Rebecca Brown is fearless as well as prolific.  Her latest book, American Romances, is a smart, moving collection that transcends – no, it crushes – all expectations of what an essay should be.  To this day, one of the greatest compliments I have ever gotten came after I read a short story at a Goddard residency (which was later published in The Crab Creek Review) and a colleague jokingly told me it sounded like a bad copy of Rebecca’s work.  This excerpt comes from the essay, “Failure, An Appreciation.”  Enough said!  Rebecca writes:

When it was first published in 1851, Moby Dick was, in terms of commercial and critical reception, a terrible failure. It was big, sprawling, philosophical, Biblical, encyclopedic, and weird. It was, that is to say, not at all like the earlier “successful” novels Melville had written. Melville’s first novel, Typee, a fictionalized account of his real life adventures in Polynesia (naked ladies! Cannibals!), was a hit in both the USA and Britain, and his publishers and readers were thrilled when he brought forth a sequel, Omoo.   Now, I am not at all dissing popular fiction. I love some of it. What I am dissing is the fact that some writers are punished when they try to expand their repertoire to include other things besides what’s popular. 

When Melville deviated from the kind of popular adventure he’d once written, critics called his work “trash,” said it was “muddy foul, and corrupt.” One newspaper headline even blared: “HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY,” and members of Melville’s family arranged for a consult with a doctor about his sanity.

But Herman Melville had not gone insane. He had simply needed to write outside the standard “formula for success” books most people wanted.

Around this time, Melville met Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose Mosses from an Old Manse the 15-years-younger writer much admired. With Hawthorne, Melville was able to discuss his frustration with the difference between writing for market place “success” and writing for and from his soul and mind and heart: “What I feel most moved to write, that is banned—it will not pay. Yet altogether, write the OTHER way, I cannot.  So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches...”

Hawthorne recognized the merits of Moby Dick and so did a few other readers. But it was not unlit the 1920s, seven decades years after it was published and three decades after Melville died, that Moby Dick was “rediscovered” and began to be regarded at the masterpiece it is.

I wish I could, every time I am rejected by some arts granting organizations or magazine or publisher, remember stories like the story of Moby Dick.

Or the story about Park Young Sook.

Park Young Sook, Korea’s foremost ceramic artist, was asked to make a group of Moon Jars for show in a gallery. A moor jar is a traditional Korean vessel made of two thrown pots, pressed together at their lips to make one. Moon Jars developed in the neo-Confucian culture of the Choson era between the l5th and early 20th centuries and are the epitome of Choson sensibility, representing elegance, humility, integrity, purity, and self-control. They are solid white. Traditionally, Moon Jars have been relatively small—the size you can hold in one or both of your hands. But when Park Young Sook went to look at the gallery and saw how huge it was, she realized that traditionally sized moon jars—which had been made for more intimate settings—would not be right there. So she decided to make really big ones. And though she had been a ceramist for decades, it took Young Sook five years to make a Moon Jar the size she wanted. It was one of these five-years-in-the-making Moon Jars that I saw at the Seattle Asian Art Museum a while back and it was stunning. Even if you didn’t know what went into making it, you’d just find plain beautiful. 

Then, when I saw the making-of video, I was just blown away. In one scene, a bunch of guys are loading some big, white, beautiful pots onto the back of a cart. As I watched the video I thought, They’re being kind of cavalier—just popping those babies into the cart like that, with just little piece of cloth between them. Then the guys pushed the cart a little way down a path and unloaded the cart, yanking the pots off and hauling them up into these woods.

Then I saw the artist, Park Young Sook, standing next to a big shallow hole in the ground. The guys bring the pots over to her and she takes a hammer and slams it right into a pot. The pot breaks and she hammers it again and again, into smaller pieces, then kicks the busted pieces of pot into the hole and the guys bring another pot and she does it again. Smashing all these huge big beautiful pots to smithereens.

It turns out that each of those pots had some little flaw or crack or blemish, something most people wouldn’t see, but not exactly what the artist wanted. So she knocked apart that “draft” to see how and where it broke apart then took that knowledge back to her studio and started another pot again. She did this for years, failing and breaking, failing and learning and failing again on the way to make the object she desired.

What am I trying to tell myself? 

That artistic “success” doesn’t come at once. That you may have to keep trying and trying to create the thing you have envisioned. That even if you make a thing you are proud of, “they” might not like it or get it, or might think that because you have been doing this work for years you are getting paid decently for it, even though you aren’t.

That you might need break a lot of pots, and write a lot of drafts, and that not everyone is going to like what you do. Which is why, however your work is received by “them,” you need a good, true, decent friend or two—a friend or family member like Melville had, a writer pal or a bunch of fellow potters, of actual practitioners of art—to believe in you and to understand and bear with you throughout the long hard work of creating your art, of your trying to live a life of making art. 

That even if you do make something you are proud of others may not recognize it at the time if they ever recognize it at all. 

That then, if you ever do “succeed” in making art you believe in, you need to be able to give it away.

I’m still trying to learn to live with that.

Rebecca Brown’s twelfth book, AMERICAN ROMANCES, a collection of gonzo “essays” released by City Lights, won the Publishing Triangle’s Judy Grahn award for nonfiction in 2010. Brown’s other titles include THE LAST TIME I SAW YOU, THE END OF YOUTH, THE DOGS, THE TERRIBLE GIRLS (all with City Lights), EXCERPTS FROM A FAMILY MEDICAL DICTIONARY ( Granta and University of Wisconsin) and THE GIFTS OF THE BODY (HarperCollins). A frequent collaborator, she has written numerous texts for dance; a play, THE TOASTER; and WOMAN IN ILL FITTING WIG, a book length collaboration with painter Nancy Kiefer. Her work has been translated into Japanese, German, Italian, Norwegian and Dutch. She recently co-edited, with Mary Jane Knecht, LOOKING TOGETHER: Writers on Art (University of Washington Press), an anthology of writers’ responses to work at the Frye Art Museum. She lives in Seattle.

This essay is excerpted from "Failure: An Appreciation," published in the anthology The Alchemy of the Word, California Institute of Arts and Letters, reprinted in THE STRANGER, 2010.  For more information on the book and this series, The Daily Mentor, check out my introductory post here.