I’ve been noticeably absent from this Substack the past few weeks. My work self has been active and I’ve not had the bandwidth, even on Sundays, but I’ve also been psychically overwhelmed by the enormous catastrophe that’s facing our country and our planet. Do you feel as helpless as I do against this venom? Saturday’s No Kings protest was invigorating, a blessed reminder that there are many millions of Americans who are appalled at what our country has become under this corrupt regime. It’s important to draw hope, even a modest one, wherever you find it. Cynics may say these large-scale protests are meaningless, but that’s not true. They matter.

A couple months ago, my good friend Sejal Shah (Dispatches and Invisible Disabilities) asked me why I named my Substack Bright Boy. It’s a fundamental question to this project—one I wrongfully assumed was obvious!—so I’m finally going to address it in this post. Keep reading; it’s below.

AARP Essay Published!

Some good news to begin, though: My AARP essay (“How Tourette Syndrome Affects 5 Older Americans”) was finally published earlier this month (gift link). I’m very proud of this essay, and deeply honored to be entrusted with these stories from four incredible people. Embedded in the article is a three-minute video with Jeffrey Kramer, whom you might recognize as Deputy Hendricks in Jaws. I encourage you to read the story and watch the video. One goal of mine in writing this Substack (and publishing periodic pieces in places like AARP) is to educate the general public on Tourette Syndrome. To that end, I recently interviewed Vernell Jones, pictured above, for my Youtube page. I tell (part of) her story in the AARP piece.

If you enjoy the essay, I’ll be presenting at this free virtual event for the Tourette Association of America on October 28th (register). I’ll discuss my childhood, my novel The Book of Losman, the making of the article, and my TS story.

A Writer’s Life

Despite my absence here, I have been writing—lots! Over the past three months alone, in the scattered moments I carve out time in the wee small hours of the morning or night, I’ve written more than 17,000 strong words on a new novel. Three full chapters! Like The Book of Losman, this new work has been marinating in my mind for many years, but it’s coming to the fore now due to circumstances beyond my imagination: a dystopian novel, it’s foregrounded in the political chaos we’re witnessing in the United States today. I’m prodded to write by a deep sense of urgency, in other words, to tell this story now.

Last night, I went into my friend’s sound studio and recorded an audio version of each chapter. As a longtime listener of audiobooks, I know what I like in a narrator and what I don’t, and I’m eager to assess the musicality of the language. What works? What doesn’t? I may post one of these audio cuts here on Bright Boy as a gift for subscribers.

Assuming I finish the novel to my satisfaction, I don’t know if this manuscript will ever see the light of day. For one, it’s the most violent story I’ve ever written—and that makes me uneasy. I’m not a violent person, or writer, but these are violent times. Even in the language the regime chooses to use, the violence is eerily palpable: “radical left,” “illegal aliens,” “violent criminals,” “terrorists,” “thugs.” These are the deleterious words of a despot, but in literature you can fight fire with fire, and that’s what I aim to do.

But what will become of literature (and art) in the coming years when AI tears its claws deeper into the flesh of our broken culture? Who will read lengthy texts? Who will care? What power does literature hold to enact or enable significant change in a society as fucked up as this one? Upton Sinclair’s famous novel The Jungle (1906) exposed the horrifying corruption in Chicago’s meatpacking industry, and it caused such a stir among the populace that real, lasting changes actually were made. Going further back in time, Thomas Paine’s 1776 pamphlet Common Sense may have very literally started a revolution. Can you imagine this happening today? The New York Times’ 1619 Project may be our closest analogue, but in a dreadful irony, the 1619 Project incited a reactionary backlash by powerful white elites that have turned the clocks backward. Lasting change circled around and, like a mean drunkard who has just pissed himself, went tottering off in the wrong direction.

In our fragmented and diffuse culture, many among us can’t even admit that Nazis were hideous and despicable people. Monsters even. Or that fascism is in fact a terrible form of government that will only lead to death and destruction for many. Our body politic is poisoned by a corrosive acid that’s eating its way into our hearts and minds, and I don’t see an antidote on its way. The funding has been slashed.

And yet, call me naive but I still believe in literature’s power to alter these same poisoned hearts and minds, to change attitudes, and even to heal. It’s not literature’s job to accomplish these things, but it nevertheless can do them.

Literature as a Light in the Distance

I am an unapologetic lover of reading and literature of all kinds, but I didn’t start out that way. In elementary and high school, I wasn’t a big reader at all. I read what I had to for school. The typical fare—I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, The Catcher in the Rye, Lord of the Flies, “Hamlet,” “Macbeth,” and so on. To give you an idea of how ornery a child I must have been, one rainy summer day when I was around 11 my mother told me to read a book. That seemed boring, but ever the dutiful son, I picked up one of my brother’s Hardy Boys mysteries. I didn’t want to read the book, but I wanted to have read it so that I could appease my mother. My solution was to read the last word of each line on every page, and when I was done I clapped the book shut and told my mother I was bored. I was that kid. (Sorry, Mom!)

The truth is, I wasn’t ready to be a reader yet.

This is one of my life’s regrets: I wish had had a greater inclination to reading and other intellectual pursuits as a boy. Had I been a better reader, I’m certain I would’ve published my first novel long before I actually did, and I’m doubly certain I wouldn’t have felt so dumb for most of my life. Because here’s the thing—and why I call this Substack Bright Boy—I’ve struggled throughout my life with a lack of self-confidence. I was the very opposite of a bright boy, I thought: I was a dim bulb. Ingrained in me from an early age was the ever-present sense that I was a fundamentally flawed, inarticulate twat.

Is this an unfair self-recrimination? Sure it is, but it was also one I could not shake for decades. Whether real or imagined, I felt dumb as a kid, and that matters to a person’s psychological growth. It’s easier to fake confidence than to develop it.

As I’ve grown older, however, I’ve gained greater insight into why I’ve lacked confidence, and this has altered how I view myself. The number one reason is that I never considered myself a smart or interesting person. I mostly struggled in school, I failed algebra three times, I barely managed to climb over low bars. That I made it into college amazed me, but once I was there, I did everything I could not to mess it up. Because of this early struggle, I always felt I had to work harder than others even to keep up.

Now, at last, I’m finally coming into myself. I’m not the broken boy I once was. Better late than never, I suppose. So “Bright Boy” is, you see, cheerily ironic.

My lack of confidence steered my meandering path forward in life, from when I was a twitchy elementary school kid to now, and it has caused me to feel inferior to others, of lesser value, throughout my life. I’m not alone in this, I’m sure. Doubtless the majority of people feel this way at some point in their lives. Some people just get sucked into a vortex of negativity, like me, and have to claw their way out over a longer period of time. And some people never escape the vortex. Have you ever tried picking up walnuts during an autumn wind storm? It’s an impossible task. Like little bombs, they keep falling all around you. You duck your head and hope you don’t get plunked.

That’s what escaping from your own negativity feels like. Still, I always climbed upwards. I sought out smarter people, smarter conversations, smarter books.

Books and reading changed my trajectory. They were my way out. I read today (and every day) for the simple reason that reading is the clearest way to develop an educated, intelligent mind. To become smarter. There’s a good Danish word to describe my life’s process: mønsterbryder. No English-language equivalent exists, but it essentially means “pattern breaker.” I grew up in a working-class family, and the only expectations placed on me and my siblings was that we would one day support ourselves through gainful employment, most likely of some blue collar variety like our parents. Breaking this pattern means shattering the glass ceiling of expectations and venturing out completely on your own, and that’s not easy to do. In fact, it’s really hard—you stumble and bumble through unlit rooms trying to find the damn light switch. You often feel lost, especially, in my case, when you’re trying to pursue a career as a writer. Writing well is hard. The only way to become a writer, a good one anyway, is to read your ass off.

Reading is Seeing

When I was a freshman in college, one of my fondest classes was on the American short story. Professor Warren* was a woman with an infectious joie de vivre who loved words, stories, and language. In one early morning class, I remember, she giddily remarked that one of her favorite non-reading activities was climbing behind her husband on his Harley Davidson and zooming down the highway at full throttle. Vroom, vroom! Her husband was also the university town’s sheriff. I never met her husband (which I guess is a good thing!), but I always considered her marriage to the sheriff a neat literary juxtaposition: the fuzzy, metaphorically nuanced realm of literature meets the sheer cliff face of hardened, inexorable law. Yet together, like Sonny and Cher singing “I got you, babe,” the couple race down the highway, poised on the knife edge of life. Awake and fully alive.

I read so many wonderful stories that year. I fell in love with Flannery O’Conner’s A Good Man is Hard to Find, a quietly subversive collection of stories I still consider one of my all-time favorite books. I was drawn into the jazzy frame of James Baldwin’s short story “Sonny’s Blues”—an experience that would lead me to more of Baldwin’s astonishing work—and I was sucked in by Philip Roth’s “Defender of the Faith.” Roth, too, became a favorite writer.

There were more. Plenty more. I struggled to read Henry James’ Eight Tales from the Major Phase and—I kid you not!—I circled between 10-15 words per page. That man was prolix. I kept a big fat Merriam-Webster’s dictionary with me and I looked up all these words, underlined them, and tried to imprint them in my memory bank. I liked the stories without fully comprehending them.

Still, I was so absorbed in all the stories I read, or the Bob Dylan songs I listened to, or the Charlie Chaplin films I watched, I was so obsessed with the construction of language and story that I became hooked for life. Even without needing to, I would go to the library and I would search for literary criticism on what I’d read or heard or watched, and I would read these essays to deepen my appreciation for and understanding of the work. In this way I would later spend many thrilling months immersed in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, still my favorite all-time American novel. It was geeky behavior, and a very different version of myself emerged that year. My 11-year-old self would never have recognized him. For whatever reason, once I discovered the beauty of language and stories, I made a sharp U-turn and never looked back. [As I write in this Lithub essay, I credit my truck driver father for my love of reading, but professor Warren came along right after and cemented it permanently into my life’s passion. Reading is fundamental.]

In any case, that’s why I named this Substack Bright Boy. I probably could write an entire memoir on the subject, but I’m not quite ready for that—and you’ve got plenty of other stuff you need to read first.

*Warren is not the professor’s real name.

NEWS: It has now been one year since The Book of Losman was published. Did you know that it’s also available as an audiobook? I recently downloaded it from the NYPL and listened to it for the first time. That’s a weird experience for an author, but if you like audiobooks, Dreamscape Media did a terrific job with Tristan Wright as narrator.

K.E. Semmel is a writer and translator. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in Ontario Review, Lithub, The Millions, HuffPost, Electric Literature, The Writer’s Chronicle, The Southern Review, Washington Post, and AARP online, among others. His debut novel is The Book of Losman. Learn more at kesemmel.com.