Mike Scalise

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.

Likewise with “Insulatus,” which Zach sent me early drafts of following a writers conference we both were scholars at in the summer of 2008. It was about crime, mothers, heredity, and loneliness, and what was on that page was immediately more daring and compelling than anything I’d ever written. I think I read it, suggested Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife — which is also about mothers, heredity, and loneliness – then gave Zach some vague, useless commentary about persona. Next thing I knew the thing was slated to come out in the Mass Review, and I’ve been lucky to read the work that’s sprung from that first piece, which is even more daring, even more spellbinding.

To be acknowledged for your role in accomplishments like Joe’s and Zach’s is satisfying, but not in a “yes, I did help” way. Its satisfying in that the pride gives way to a colder humbling, particularly when you realize how tentative your connection to the text is; that these writers would have done the same quality work had I never met them. But its also a reminder that I’m glad I did. The acknowledgment is just a galvanizer of my proximity to that work, something that allows me, if nothing else, to be grateful that I had access to its growth.

What I’m trying to say here: thanks for the thanks, guys.