My friend wrote me a love letter. I guess it's a love letter,
because I don't know what else to call it. She is one of my favorite writers in
the program at UCI where I am getting my MFA. This girl and another guy, who I
will just call BLANK (because I didn't ask permission to use his name)
encouraged me and loved me into a submissive state of self-love and openness
that has never occurred before or since. I love these two people with all my
heart and soul and they make me want to be whatever I am in all its flawed
uncontrollable energetic glory. At some point this summer I asked Kat to
remind me who I am. I asked her to tell me what she thought of me and to
reflect back that I should stay here on planet earth and continue to be my Lisa
Douglass self. As per usual I was looking for some form of validation of a self
that I don't always completely understand but that I exist within as I am in
this current human body----I was hoping for just a sentence or two of what
meaning I might have to people here on the earth as we know it. Instead, Kat
wrote me the following thing. I read it on my phone, in a room with people
who were very very sad. People who I
love. I cried openly, but no one noticed, immersed as they were in their need
to stay alive in their own way, just like I do through words.
Happily, I share this with you, because I've never had anyone say these things
to me and because I have had many people think that I hear things like this
often when nothing could be further from the truth. I reflect back to you, to
ask a friend to tell you what they think of you, because it might be
interesting. I doubt, with my whole open heart, that you will ever get a letter
so beautiful and well equipped to keep you going one more day, but in this
case, I humbly thank Kat for saving my dear heart and for reminding me that
sometimes people see things that I cannot see at all. Namely, myself.
Lo,
we have reached a period in the troubled beginnings of this millennium – a
crossroads – at which nothing is as it appears. Banks are government-subsidized
for-profit industries, PETA kills tens of thousands of kittens a year, and
everyone on the internet is a ten-year-old police officer. It’s an ugly scene,
no doubt, and to make it through the day while swallowing the absolute bare
minimum of Pills That Make Us Not Feel Feelings (for which I praise the god who
probably doesn’t exist), we need one truth to hold dear. Oh it’s time, my
kittens, for a manifesto.
And on this worrisome day, there is BUT ONE THING I
HOLD MANIFEST: There are very few damn good things in this world. Lisa Douglass
is pretty much all of them, condensed down into superdense space plasma.
THE
MANIFESTO OF LISA DOUGLASS, BEAUTIFUL, HONEST, CUPCAKE-SCENTED VIDEO-MAKING
GODDESS
1. Lisa Douglass is not a goddamn liar. You know how we all loved Catcher in the Rye when we were thirteen, before it became embarrassing to admit you like Catcher in the Rye, because when you’re thirteen everyone you meet IS a goddamn phony and, by gum, you do hate those phony bastards? I don’t care whether it’s embarrassing or not: everyone you meet at thirteen is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at twenty-three is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at thirty-three and forty-three – the world is filled with douchebags, and we need to keep acknowledging that so we can treasure the rare prize of a non-phony.
2. Lisa Douglass is not a phony. If your hair is fucked-up, she’ll tell you your hair is fucked-up. If your prose is fucked-up, no one else will tell you. Lisa Douglass will tell you. This is a gift that surpasses that of the wish-granting gem.
3. Lisa Douglass will never say anything about you that she won’t say to you. And usually the things she says to you – the things she says to me, anyway – are the kinds of things you give up hope on people saying because you’re beginning to suspect they’re probably only wishful thinking on your part.
4. Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful
5. and the chick has style, that kind of style that you can’t beg borrow buy or fake so if you’re not born with it, look, why don’t you just go ahead and get your Connecticut country house and keep shopping Isaac Mizrahi for Target the rest of your life, because you’re strictly drugstore-smells-alike and everybody knows it.
6. Lisa Douglass’s fiction is the reason we will always need fiction. She’s got that damn heart thing that most people are too scared to even approach. Her fiction makes you laugh but then it jabs you with that those truths that are big and hurt like fuck but you can’t put them away. Lisa Douglass isn’t afraid to butt heads with The Big Lie. Every other lame wannabe New Yorker fiction dude or Saunders-alike on the street fights their heart on the way to the page until it’s limper than a sell-by-yesterday supermarket porkchop. Lisa Douglass pins down that hot thrashing thing right to the page and she doesn’t even nuzzle it. She writes things that hurt me to read. (The good kind of hurt. Everything worthwhile hurts; the rest is just escape, and where did escape ever get anyone? Except Jews in Nazi Germany, I guess. THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT FOR JEWS IN NAZI GERMANY. THEY HAD THEIR OWN SHIT GOING ON AND ARE THUS EXEMPT FROM THESE VERY IMPORTANT THOUGHTS.)
7. I remember details about every single thing Lisa Douglass has ever turned into workshop. Go on. Test me sometime. She is the real goddamn thing and everything she writes gets into your skin and inside of you. Except it was already there inside of you, just waiting to be activated, because it is so goddamn true.
8. Sometimes Lisa Douglass’s fiction is so true and inspiring that it makes me hate myself, and go to the gym and run too long on the elliptical while thinking Why Am I Pretending To Be A Writer Thoughts, and then bang out twenty pages of red-hot prose while thinking, “What would Lisa say? How would she say it? How much of this is disguise and which parts of this needless façade would she crush into the dirt with one of her impeccably stylish boots?” Often when I’m writing fiction and it’s all weird and fake and New Yorkery, I tell myself, “Pretend you’re writing a letter to Lisa,” and you know what? It always helps me.
9. Did I mention Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful? Some people don’t think that’s important, and I know people are born with what they’re born with, but for my money, confidence and style make the world more bearable and goddamn is it nice sometimes to be able to look upon a person and think, “Yeah, your presence makes my life feel a little more like a movie I’d like to watch, one that’s filled with excitement and intrigue and Beautiful Things.”
10. Lisa Douglass actually gives a fuck about you. Maybe she gives too much of a fuck – maybe that’s something that hurts her beautiful truth-making heart – but even if it leads to painful vulnerability, it matters. Lisa Douglass writes the flat-out best critique letters I’ve ever read, because instead of talking about nuts&bolts and things that can be taught, she looks at the big picture: how art touches lives, how it makes people feel, how it can change you. It seems sometimes that Lisa Douglass is the only person who remembers What Actually Matters (which isn’t, in my experience, at least, always the easiest thing to remember).
11. Lisa Douglass is weird. Ultimate weird. Mega-weird. Irreplaceable weird. And if there’s anything more worth being than weird, I don’t even want to know about it. You can’t replace Lisa Douglass. Not in a room, not around a workshop table, not in the conversation of contemporary fiction, not in the world. Period. Everyone gives Henry Ford a lot of credit for creating the assembly line, with its interchangeable parts, and yeah, props to the dude for enabling twentieth century convenience – but the thing about convenience is it robs us of doing The Hard Thing, which is true and difficult and therefore the most worthwhile. Lisa Douglass, on the other hand? Roll up your assembly lines. She’s straight artisan.
12. Lisa Douglass is exquisite and magnificent and I adore her very, very much. Anyone who doesn’t is a phony a douchebag a flake and probably a communist. These things, today and in perpetuity, I hold manifest. Love love love,
K
1. Lisa Douglass is not a goddamn liar. You know how we all loved Catcher in the Rye when we were thirteen, before it became embarrassing to admit you like Catcher in the Rye, because when you’re thirteen everyone you meet IS a goddamn phony and, by gum, you do hate those phony bastards? I don’t care whether it’s embarrassing or not: everyone you meet at thirteen is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at twenty-three is a phony bastard. Everyone you meet at thirty-three and forty-three – the world is filled with douchebags, and we need to keep acknowledging that so we can treasure the rare prize of a non-phony.
2. Lisa Douglass is not a phony. If your hair is fucked-up, she’ll tell you your hair is fucked-up. If your prose is fucked-up, no one else will tell you. Lisa Douglass will tell you. This is a gift that surpasses that of the wish-granting gem.
3. Lisa Douglass will never say anything about you that she won’t say to you. And usually the things she says to you – the things she says to me, anyway – are the kinds of things you give up hope on people saying because you’re beginning to suspect they’re probably only wishful thinking on your part.
4. Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful
5. and the chick has style, that kind of style that you can’t beg borrow buy or fake so if you’re not born with it, look, why don’t you just go ahead and get your Connecticut country house and keep shopping Isaac Mizrahi for Target the rest of your life, because you’re strictly drugstore-smells-alike and everybody knows it.
6. Lisa Douglass’s fiction is the reason we will always need fiction. She’s got that damn heart thing that most people are too scared to even approach. Her fiction makes you laugh but then it jabs you with that those truths that are big and hurt like fuck but you can’t put them away. Lisa Douglass isn’t afraid to butt heads with The Big Lie. Every other lame wannabe New Yorker fiction dude or Saunders-alike on the street fights their heart on the way to the page until it’s limper than a sell-by-yesterday supermarket porkchop. Lisa Douglass pins down that hot thrashing thing right to the page and she doesn’t even nuzzle it. She writes things that hurt me to read. (The good kind of hurt. Everything worthwhile hurts; the rest is just escape, and where did escape ever get anyone? Except Jews in Nazi Germany, I guess. THIS MANIFESTO IS NOT FOR JEWS IN NAZI GERMANY. THEY HAD THEIR OWN SHIT GOING ON AND ARE THUS EXEMPT FROM THESE VERY IMPORTANT THOUGHTS.)
7. I remember details about every single thing Lisa Douglass has ever turned into workshop. Go on. Test me sometime. She is the real goddamn thing and everything she writes gets into your skin and inside of you. Except it was already there inside of you, just waiting to be activated, because it is so goddamn true.
8. Sometimes Lisa Douglass’s fiction is so true and inspiring that it makes me hate myself, and go to the gym and run too long on the elliptical while thinking Why Am I Pretending To Be A Writer Thoughts, and then bang out twenty pages of red-hot prose while thinking, “What would Lisa say? How would she say it? How much of this is disguise and which parts of this needless façade would she crush into the dirt with one of her impeccably stylish boots?” Often when I’m writing fiction and it’s all weird and fake and New Yorkery, I tell myself, “Pretend you’re writing a letter to Lisa,” and you know what? It always helps me.
9. Did I mention Lisa Douglass is unfairly beautiful? Some people don’t think that’s important, and I know people are born with what they’re born with, but for my money, confidence and style make the world more bearable and goddamn is it nice sometimes to be able to look upon a person and think, “Yeah, your presence makes my life feel a little more like a movie I’d like to watch, one that’s filled with excitement and intrigue and Beautiful Things.”
10. Lisa Douglass actually gives a fuck about you. Maybe she gives too much of a fuck – maybe that’s something that hurts her beautiful truth-making heart – but even if it leads to painful vulnerability, it matters. Lisa Douglass writes the flat-out best critique letters I’ve ever read, because instead of talking about nuts&bolts and things that can be taught, she looks at the big picture: how art touches lives, how it makes people feel, how it can change you. It seems sometimes that Lisa Douglass is the only person who remembers What Actually Matters (which isn’t, in my experience, at least, always the easiest thing to remember).
11. Lisa Douglass is weird. Ultimate weird. Mega-weird. Irreplaceable weird. And if there’s anything more worth being than weird, I don’t even want to know about it. You can’t replace Lisa Douglass. Not in a room, not around a workshop table, not in the conversation of contemporary fiction, not in the world. Period. Everyone gives Henry Ford a lot of credit for creating the assembly line, with its interchangeable parts, and yeah, props to the dude for enabling twentieth century convenience – but the thing about convenience is it robs us of doing The Hard Thing, which is true and difficult and therefore the most worthwhile. Lisa Douglass, on the other hand? Roll up your assembly lines. She’s straight artisan.
12. Lisa Douglass is exquisite and magnificent and I adore her very, very much. Anyone who doesn’t is a phony a douchebag a flake and probably a communist. These things, today and in perpetuity, I hold manifest. Love love love,
K
