last man out of eden

poetry.prose.play

A Year Of Play

That’s me. A regular guy with a book. There are lots of us around. Writers. People with books.

I’ve spent the past 5 years trying to be a regular writer. Which has felt strange for someone as irregular as the verb “to be” (have you ever wondered that “to be”, the verb that gives us the words “essence” and Being, that represents life itself is the most irregular verb of all? As though the first linguists knew what we’ve forgotten – that there are as many ways of living as there are people?).

You see, no matter what I was doing, I’ve spent my writing life either trying to break in or break out. Get a publisher, make some money, be accepted, be invited to do stuff. Be different, be the first, explore new ground, be a rebel. It’s all the same. It’s all about there being me on the one hand. And on the other there being something else. And it’s always been about how to position myself in relation to that something else. Or those many something elses.

And the odder thing is I’ve spent much of that time writing articles about confessional art. About the theoretical impossibility of any two people and any two artists being the same. Exhorting people to go out and *do* and not worry about money or mainstream.

So, finally, I’m devoting a year to fun. Play. Exploring. Doing what takes my fancy. And not a single sales pitch. That’s the only rule. Like a writers’ gap year. Only I can’t help thinking that in art it’s those years we spend selling ourselves that are the gap years. And too many of us wait too long to take up our proper roles.

I’m not “trying to fail to sell anything” or going for “glorious obscurity.” My books will still be for sale – e-books on Amazon, paperbacks on Lulu. There’ll still be links on my site. But I won’t plug them. Not once. And there’ll be plenty for free.

I’ll spend the next few days spinning some anecdotes about what I’ve spent the past five years doing. And why it wasn’t right. Whilst acknowledging I’ve made more and better friends and learned more and had more exciting moments than in any other period of my life.

So that’s the project. I’ve called it Last Man Out Of Eden. Like my eight cuts gallery project I could pretend there’s a reason for that. There isn’t. I liked the sound of it. And thought it might look OK on a hoodie.

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