A long time ago, I was once a guest at a dinner party for very important people. It was a lively group of friends and erudite urbanites; artists and journalists, lawyers and doctors, husbands and wives, humanitarian-ish world travelers who swapped stories with aplomb. Their timing impeccable.
I was excited to accept the invitation despite my feelings of outsiderness I have when meeting any group of new people. I’m ill-at-ease at best in social situations until I feel safe. I’m anxious to feel accepted or even liked and I usually try too hard.
As the meal unfolded, I embraced my default anthropologist’s perspective along with parallel pangs of envy because deep down, I wanted to fit in and be part of their kind of belonging; a camaraderie that had an ease of conversation and shared laughter heralding qualities of intimates who’d raised their families together and who’ve walked through fires of life holding one another up over years. Theirs was an easy, familiar banter. The evening felt warm and nice and interesting. And at an appropriately well-mannered moment, a guest turned the table’s attention to me—the stranger in their midst—and asked what it was I do. “I’m a writer,” I said.
My answer turned a switch that spun the convivial spirit of the gathering into something stiff and distant. The way I remember it; shoulders, backs and necks straightened. Downcast glances were exchanged as silverware pushed food around china plates. I think I heard wine glasses being refilled. In my imagination, congealing fat from the sliced roast beast formed thick and opaque because it was that cold and long a moment.
The strained silence was broken only when the one guest who held authority to do so, did. A Pulitzer Prize winning author responded thusly; “Even I don’t call myself a writer.”

I am on a train for about four days from Springfield, Massachusetts to Tucson, Arizona with a delivery for my elder. I love the train. I have nothing to do and everything to do. Here in motion, I exist in the now of expansion and contraction. It’s like a buddhist practice to me. This luxurious amount of time alone is a revelry in the drawn out rhythm of a long journey that mandates relinquishing control of the wheel. I am amazed at the kindness of strangers and the intimate stories they share in the observation car. The Amish family I visit with, is patient with my ignorance of their ways and just as curious about me as I of them. They tactfully veer the conversation to Belgium v. Percheron draft horses if and when I tread too close to some proscribed edge. Duly noted.
The first night I slept fitfully, reminding myself to sink into the movement and fall into the sounds. My dreams featured a small cast of ogres from my past. When I woke up with an Amtrak coffee the temperature of the sun—I left those ogres behind to wither and die on the tracks in the wake this Texas Eagle’s westerly route under a Scorpio Moon. I am pleased as punch to report that I’m more refreshed and way lighter for it. There is nothing quite like letting go of that which doesn’t serve you.

When I think about that dinner party and the young woman I was then—in hindsight I wish she hadn’t taken that humiliation and judgment to heart as hard as she did. I wish she understood that that author was a gatekeeper of white male patriarchy, supremacy and privilege. But I swallowed the shame and it suffocated me for a very long, long time.
Here’s the thing; that person’s caustic remark revealed more about him and the scarcity mindset he operated in and from, in contrast to the abundance of a creative, engaging literary writing community that actually exists outside of that ‘old school’ kind of hubris diminishing others.
One would think and hope, such an acclaimed writer would be supportive and welcoming. That they’d make room in their rooms in order to overflow them in order to build expansive, billowing, beautiful tents instead, for more writers, to cultivate more voices, develop craft and well told stories. And “to be a good literary citizen,” like Chelsea Hodson1 encourages. Well, fuck him.
Look, this what I say to my younger-self Alice and to anyone who’s reading this:
If you write you are a writer.2
Don’t let anyone tell you different and I won’t tell myself anything different either.
It doesn’t matter where or when or how I publish. I’m taking my own time, writing in my own voice, creating, crafting, diligently doing my own work. To tell my stories of trauma and to do my best to tell them well. This is not being self-absorbed. This is being subversive.3
I love words and language and I think I’m pretty good with them. What’s important to me is that I create in service to my life. That I write. If there is one reader gets something from my work, the connection is made. The years I allowed myself to be shutdown because of shame, insecurity, fear, bullying, gatekeeping and me looking for love in all the wrong places—are lessons learned, experience gained. I am sorry I caved and gave away my power so readily those years ago. That I acquiesced to someone else’s narrative of me and made myself smaller to fit into it. But no longer.
Here’s the thing: Acts of art and creation are imperatives to living and impact our bodies, spirits and souls. Especially, particularly, urgently, now.
I encourage you and me to unlearn and question embedded patriarchal systems every day. To experiment, take risks with joy, abundance, integrity, discipline and practice. To find your people and your voice; the endings and new beginnings that we could not have imagined when we begin again with one blank page.
Here’s a shout-out to the authors who are on this train with me in one form or another: Alexander Chee, Pema Chödrön, Rachel Cusk, Annie Dillard, Jessica Dore, Melissa Febos, Mary Karr, Christopher Marmolejo, and as always—my colleagues, the writers of the Morning Writing Club.
I’m sending this from the Texas outlands moving about 100 mph—wish us luck. Thanks for reading! I’m so glad we’re here together. Now it’s time to write.
~ Alice
https://chelseahodson.com/ The Morning Writing Club
Ibid.
Melissa Febos, Body Work
A big fat affirming YES to all of this, Alice. And I’m glad you mentioned Chelsea bc she models that literary citizenship so well. Her tent is ever-expanding and welcoming, as we know. I’m glad you know the truth now: you are a capital W Writer. Also I’m sorry you had to have dinner with such an ass all those years ago. Keep locomoting ;)
Hello Alice, I've loved watching your train journey unspool on IG. Thank you for this post. I too wish I could tell my much younger self to wholeheartedly reject someone else's vision of my art, no doubt thrown out as a casual observation, which I internalized for decades.