By Stuart Phillips
“Thank you for your service.” I have a viscerally ambivalent reaction when someone says that to me. Sure, I spent over a decade in the Army as a small cog in the Big Green Machine. I understand that part of my discomfort with the rote patriotism of these throwaway thanks is my firm belief that most of the people saying it would immediately classify me as the “wrong” kind of soldier if they knew my politics, since apparently that is now the determinant of value. Mostly, however, my reaction derives from my fundamental resistance to admitting that my contributions made any difference.
When I finished my first tour in the Army, I was back home having a drink at the Hoka in Oxford, Mississippi (miss you, Ron) when a young lady came up and told me that she’d had a huge crush on me in high school. I had no idea who she was, but it gave me a real paradigm shift. It made me realize the truth in the lyrics by the Butthole Surfers: “You never know just how you look through other people’s eyes.” That confession made me realize that there was a real value, and impact, in just being me.
“Making a difference” is Sisyphean when you exist on the margins of the writing world, when you make do with the occasional short story publication while deleting the stream of rejections. Each publication moves the boulder uphill; each rejection rolls it back down.
More poignant is the difficulty of believing in what you do when value is defined in truly repulsive ways in a business model that commercializes and commodifies both art and craft to the point that if you don’t have a splashy book jacket and Reese Witherspoon pimping you on the Today Show, you are a failure. We’re trained to believe that if you don’t sell enough “units” to crow “Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair” then you, and your work, are meaningless. I call bullshit.
Flannery O’Connor observed that the real value of writing is in taking an everyday occurrence and presenting it in a way that allows a reader to extrapolate broad lessons about the world and themselves. I understand that this approach doesn’t necessarily sell books, but it changes lives—not in the Saul on the road to Damascus sense, but in the same way that one teacher can nudge, inspire, inflect you to think a little differently about something. And that one brief, shining, moment of impact is both magical and worthy.
I think it’s important to begrudge no one their big contract for a work of commercial fiction. Especially as the world burns around us, people need their shows, their entertainment, their escape. But many of us don’t write with the end goal of fame or riches (or any end goal at all). We write because we feel that we have something that needs to be said, to be read—regardless of the size of the audience or the reach of the words.
Having accepted that, it can still be demoralizing when you tear a tiny piece of yourself off and paste it onto a sheet of paper, then hear crickets. No one fills out your contact form on your website. No one comes up to you after a reading. You begin to wonder if you can somehow reattach that ear.
But bear in mind that you are part of a community. To paraphrase The Breakfast Club, it’s demented and sad, but still a community. It may be rare to get the feedback that validates you in your world of thoughts and emotions, and I have no cure for how that feels. Like many of you, I have not mastered the art of self-validation. Instead, simply allow me to metaphorically come up to you in this bar and tell all of you– the writers, the poets, the playwrights, the lyricists– thank you for your service.
Read more of Stuart’s work here at Reckon.
Stuart Phillips is an expatriate Mississippian, former Army officer, and recovering lawyer who now lives and writes in the Mohawk Valley of New York. A graduate of Ole Miss, Pepperdine (JD) and Fairfield University (MFA), Stuart is slowly driving himself mad with revisions on The Great Southern Novel. You can follow his descent at stuartphillips.work or on Instagram @deltawriter12.