My fascination with Peter and Wendy grew out of my fascination with Wendy. She was in love with a betwixt-and- between who was forgetful, disloyal, and refused to ask her parents a question on a “very sweet subject.” I was in love, and I too felt as if I were a wee child playing house and marrying pretend. Because I still felt like a child—I still do—my love existed in the realm of performance. I played the good housewife and wanted children to mother. I was trying to have a baby at the time and could not have a baby, and so I felt Wendy’s want of children and her performance of mother to the Lost Boys most poignantly.
Role-playing and trying on different guises aids in assimilating real life, its successes, its failures, its happenstances and all. By pretending to be one thing, you can better accept that you are not another thing.
Perhaps that is where my love for Wendy and for possibility in form began. My book not merely because of the unknown that was stalking toward them is the creative outgrowth of my research on the Peter texts, yes, but it is also critical theory and a theory on reading insofar as it suggests, albeit in an experimental way, an alternative to the traditional academic essay on literary interpretation. However, it can also be classified as prose poetry because of how it is written, as veiled memoir (I wrote myself into this) and—due to my building on Barrie’s story—fiction.
It is also a betwixt-and-between text in how it appropriates space. The bisected page, relying on “The Home Under Ground” sections to contain those moments that center on decay, death, and passing out of existence, acts as a casket of sorts, a memento box. The bisected page also interrupts or disrupts the act of reading. So in a text that presents a multiplicity of voices and points of view, there is also a multiplicity of reading experiences.
I could say that my work is not so easily demarcated because its subjects, Peter and Wendy, are also not so easily demarcated, but I find that I often rebel against boundaries, preferring instead to envision, to test, to experiment, to practice, to pretend, to fracture, and then to make anew.
The text could only be subversive; that is, it could only exist as complicated, as yearning, as multifaceted as Wendy Darling—the girl who, as I see it, fell in love with the bad boy, ran away with him, wanted to delight in adult games and desires, to have fantasy cross over into real life.
It could only be its best while playing at its own brand of make-believe. That is, the text is only successful if it truly believes the story it puts forth: that what its author has read between the lines in Peter and Wendy is the truer story.
On Beginnings and Endings
To begin is to admit an infatuation, a longing, a love.
A beginning signals that one has moved well past being merely interested and is now immersed in what is most likely an obsession. To begin connotes more than falling in love: to begin is to commit, to stay, to hold.
To write is to encounter a love affair. And as we groom ourselves and struggle to appear our most attractive to our beloveds, so too do we, as writers, want to present ourselves to our readers at our very best.
Or perhaps we get caught unawares: our ragged, disheveled, unsure, untidy, and ugly selves are what make someone else love us, for in writing there is always, inevitably, the ugly.
Love, in writing, is mostly a one-sided love.
Either I love or you love.
And, sometimes—although this is quite rare—we love each other. That is what makes the reader flip the page, that is, read past the beginning.
I am thinking about a beginning that I love, that I adore. I remember, always, so dearly, the beginning of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “I am living in the Villa Borghese.” I will always remember “I am living in the Villa Borghese” and the rest of the first page and a half of Tropic of Cancer. My teenage marginalia reads, not naively, “This is the most beautiful beginning to a book. Ever.” This is something I still believe today. It is the most beautiful beginning to a book. Ever.
I adore beginnings.
I adore the beginnings of love affairs.
When I teach a creative writing course, I sometimes photocopy the first pages of books that I adore. I ask my students to guess the writers, the books. They are often wrong. Not only are they unable to identify a writer or book, they cannot identify the genre.
The uneasy transmission of genre tells me a lot about the nature of love: spontaneous, unplanned, risky, and, yes, that most beautiful of writerly and loverly attributes: suicidal. For to write and to love, and to write and to love sincerely, is to write and to love like a kamikaze.
I loved the GRE Subject Test in Literature because I was asked to match first lines of literature to their authors and books. I, too, often guessed incorrectly, but I enjoyed so deeply the thrill of matchmaking.
However much I love beginnings, I know that eventually, I must write about endings.
I fear endings with the same intensity that I adore beginnings.
The fear is not the opposite, nor the negation, of adoration; it is an altogether different sort of trepidation, for love is nothing if it is not trepidation.
An ending tumbles toward you over and over again; an ending will not stay flat, will not stay put; an ending troubles and taunts; an ending is sleep lost.
An ending is a
