‘It Can Be Done with Words’ by Erin MacNair

We know you have it in you, Thomas, even though you don’t know it yet. Listen to your future readers. We know what we are talking about.

You’ll know it in about two years and four months when your agent calls and says something like, “We’ve done it,” but you can’t quite hear her words over the static inside your brain. 

You dared to imagine that this book, The Last Map, would feed your family; it was all you were hoping to achieve. (We got this bit of information from the videos and interviews many years later in your career, where we are now, whereas you are still huffing the fumes of writerly dream ether). You have no thoughts of transcending culture, no ideas about binding humanity together in one 84,900-word paper-bound package. You knew your prose was powerful, but every writer thinks that, from what we’ve heard. We know that right now writing feels like extracting the marrow of your incisor tooth with a hollow needle, made worse by a sunny morning in front of an incessant blinking cursor, waiting. Later you will tell us about the anguish: pain manifesting itself in physical symptoms like neck aches, Crohn’s, gout. 

“It’s almost like he was giving birth,” your wife chimes in, in one rare interview where you tell her to come up and join you on stage, flashing that toothy grin, your sharp-angled jaw handsome in that forgotten-cowboy sort of way. We wanted to dislike her because we didn’t want to share our deep love. In the end, we loved her. Time to write was a luxury afforded to you by your support team, i.e., her. You told us, “Halfway through the book, divorce was imminent, but she hung on.” 

She concurred. “Living with a writer is awkward — all those silent spaces in their minds filled with combustible gas,” she will say. 

“I am a great writer because she was a great wife,” you will say. We cringed a little, because, that’s a given until we realized you actually meant it. We watched as you took a sip of tea then described the origin of Janus, our heroine, our goddess of knowledge, your hands moving through the air as if sculpting. How Janus means two-faced (we gasped at that revelation, of course! Her dual nature of light and dark, loving experimental jazz but also eating dirt when no one was looking). 

You can’t imagine now, in your early draft, how desperate we are for your shimmering, modern fairy tale, a panacea to our damaged psyche.