The Argonauts & Bluets. A letter to Maggie Nelson
Dear Maggie Nelson,
One of the reasons I waited so long to read your work is because when I began writing my own story in earnest, enrolling first in shorter essay classes and then in multiple yearlong book craft classes, one piece of feedback was consistent. Readers kept saying, “This is very Maggie Nelson.” I didn’t want to be accused of copying you.
Four years of revisions later, and I have spiral bound and vetted the most complete iteration yet with early readers, most of whom know me personally. When I paid for two manuscript consultations with queer published authors I deeply respect, they both repeated the assessment of comparison to you. Along with advice about how to get my work published that included such straight-faced conventional gems as “Go for a MFA!” and “Think about turning it into a set of essays!” While there is no doubt I have more editing to do, I am not interested in crafting the queer out of my book.
Leonard Cohen said, “You put in your best effort, but you can’t demand the consequences.” He should know because he lived through Columbia-fucking-Records re-negging on “Halleleujah.” His team found a smaller, scrappier, inde publisher to release the record they knew was good, and we all know what happened to Halleleujah.
I am grateful for what I imagine to be your endurance through the process of obtaining a Ph.D. so that you could command the audience to prove that a book does not have to be spoon-fed narrative pablum to be richly satisfying and saturated with the truths of the human condition, to inspire innovation and reinforce lesser-expressed ways of being that transcend the status quo and imagine a more liberated future.
Every piece of everyone’s advice about what I should or should not be doing in my manuscript fell away by the fourth “sentence” in The Argonoauts in which you name the rapture of a good ass-fucking. What else is she going to say?!?!?!? I absolutely had to know, and so kept turning the page, to my delight finding life-giving distilled reflections of my own experiences in both being non-binary and a birth parent. Books like yours are good friends to the parts of us often unseen.
And I imagine the ardent pushback you must have received in your creative process to lead with such an unequivocal taboo. “Well, Argonauts was not Maggie Nelson’s first book,” one of my advisors said to me, again, perhaps unconsciously, urging me toward conformity.
Exhausted from a season of querying my book, I’m now meeting people at a new job at a neighborhood restaurant where most people are about 20 years younger than me and many of them are queer. One of these shining new colleagues spotted me yesterday at a coffee shop reading Bluets.
“What are you reading, CT?”
I said, “Do you know Maggie Nelson?”
“No, is it good?” he wanted to know.
“It’s amazing… something like abstract poetic prose, it’s fucking beautiful.”
“I’ll check it out,” he said, pulling his phone from his pocket, smiling and nodding.
“I’m putting it on my list now.”
This experience reminds me that books like ours travel not necessarily through academies but person-to-person in humble communities.
The ship for my Ph.D. or MFA sailed long ago. The learning I share in my writing has been forged in the fire of waking up, unlearning, and practicing the art of authentic human connection. My lab has been an archaeological dig where my Self has been buried in some Pompeii- like patriarchal disaster. I have been both the scientist and the object of study (gasp!) while I work with a team of chosen family to remove all the layers of socialization and culture that have hidden me. My unconventional work may well be silenced by a prevailing bias that one must clack their heels through the marble hallways of The Institution in order to be credible enough to imagine liberation and assemble thoughts into sentences. I find moments of surrender knowing, as Cohen said, I cannot demand the consequences. And yet I am still frustrated.
What would you do if you were me?
Sincerely,
CT Moon
