Thanks for the Thanks.
There’s been a trend lately where friends have been throwing my name in the acknowledgments pages for certain excellent things they’ve published.
The first time it happened was a few weeks ago, when I saw that longtime buddy Joe Hall mentioned me in the front matter of his heartbreaking (but also invigorating) poetry collection, Pigafetta Is My Wife. Less than two weeks later I got a package in the mail from friend Zachary Watterson containing the latest issue of the Massachusetts Review, which features ‘Insulatus’, Zach’s short essay of very distilled bravery. I turned to the contributors page, and there I was tucked in between badasses Patricia Engel, David Shields, Brian Christian and Charles Johnson.
The feeling, initially, of appearing on those pages is a kind of reactive gratitude for the gratitude, a swell of unnamable pride; not that I had anything to do with the quality contained on that page, but that I was ever able to somehow associate myself with it to begin with.
Joe wrote the earliest version of Pigafetta when I was at work on a terribly tone-deaf nonfiction book about luck. We were were both DC-dwelling fellows in our thesis year at George Mason’s MFA program, and we did not share work. What we did share were long, traffic-choked rides into Fairfax over which we discussed hovering frustrations about the months and years ahead, conversations that carried an itchy, beleaguered desperation that sometimes grew so thick that I lost concentration on the road and nearly steered us into oncoming cars. I always felt about Joe then as I often do about my wife: he tolerated me. The work that ended up in the book — written during the long, humid weeks in between those pained conversations — is something strange and remarkable, sewn together with a beautiful, elliptical severity, and I refuse to believe I had anything meaningful to do with it.
