1914—Goodbye to All That: Writers on the Conflict Between Life and Art

by Lavinia Greenlaw

I learn from the programme that intelligent and creative people are particularly susceptible to hypnosis. The most immune turn out to be the really stupid and the lame-brained.

Among other things, I cannot shake the feeling that perhaps I am making a mistake by being in a writing program instead of law school, which is what my father and family back in Zimbabwe believe I am doing. I have all along kept my writer’s aspirations private, even imagining that a switch might flick within me so that I would go on to enroll in law school after the termination of my first graduate degree and finally study what I came to the United States to pursue when I left home for college years ago. But the switch never flicks in the end. Although I am not comfortable disappointing my family, I know I could not face myself if I were to go against what is in my heart, even a heart mired in hesitation. Still, I am just not yet at ease with my writer self and, while I am enrolled in a reputable creative writing program, the fact that I have not published a single word means, at least to me, that I do not have the license to claim that writer self. I remember that for a while I resist calling my work in progress a novel, and whenever I am pressed to talk about what I am working on I call it a “thing”. So much goes into naming and calling, and for me the word “thing” makes my project more approachable and less intimidating—after all, I have not written a novel before, so who I am to speak about writing “novels”?