Good morning, writers!
Last week we had a deliciously morbid discussion about what book you would choose to read on your deathbed. Our thanks to all of you who participated. (And pssst: There's still time to join that conversation! Our posts never
close.)
But wait, don't climb out of your imaginary deathbed just yet! Because this week we want to play a game of... let's call it Deathbed Would You Rather?
Lately I've been thinking about art and posterity, in part because my pal Drew Nellins Smith wrote a wonderful essay about it over at Electric Literature called "You'll Fete Me When I'm Gone."
In it, Drew writes about how certain he is that his writing will never catch on with readers during his lifetime, and how he comforts himself with fantasies that, like Fitzgerald, Melville, Lovecraft and others, his work will be "discovered" by future generations.
Drew also how it can work the other way, using as a counterexample a poet named Richard Eberhart, who won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award but is now almost entirely forgotten.
So the natural question, which we write about in this week's post, is: Would you rather die in obscurity but one day have your work as widely read and admired as
Fitzgerald’s, or would you rather, like Eberhart, be loved in your lifetime but then be almost totally forgotten?
Loved in your own time and ignored in all others, or ignored in your time and loved in all
others?
You can respond to this message to have a private email discussion, or join the conversation over at the blog post itself. Either way, I'm eager to hear from you, and very curious to see what you all have to say.
And do read Drew's essay, which he concludes with the sort of advice all writers need to hear from time to time: “The only real failure in art is to fail to produce it.”
And oh
yeah, our three favorite responses to this question win the writers a free copy of Drew's debut novel, Arcade. So make it good!
And I swear, next week we'll stop this crazy death
march.
