the island: poor Skylights hardly lives through the span of a sentence. And so many other deaths abound. Tinker Bell will hardly live for a year, and Wendy Darling, we know, gets too tall to fit in Peter’s world and goes on to have children and grandchildren who Peter replaces her with.
My fascination with Peter and Wendy grew out of my fascination with Wendy. She was in love with a betwixt-and- between who was forgetful, disloyal, and refused to ask her parents a question on a “very sweet subject.” I was in love, and I too felt as if I were a wee child playing house and marrying pretend. Because I still felt like a child—I still do—my love existed in the realm of performance. I played the good housewife and wanted children to mother. I was trying to have a baby at the time and could not have a baby, and so I felt Wendy’s want of children and her performance of mother to the Lost Boys most poignantly.
Role-playing and trying on different guises aids in assimilating real life, its successes, its failures, its happenstances and all. By pretending to be one thing, you can better accept that you are not another thing.
Perhaps that is where my love for Wendy and for possibility in form began. My book not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is the creative outgrowth of my research on the Peter texts, yes, but it is also critical theory and a theory on reading insofar as it suggests, albeit in an experimental way, an alternative to the traditional academic essay on literary interpretation. However, it can also be classified as prose poetry because of how it is written, as veiled memoir (I wrote myself into this) and—due to my building on Barrie’s story—fiction.
It is also a betwixt-and-between text in how it appropriates space. The bisected page, relying on “The Home Under Ground” sections to contain those moments that center on decay, death, and passing out of existence, acts as a casket of sorts, a memento box. The bisected page also interrupts or disrupts the act of reading. So in a text that presents a multiplicity of voices and points of view, there is also a multiplicity of reading experiences.
I could say that my work is not so easily demarcated because its subjects, Peter and Wendy, are also not so easily demarcated, but I find that I often
rebel against boundaries, preferring instead to envision, to test, to experiment, to practice, to pretend, to fracture, and then to make anew.
The text could only be subversive; that is, it could only exist as complicated, as yearning, as multifaceted as Wendy Darling—the girl who, as I see it, fell in love with the bad boy, ran away with him, wanted to delight in adult games and desires, to have fantasy cross over into real life.
It could only be its best while playing at its own brand of make-believe. That is, the text is only successful if it truly believes the story it puts forth: that what its author has read between the lines in Peter and Wendy is the truer story.
On Beginnings and Endings
To begin is to admit an infatuation, a longing, a love.
A beginning signals that one has moved well past being merely interested and is now immersed in what is most likely an obsession. To begin connotes more than falling in love: to begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.
To write is to encounter a love affair. And as we groom ourselves and struggle to appear our most attractive to our beloveds, so too do we, as writers, want to present ourselves to our readers at our very best.
Or perhaps we get caught unawares: our ragged, disheveled, unsure, untidy, and ugly selves are what make someone else love us, for in writing there is always, inevitably, the ugly.
Love, in writing, is mostly a one-sided love.
Either I love or you love.
And, sometimes—although this is quite rare—we love each other. That is what makes the reader flip the page, that is, read past the beginning.
I am thinking about a beginning that I love, that I adore. I remember, always, so dearly, the beginning of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “I am living in the Villa Borghese.” I will always remember “I am living in the Villa Borghese” and the rest of the first page and a half of Tropic of Cancer. My teenage marginalia reads, not naively, “This is the most beautiful beginning to a book. Ever.” This is something I still believe today. It is the most beautiful beginning to a book. Ever.
I adore beginnings.
I adore the beginnings of love affairs.
When I teach a creative writing course, I sometimes photocopy the first pages of books that I adore. I ask my students to guess the writers, the books. They are often wrong. Not only are they unable to identify a writer or book, they cannot identify the genre.
The uneasy transmission of genre tells me a lot about the nature of love: spontaneous, unplanned, risky, and, yes, that most beautiful of writerly and loverly attributes: suicidal. For to write and to love, and to write and to love sincerely, is to write and to love like a kamikaze.
I loved the GRE Subject Test in Literature because I was asked to match first lines of literature to their authors and books. I, too, often guessed incorrectly, but I enjoyed so deeply the thrill of matchmaking.
However much I love beginnings, I know that eventually, I must write about endings.
I fear endings with the same intensity that I adore beginnings.
The fear is not the opposite, nor the negation, of adoration; it is an altogether different sort of trepidation, for love is nothing if it is not trepidation.
An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost.
An ending is a puzzle without a picture; an ending says that despite whatever it is that one of us wanted, nothing more can be done.
The doctor tells the family of the dying patient: there is nothing more to be done.
An ending tugs and tugs and tugs.
The beginning does not want the ending; the beginning, like so many young people, believes itself to be immortal, trusts the illusory material of existence, and trusts that the distant point in the future that is ever-so-distant will continue to remain ever-so-distant. The ending is composed of distance and illusion; that is why the beginning, having not gone through the middle, believes that it too will live forever.
But we know, despite the feelings a writer possesses upon writing a beginning, that endings happen, that beginnings do indeed come to an end. The book spine betrays; the word count is a demise; each page number a crossing out of calendar days.
An ending is when a leaving leaves.
A beginning is asking: more please.
A beginning, in asking for more please, steps into that nebulous, often forgetful, amnesiatic land of the middle.
The middle is the leaving.
The middle is ever-so-full of things that we did together as lovers that matter to no one else but one of us. For the middle is the story of love unrequited.
And so, an ending is when a leaving leaves.
When even the leaving has left you, there still exists ever-so-much white space, an emptiness that tugs you to read the ending once more, to read the beginning again.
An ending says, I might have loved you once, but things have changed between us; things are different now. An ending says, It’s not you, it’s me.
Someone has moved on.
Someone has lost his heartbeat.
When I began to write The Book of Beginnings and Endings, I felt that beginnings and endings were true; that is, the middle was nonsensical: the middle was all but a dream. A beginning stabbed like bright light, sharp stars. An ending lived inside me forever and forever; an ending was played out over and over again until it took on the shape of mourning, and then an ending was mourned until I felt that I could approach a beginning again.
The Book of Beginnings and Endings is just that: it is a book of solely beginnings and endings to hypothetical books. The beginnings end abruptly; the endings begin in the middle of things. It was my book about how love is always only a beginning and an ending.
The middles were only about the despair of the endings: the approaching ending and the ending of beginnings.
The importance of the beginning is to make possible the love affair; the importance of the ending is to make impossible the love affair.
The ending says, There is nothing else that I can do to keep you, and so—despite the heaviness and the utter heartbreak that you may feel—I leave you with such a small message, such a small sorrow, such a small sound. That is what an ending should do.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of the following publications and anthologies, in which versions of these pieces first appeared:
“the future imagined, the past imagined” in MiPOesias
“Forecast Essay” in How2
“On Writing and Witchcraft” in LUMINA
“Inner Workings, in Meadows” in The Force of What’s Possible: Writers on Accessibility & the Avant-Garde
“Einstein on the Beach/Postmodernism/Electronic Beeps” in Essay Daily
“On the Voyager Golden Records” in Kenyon Review
“The Page as Artifact” in Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook
“Between Cassiopeia and Perseus” in DIAGRAM
“Kafka’s Garden” in Unsaid
“Six Black-and-White Movies in Which I Do Not Find You” in Tarpaulin Sky
“Moveable Types” in Maisonneuve
“How to Write on Grand Themes” in MiPOesias
“The Art of Fiction” in ArielX
“Fragments” in Another Chicago Magazine and effing magazine
“22” in Coconut
“On the EEO Genre Sheet” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction
“Writing Betwixt-and-Between” in Family Resemblance: An Anthology and Exploration of Eight Hybrid Literary Genres
“On Beginnings and Endings” in The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction
“The Poet’s Education” was a talk given for the Chicago Poetry Project’s “Poets Talking” lecture series.
Additionally, the following essays also appeared in the now out-of-print chapbook Moveable Types: “Forecast Essay,” “Kafka’s Garden,” “Moveable Types,” “Fragments,” and “22.” “
22,” “Fragments,” and “Between Cassiopeia and Perseus” also appeared in of the mismatched teacups, of the singleserving spoon: a book of failures.
I also wish to express my extreme gratitude to Coffee House Press, especially to Chris Fischbach, who quickly believed in this book; to Caroline Casey, who knew there was something there; and, most importantly, to Carla Valadez, who, through her meticulous reading and devotion to meaning, made me believe in this book too.
Coffee House Press began as a small letterpress operation in 1972 and has grown into an internationally renowned nonprofit publisher of literary fiction, essay, poetry, and other work that doesn’t fit neatly into genre categories.
Coffee House is both a publisher and an arts organization. Through our Books in Action program and publications, we’ve become interdisciplinary collaborators and incubators for new work and audience experiences. Our vision for the future is one where a publisher is a catalyst and connector.
Funder Acknowledgments
Coffee House Press is an internationally renowned independent book publisher and arts nonprofit based in Minneapolis, MN; through its literary publications and Books in Action program, Coffee House acts as a catalyst and connector—between authors and readers, ideas and resources, creativity and community, inspiration and action.