The Loyalty of Water: Why Write?

Guest post by Melissa R. Sipin

Why do you write? What are your goals as a writer?

These questions haunt me. Whether it’s late at night after hours of writing or in a seminar with Juliana Spahr, who forces us to read articles on the gatekeepers of literature, the MFA Machine, AWP and its capitalistic complications (like its rejection of the proposed panel, “Principled Protest in Academia: the Story of the University of Houston Sit-in,” and its acceptance of another that encouraged a third [and probably expensive] degree), or Kathi Week’s book, The Problem of Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Juliana asks us to create graphs, maps, and trees of prizewinners in recent Poets & Writers (How many men have won awards? Women? Let’s re-look at the VIDA Count), asks us to interrogate the data of who gets into this or that journal, and asks us to examine the trends of who gets published in this or that prize-winning collection (like Cliff Garstang’s Journal Ranking based upon the Pushcart anthology). She asks us: what do you do with this data?

Faced with all of this: why do you write?

It’s a difficult question for me to answer, if only because the reason why I write is an emotive, intellectual choice, almost like falling in love. I don’t exactly know why I love or chose my husband: but, I know that I do love him. I know the things I love about him; I know the things I love about writing and literature. I can quote the women who have saved my life via writing—

Toni Morrison: “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.”

Or Alice Walker: “[Writing] saves the life that is your own.”

Or Gloria E. Anzaldúa: “I write to record what others erase when I speak.”

These are all the reasons why I write. But it doesn’t exactly answer the body of that second question: what are you goals as a writer? Especially when stacked against the backdrop of this descriptive data of who succeeds in the publishing world, and who does not, why continue writing with the goal of publishing? What is the end goal of publication? With publication comes inevitable rejection; rejection is the staple food of a writer’s life. And so are sacrifices. What do we sacrifice as writers, as women writers, as writers of color, as women writers of color? 

Finances. Time. Family time. Absences. Motherhood? Children. Time away from children. Privacy. Unraveling family secrets. Dislocation. Migration. Miles and land and sea: separation from loved ones. Community? Competitive community? Petty and insecure community? (Can we really be true friends with other writers? I believe we can.)

This list is not exhaustive, and it’s rather specific to just me: a Filipina American writer. A Filipina American writer who’s also a Navy spouse. Time away at an MFA program means time away from my husband and his duty station in Norfolk (and time, to military families, is scarce, uncontrollable, less known); it means time away from my family in Los Angeles. It means returning home to family who accost me with a list of questions: when will you have children? After you write a book? Why waste time writing a book? Don’t you want children? To a family where life is a daily struggle between jobs and wages and food on the table, the writing life is a luxury. Time away at writing conferences? At residencies? Isolation and loneliness and all for a book? These things, as a child of an immigrant family (or at least, of my immigrant family), are sacrifices that do not translate. And when I think of the framework of the publishing world, and how the prize system works alongside an anointing “fellowship” system (read this great article by R.H. Kanakia who breaks down “the gatekeepers” of literature framework), I must again ask myself: 

Why do I write? What am I doing?

I don’t have set answers, and I don’t think I ever will. There’s so much a writer sacrifices to write, and it’s different across the board, and intensely personal. But I know this: I ask myself why I keep going in order to question my desire to be exceptional or to interrogate my need to be seen—seen as a writer, and seen by the world through my writing. Publication fulfills that need—that basic human need to be seen. The answer fluctuates, morphs, and changes as I change, as I grow as a writer and human, but there’s this constant that always stays the same:

I write not just to be seen, but to be heard. I write to communicate, to say I have a place in this world, too. I write because I am not an island. I write because the silences in my community, in my family, are real. We carry them until death. And I will always write against that torrent, against the silence, because in my own way I write, I create, to be strong. I write because, in its most honest way, it creates a life, and a room, determined and created on my own.

Melissa R. Sipin is a writer from Carson, California. She won First Place in the 2013 Glimmer Train Fiction Open and her writing is published or forthcoming in Glimmer Train Stories, Kartika Review, and The Bakery, among others. Melissa blogs at msipin.com.