By Ben Berman
We were at the home of some friends when I found myself in a conversation with their six-year-old son.
My dad told me that you're a writer, he said.
I am, I said.
Then let me ask you something, he said. How come I've never read anything you wrote?
That's a good question, I said.
Think about it, he said. Right now there are thousands of people out there who aren't reading any of your books.
He shook his head and walked away, leaving me all alone in the kitchen.
I grabbed a slice of lukewarm pizza and started laughing to myself. I'd recently published a small book of short prose and was well aware of all those people out there not reading it. It got me thinking about one of the two recurring dreams that I'd been having of late, which involved me walking into a bookstore to give a reading and seeing that there was only one person in the audience.
This, in fact, actually happened to me once, and although I laughed it off at the time—cracked some joke about the sound of one hand clapping—it was one of those moments that remind you of the fine the line between humility and humiliating.
We left our friends' house shortly afterward, and although it was getting late we decided to give our five-year-old a bath.
Giving our five-year-old a bath is always a bit of a production: she likes to bring trays of Tupperware into the tub with her and pretend that she's the star of some warped Disney film.
Look, I overheard her say at one point as I was walking by. I know you think that you killed my parents. But I have news for you. It is I who poisoned your parents!
Then she started laughing this evil, maniacal laugh.
I have no idea what the premise of her story was, but I wasn't about to ask because if she knew that I was eavesdropping, she would have immediately stopped the show.
And as I stood in the hallway listening in, I started thinking about the other recurring dream that I'd been having as of late. In this one, I am taking a shower and when I step out, I realize that there is a full crowd of people waiting for me to read. I walk up to the podium and not only do I not have my book with me, I'm not wearing any pants.
I had always assumed that this was simply the converse of the first dream—rather than showing up with something to say and finding no one there, I show up with nothing to say and find everyone there.
But as I listened to my daughter play so freely in the bath—her imagination wandering in the most surprising and delightful of ways—I wondered if this dream was actually about the tension between the pleasures of writing and the pressures of being a writer.
On my better days, I'm able to compartmentalize the two. But whenever I've sat down to write, lately, I've found myself worrying about book sales and Goodreads ratings, about the reviews that people were writing and the reviews that people weren't writing.
My five-year-old was starting to sing some song that could only be described as a ballad to her bum. I couldn't make out all the lyrics, though, because she was laughing so hard as she belted it out.
And I realized that if I wanted to reclaim the pleasures of writing, I couldn't worry about all those thousands of people not reading my books. Because that's not why we write. We write for that single fleeting moment, as Merce Cunningham says, when [we] feel alive.
From Writing While Parenting © Ben Berman, 2023. Used by permission of Able Muse Press.
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Ben Berman is the author of three books of poems and the forthcoming book of flash essays, Writing While Parenting. He has won the Peace Corps Award for Best Book of Poetry, has twice been shortlisted for the Massachusetts Book Awards, and has received awards from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, New England Poetry Club and Somerville Arts Council. He teaches creative writing classes at Brookline High School. You can reach Ben at his website.
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