Oh fuck...

Here are some things Lucy Grealy wrote about me:

"...this is one damn talented woman. This is a Siamese-twin, double-hearted work... Each essay works.... I'd like to see that last essay be the penultimate essay; in an indirect way, I think that would make her point even more stongly. Or maybe I'm just trying to trick H into writing another essay, simply for the pleasure of reading it. I'm won over."

"H is a true writer, and I admire her work greatly. Her essay on the photographer Eggleston, which I saw through several drafts, and which was about so many different things, was beautiful. Overall, I think she needs to be aware of all the complexities in her writing, and force herself to follow some of the many threads in the pieces to their ends, but these are problems of tenaciousness and self-esteem, not talent. H is full of talent; all I want is for her to write more."

And something Sven Birkerts wrote about me:

"The prose is a result of H's arriving at a certain point of writerly readiness. She has, in her own off-beat way, brough herself to the threshold of serious publication. Now come stamps and envelopes and strategies of keeping faith through the long stretches where it seems that nothing will ever happen. It will."

Re-reading this stuff stirs me up in complicated ways. How much did they meant all that? I was on the verge of semi-serious publication once, with near-misses with Harper's and Esquire. And I was in that DaCapo Best Music Writing anthology. But deciding to make a living as a writer, by any means necessary, actually hurt me as a serious writer, I think. Quitting my job is actually an opportunity to go back to writing for the art and the discipline of it. Except of course I'm going to law school, which I'm sure is going to take up such the bulk of my time and attention and energy