John Biscello

Before this goes any further, allow me to come clean: I have never written a single line in my life. At least not creatively. I wouldn’t know how. Not knowing how is one of my specialties. It is my fool, my ineptitude, my bumbling clown. If I-don’t-know were both a religion and cliff’s edge, you’d see me loitering on the precipice, staring out blankly, a devout disciple by egress and default. Then how do the novels, plays, stories, poems, etc. get written? Simply put—I find a writer. I go inside myself and search and search and I find a writer, the way a recruiter finds a paladin, or the village idiot divines cause from effect. I discover the writer who will tell the tale in which I can get happily lost. In this respect, I have had the great good fortune and privilege to have worked with many different writers, each one bearing distinctive gifts that I envy and admire. How I wish I could be them! Yet I am not now nor have I ever been the writer. I am the witness, I am the emcee, I am the fan, I am the hanger-on, I am the associate and delegate, the representative and agent. I am the eternal geek with a tapeworm for a brain. A part of me longs to be a writer, to feel like one, which is why I have been inexhaustibly compelled to seek again and again and again within the inner-verse and fields of dreaming to meet and intimately acquaint myself with writers. They are preferred and necessary company. My solitude wouldn’t be the same without them. I warm and insulate myself through their creative activity. Otherwise I feel cold, distant, removed, a slow-drifting vacancy. In my everyday life, my pedestrian fronting if you will, I am relatively blind when it comes to recalling physical and visual details. Case in point: I can enter a room, leave the room ten seconds later, and if someone were to quiz me on what I saw in the room … visual details would range from scant to none. It’s like I was never in the room at all. Or a part of me was in the room, but another part of me, the one that is perhaps closely linked to visual observation and recall, wasn’t there or isn’t operational. My working theory is that a part of me is and has always been existing elsewhere, and it is in this elsewhere place where I go to meet writers, where I hope to have chance assignations or encounters, and I will be the privileged recipient of a poem or story at least, and a novel at best. I never know who I’ll meet, what they’ll offer (if anything), which is why it is vital that a part of me remains stationed there, elsewhere, 24-7. In our semblance of reality, let’s call it the dream-side-up (the elsewhere being the dream-side-down or dream-side-sideways) recall, for me, often means inventing something inspired by what it was I was supposed to have seen or experienced. It is a fractious and fluxing state of restless superimposition or hydraulic makeovers. I don’t understand how things work, don’t understand the physics, science or mechanics of why they work. The functional aptitudes of machines, instruments, services, and systems confound and mystify me. When I read directions or instruction manuals, I am often boggled by what I’ve read and left scratching my head as to why none of it is computing. I am staggered by how little I know, or by how much of the world and its doings and machinations I find puzzling and incomprehensible. Perhaps this is one of the catalytic forces behind my going out inside myself in search of writers. I want to experience the force of their fluency, their tale-spinning, their crafting and constructing worlds using words alone. It is a phenomena which has never failed to wow and inspire me. When I discover a writer with whom a bond and connection is shared, it blows me away that no research is required, no outlines or blueprints or structural notes … these writers are authors with novels attached to them, or fully formed inside them. The novel is part of their operating system and physiology. The novels, same as the authors, are capsuled inside the timeless, yet for the novels to manifest and exist in our space-time reality, a host or host-body is needed and that’s where I come in. The authors require my space, my time, my attention, my hours, my days, my life-force to bring forth the works. I am used, and happily so might I add, as the host, the domain, the platform, the cheat-code of genesis. Why am I going on and on about this right now? Because, at the moment, I am looking for a new author, one who will emerge from me to produce a new work. I am burning and itching to find a new author, because I feel a great void in my life (one author I knew, or pretended to be, has compared it to a big yawn lined with razor teeth) when there is no author for me to birth and echo, no author to which I can parasitically cling. Without the author’s vitality, I am as good as dead. I am not an author, I am an author-eater consumed with hungry ghost hunger. In pretending to be the authors I have met, hosted and collected, in signing my name to their books, I feel as if I’m part of something bigger, something resembling a gateway and endless pilgrimage. Yet deep down I understand that the words, every last one, belongs to the authors, and they are not I.