Although epic poetry holds an important place in literary history, I tend to read prose more. Like most wordsmiths, I do write poetry—more like dabble in it. Unlike my fiction writing, the poems aren’t intended for publication. They are too deeply personal for that. Still, my recent post about Gothic (the movie) had me thinking about Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. They were known for their poetry, of course. I can’t pretend to have read a ton of it, but their free-spirited personalities are intriguing. Back in 2012 I read Edward Trelawny’s account of Shelley and Byron’s last days—neither lived more than six years after the summer when Frankenstein was born, both dying before forty. I was recently reading about Byron in another context and was reminded (I’d read it before) that an acquaintance once described him as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
Authors, I suspect, are often neurodiverse. There’s a reason I think this. The size of the population that reads for pleasure is depressingly small. It stands to reason that writers are a subset of that small population. The writers I know tend to have some quirks. They function just fine in society, but they do seem to operate on a different level. I’m naturally drawn to them. I have been trying to get to know writers locally—there are quite a few here in the Lehigh Valley—and sometimes they will let you in. Often not. It’s tricky to befriend writers, in my experience. I suspect I might be one myself. In the published side of things, I’ve produced six non-fiction books, but I also publish short fiction (and have completed six unpublished novels). Still, I’m not part of the “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” club yet. If there is a club.
Over the years I’ve joined three different writing groups. Their meetings are interesting since many of us are introverts. One thing we all have in common is that we love to talk about writing. Perhaps it’s because mainstream success is so difficult to come by. Publishing houses have consolidated and the “Big Five” are responsible for by far the majority of books the reading public—that most rare group—buys. One thing that’s true among the writers I know is that most would keep writing even if publication, or hope of publication, was off the table. It is what we do. For many years, perhaps too many, my writing was academic. What nobody knew in my teaching days, however, was that I never stopped writing fiction. It was there I put my thoughts that I’d classify as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”
