As I write, it is rapidly approaching Halloween here in the United States and the stores are now filled with discounted creepiness. Remaining novelties and adornments are everywhere, from the large grocery stores to the gas station ‘Grab-n-Go’ joints, from fast-food restaurants to university bookstores. Orange as a pumpkin, skeletal as the trees, the bare ash, the stark maple, the stick hickory and the grey elm, as dark as 6.00 in the morning. What was anticipatory is now spookily pending.
As if to join in the approaching celebration, the moon has been full these last few nights, big and round and golden in a clear cold night sky – what is sometimes called ‘the hunters moon’, in recognition that fall is indeed hunting season. A time to dress in camouflage clothing and stalk things. In the evenings, working on a book about analysing creative writing, I have been reading about fellow creative writers, about how they think and write about themselves. Many creative writers. I go to sleep with them in my head.
When creative writers write about their writing, and about their lives as writers, they go beyond the literal. That is not meant to be a comparative statement – perhaps other people in other occupations do this too, I haven't looked. But the spooky sense of something beyond the mechanics of the job, the physical and mental activity of it, seems heightened with creative writers. It is not a concerted attempt to remember or to be remembered – not the plastic adornment of a witch's mask or the frightening impact of seeing inside the green foam head of a Frankenstein. The otherworldliness is decided worldly, mundane even, a kind of labour of being human but raised to the level of it being noted, not merely recognisable. You could not make a bauble or a mask or a curio out of this. The haunting here is not made into a face or found in a sound, not an expression or even the scent of pumpkins and spice. A creative writer, I go to sleep tonight with creative writers in my head, the full moon lighting the decking, the cold of the season frosting the window, the night especially dark.
We reveal ourselves in creative writing but otherwise live adorned by the works we produce, the representations made by others, the cultural expectations of some and the invisible toiling of others, deep among the everyday, unseen. I am haunted tonight by creative writers – by a presence that is not replicable, that cannot be reduced to representation. Selves inside selves, thoughts and imaginings inside the activity of writing, time inside time, circling through present and past, a self-hood for all seasons.