Easter Monday, resurrected writings

Today is April Fools’ Day, a day of joy for pranksters, a day of annoyance for those of us who may be subject to the pranks. (You’ll find no pranks or tomfoolery on this blog today. I hope you’re not disappointed.) It is also the first day of National Poetry Month, which ought to be celebrated broadly, and I plan to do my part to highlight poetry in the coming days and weeks.

Today is also Easter Monday, which is celebrated in some parts of the world, but, aside from the annual Easter egg hunt on the White House lawn today, not so much in the U.S. You might, however, score some bargains on overstocked candy eggs and Easter bunnies today.

As for me, I’ve been thinking today and recently about the idea of resurrection — not only of the resurrection of Jesus as recorded in the New Testament gospels, but of the resurrection of writings. My own.

A discovery

Last week, while attempting to tidy up my home office, I discovered, shoved in a cranny of one closet, two expanding file folders stuffed with some of my past writings. I knew I had kept old notebooks and such; I just didn’t remember how much old writing I had kept.

These folders contained multitudes. They held notebooks and note pads of journal entries, essays, poems, and short stories attempted and aborted; the stapled and paper-clipped manuscripts of short stories past; and a few rejection notes from literary journal editors I’d attempted to persuade to publish my work. “There were a lot of things I liked about the essay,” wrote one editor, “but it is too long for us & needs to be tightened up to move more quickly. If you want to revise, I’d be interested to see again.” Alas, I never took this editor’s advice, and the essay languished, long forgotten.

Some of these newly discovered writings dated back to my college years. They included three short stories, photocopied at a Kinko’s and inserted in a bright blue Trapper portfolio, I’d written for a creative writing course taught by Speer Morgan, a novelist, short story writer, professor of English at the University of Missouri-Columbia, and, then as now, editor-in-chief of the fine literary journal The Missouri Review. (These stories, complete with Professor Morgan’s handwritten critiques, are pictured at the top of this blog.) This, to me, was akin to discovering something as ancient as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Housecleaning now indefinitely delayed, I spent the better part of two hours examining the contents of these two engorged folders, poring over them carefully, like an archaeologist studying fragile relics at a dig site. Much of the writing was not good, and I don’t know why I’d bothered to keep these pages upon pages of scribblings for all these years. I’m sure I thought I would return to them some day and rediscover their brilliance.

But some of the writing, I must admit, was pretty good, or so it seems to me. I read through a few pages and thought these words might be worth re-examining in a new light and perhaps reconsidering, either as stories and essays in their own right or as ingredients for some yet-to-be-created writing.

And so I began to think about these findings in light of the Easter season. I began to think about the concepts of resurrection and eternal life.

Where is Kilroy?

Not necessarily the eternal life promised by the teachings of Christianity, even though, last week being Holy Week, that idea was strong in the ether. But of the long, if not eternal, life of some writings.

The writings captured in the Bible are thousands upon thousands of years old. They have survived generations. They are as close to eternal as just about any writing. The same goes for Homer’s works, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and many other writings.

None of us gets to live forever, of course. But perhaps our words will outlive us, somehow. If they are resurrected and made visible.

Every writer wants that, right?

As William Faulkner put it:

Really the writer doesn’t want success. … He knows he has a short span of life, that the day will come when he must pass through the wall of oblivion, and he wants to leave a scratch on that wall — Kilroy was here — that somebody and hundred, or a thousand years later will see.

William Faulkner, from Faulkner in the University

Writer David Means echoes Faulkner in his collection of short stories titled Instructions for a Funeral. Means writes that he creates stories because “in some cases a voice that needs to say what it says or else (and I feel this, really, I do) it’ll be lost forever to the void, the same place where most stories go, forever; the real stories of men and women who lived lives — quiet desperation! — and then died, gone forever into eternity, so to speak.”

Maybe it’s presumptuous of me to think of uncovering these old words as a resurrection. Maybe it’s more appropriate to think of the process as an excavation. But I prefer resurrection, as it conveys a newness of life. Excavation connotes finding relics or artifacts to put on display; remnants of the dead.

So resurrection it is.

Now, to return to housecleaning, but with another task in mind for the near future: to sift through the writings, separate the wheat from chaff, and determine whether any of the words are worth redeeming, worth a new life.

Notes

• William Faulkner’s “Kilroy was here” remark refers to the practice of American G.I.s during World War II to scrawl the phrase on equipment and landmarks.
• David Means’ reference to “quiet desperation” refers to a phrase by Henry David Thoreau in his book Walden: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.”

Photo: image of my three short stories with handwritten critique from Professor Speer Morgan.