Don’t stop now
Writing is all right if you can handle the extremes. Sometimes you come up with a turn of phrase so packed with meaning and heretofore unimagined poetics that you feel you’re better off quitting right then and there because you’re sure nothing better has ever been written. Next day you see it again, that same turn of phrase. Only now it’s a slime-coated chunk of garbage, something a starving possum would refuse.
At the same time, you send out poems, stories, essays—works you’ve labored over for years—to a broad selection of literary magazines. They languish in some erudite netherworld until an email comes from the void: “While we found much to admire in your work, ultimately we’ve decided to pass . . .” It never feels good, but after enough rejection it begins at least to feel familiar. That callous that’s formed around your spirit is nearly hard enough to deflect the sting.
But every so often there actually are those moments when something you write gets in—anywhere from Joe’s Lit Mag to Granta—and you feel on par with Marquez, Morrison, Ishiguro, certain you could hold your own in a Swedish ballroom waxing with aplomb on the plausibility of an unreliable narrator in the third person limited.
The writer and writing teacher Michael N. McGregor is in the enviable position of having two new books come out in 2025. The second, An Island to Myself, is a memoir of his time alone on the holy island of Patmos in Greece; it comes out in May. The first, the novel The Last Grand Tour, hit the world in January and I just finished reading it.
Briefly: Joe Newhouse is an ex-pat recently divorced indie tour guide in Europe, which feels much more like home to him than the Pacific Northwest of his lonely childhood. But he’s done with guiding. His current group—Rudy, Sarah, Tonia, Felicity, Donald—is to be his last. The group knows each other well, it turns out, and as the book proceeds we realize just how well. And how deeply the lines of fracture run between them. They’re part of a massively successful video game company called Luckspur, whose principal—Gerhard—should have been on the tour too but, mysteriously, is not. And, as the group ranges through Austria, Germany, and Italy, new love blooms between Newhouse and Tonia, a love steeped in the beauty, power, and ache inherent in the land and its history. The ending of the book is somehow both inevitable and out of nowhere. It arrives with the sudden cataclysm of an earthquake. But even as the ground shakes beneath our feet, we realize we’d been primed for such shaking from the book’s first word.
McGregor is dealing with the end of the world in The Last Grand Tour, or at least the ways in which we each come to the end of our worlds. What are we supposed to do when everything that brought us to our brink dissolves but hasn’t had the decency to kill us? It’s a mercy and an agony at the same time. Who are you when the you-ness suddenly sloughs off? McGregor builds his book with that question as the keystone. As the group bounces across Europe in Newhouse’s ramshackle tour bus, they intend only to look at the old world around them; to look and, ostensibly, to marvel. But the bus is no guard against the incursions of the past.
In the most powerful scene, representative of the depths of the buried calamities each character faces, Rudy, who is Jewish, wanders alone through the ruins of a concentration camp. He stumbles upon a blind German man with a docile German Shepherd as a service animal. Rudy watches the dog as it patiently helps the man to simply stand up. All in the exact place, Rudy realizes, where several decades prior the same dogs ripped his ancestors apart.
Did I say writing is hard? It’s hard. Did I say it’s lonesome?
It’s lonesome. Did I say the payoff is never equal to the labor, at least in terms of the nitty-gritty? It isn’t. Did I say or at least adequately imply that “I don’t know” is often the answer to the nagging question “Why do it?”
Did I say Michael McGregor is a writer, but also a writing teacher? A mentor? He is. One of mine, in fact. Awhile back we met at a writing retreat at which he was the resident writer to whom we could go for counsel and critique. Not long ago he sent me an email. I won’t share the contents but I will say that the effect of it was and is now and, I expect, will continue to be . . . well, I’ll say it this way: You know how, when you’re a kid and you’re playing in a dark crawlspace and you lose your balance and you put your hand out to catch yourself and your hand gets gashed open by a jag of metal you didn’t know was there? And you scramble out in a panic and a grownup douses it with peroxide and all those bubbles rise from the cut?
This furious and sudden mass of tiny bubbles, teeming in your hand, hard at work for your healing, your repair, your wholeness—all to fix a deep wound that simply comes with the territory of being who you are. A kid—me—in that crawlspace. A writer now, with the jags of self-doubt and rejection never not in my path.
I carry that email with me. I printed it and stuck it in my Moleskine. And I can pull it up anytime I want because I sure didn’t delete it. It must be that the writing life, while it contains some of the obvious (busting the keyboard late at night, or the head-fog that keeps you from coming up with ideas, or the moodiness . . . God, the moodiness) also contains gifts given with care, with kindness, with sincerity. Salves for the expected wounds of a lonely calling. Crystal transmissions beamed out to the remotest outpost of the vocation: Keep going. It’s worth it, believe me. Don’t stop now.
Paul Luikart is the author of several short story collections, including The Realm of the Dog. He serves as an adjunct professor of fiction writing at Covenant College in Lookout Mountain, Georgia and lives in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
