Besiege the spirit

I keep running across the idea of writerly obsession--as an impulse for finishing a longer work, as an impetus for writing anything at all.

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ORIGIN late Middle English (in the sense [haunt, possess,] referring to an evil spirit): from Latin obsess- 'besieged,' from the verb obsidere, from ob- 'opposite' + sedere 'sit.'  The current sense dates from the late 19th cent.

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DFW had tennis. And drugs, the altered experience. David Mitchell, to some degree, has Japan, and gallivanting about with a matryoshka storytelling structure. Arielle Greenberg has being Jewish, being a mother. Ben Lerner had war. Then physics and love and a different kind of war.  Mavis Gallant wrote a whole book of stories about Paris. Susan Howe wrote a whole book about Emily Dickinson.

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If you're a typographer, perhaps you're besieged by the persistent use of double-spacing after a period.

(Guilty).

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Photographer Neil Krug took a series of 60s-inspired pulp portraits, featuring the long legs of his wife, who is holding a bad-ass gun.

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Being a curious neurotic, I always wondered about how diffuse my thinking is. I am never obsessed with any one thing in particular. Images, though: a tree, a certain kind of light, walking in the snow along the river. A long, empty prairie.

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Being in an MFA program gives you the freedom to be obsessed with one thing. Or, maybe less often, with a bunch of things all at once. As soon as you wear one out, you're done with your draft, you move on. Most likely it'll sneak up on you again in a different form.  But you're already trying out the next fascination.

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Over at The Millions Cathy Day wonders if we should be teaching the short story as definitively as we are, if we might be killing the urge to create in longer forms. Whether the workshop indefinitely kills a productive discussion about a longer work.

Maybe this is also a roundabout way to think about cultivating longevity of thought. Of continued fascination with one evolving idea. To stick around for awhile.