Introduction
There are committed writers and writers of commitment: distinct but, I would argue, not mutually exclusive categories.
A committed writer is one who is either committed to the process of writing (a commitment often reflected in great productivity) or to a particular aesthetic model (a commitment often reflected in the achievement of mastery of craft in that particular model), or to both. Consider, for example, Jules Verne, P.G. Wodehouse, Agatha Christie or P. D. James.
A writer of commitment, on the other hand, is one who has made a deep, unshakeable pledge to the vast potential of literary expression, a sort of metaphysical, almost devotional lifelong pact; a writer for whom the removal of such an allegiance or self-identification would cripple his or her very identity, make them utterly unable to function. Given this highly unempirical definition of a writer of commitment, it’s impossible to know who is or isn’t one, but I’d guess that writers such as Gene Wolfe, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates are all respectable candidates for consideration as writers of commitment. They’re likely also committed writers. (Do the committed writers I mentioned double as writers of commitment? I’ll leave it up to the intrepid reader to decide).
It may not be possible to become a truly great writer unless you exist in the intersection of both groups.
Jack Skillingstead should know. He satisfies that requirement.
And his career embodies an interesting evolution: always a writer of commitment, he has during the last decade built up a discipline of daily writing. In other words, he has become a committed writer. And with this transformation has arrived publishing success.
Touring the Bahamas between December 3rd and December 7th, 2012, during the “Sail to Success” writing workshop aboard the cruise ship Norwegian Sky, I learned in detail what being a writer of commitment, but not being a committed writer, looked like in Jack’s case. It meant a stack several feet high of novels, written in starts and fits, that were all dead on arrival--eight, nine, maybe more such abortions. Piles of stories, dozens and dozens of them. Twenty years of toiling away sporadically without any indication that publication was forthcoming. Here’s the crucial part. During these years Jack gave up on writing several times—but failed at failing. Writing was too necessary, too essential, for him to permanently forgo it. He needed to write, had to write, in order to live. A writer of necessity; a writer of commitment.
So he continued. Until one day publication did indeed arrive, and in the course of the next ten or so years Jack went on to publish a torrent of highly-regarded stories and two well-received novels (and he’s hard at work on several more).
I admit I’ve offered an admittedly romanticized notion of writerly commitment. But the grim reality is that the writer of commitment risks much. Graham Greene mentioned “the long despair of doing nothing well”; think about the really long despair of doing nothing poorly. And it gets worse. The writer of commitment risks losing himself, disappearing utterly in the pursuit of literature. Jack Skillingstead not only exists in his stories, but perhaps, given his commitment, risks existing nowhere else quite so fully. (Nancy Kress assures me that Jack definitely exists outside his fiction—but of course, she would say that).
Further, the writer of commitment doesn’t act like a veteran tour guide or a hardened expert when they invite us readers into a new landscape. They are as awed by the sights as we are. Jack’s writing provides a gateway into a strange, uncertain, shimmering world. Step by step, his narratives wend their way to stray, misbegotten, incandescent wonders of psychic subtlety, roiling mists of self-discovery, plummeting precipices of realization. Reading the fine stories assembled in this collection you get that sense of communal experience time and again, those moments of condensed, almost poetic porousness during which Jack’s experiences seep through the text, somehow directly into us.
Commitment, once simply a strand of Jack’s genetic constitution, has now also become a thematic vein running through his fiction. Commitment to what, we might ask? Many of Jack’s protagonists are wounded loners. Sometimes they get a shot at connection, at redemption of a kind, and sometimes they don’t. Some of them are bent on self-destruction. But they’re not necessarily committed to any such predicament. No, I think commitment rears its head thematically in the following way: a commitment to commitment. Jack’s characters, as one might expect from rich fiction, don’t share a common ideology or set of morals, and yet they do tend to operate by the belief that they ought to be finding something—love, art, parenthood, an acceptance of mortality—with which they might be able to align themselves, something to absorb into their psyches and help fulfill them. They’re committed to travelling, to searching.
And when we lose ourselves in their stories, and allow them to become our own, so are we.
—Alvaro Zinos-Amaro
May 2014