The Hundred-Year Question
How long is our work meant to last?
If you’re in Brooklyn on Monday, October 20, I’ll be appearing at the legendary Franklin Park Reading Series with a slew of wonderful writers. I’m excited to read with people I’ve never met and also my dear friends Maris Kreizman and Jason Diamond. It should be a great time.
Hi friends.
It’s foggy season now here in the mornings. Foggy fall. I love it.
One of the conversations I’ve been having with some friends lately is about how they write to be read one hundred years from now. They want to make work that lasts forever. A timeless quality to their art.
I don’t feel that way about my work. I think of it as being read right now, quickly consumed, experienced. Hopefully giving the reader a little bit of pleasure or joy or safety or recognition in the moment. That they might feel less alone, now. That seems like quite a bit to hope for from my work. Even just to make a tiny connection between me and the reader actually feels quite massive to me.
And I don’t know if it’s a lack of belief in my talent but rather a lack of a belief in the idea of a hundred years from now. That sounds sort of grim but I swear it comes from a hopeful place. That I could solve a kind of immediate existential crisis feels like part of my mission.
Of course I see the value of their mission, too. Perhaps they engage in a more artistic endeavor, although all of our intentions are pure. Timelessness is a true quality to a work. My friends write with gravitas, and with their own hope: that they can transcend a moment in time with their books. They write, I suppose, with a dream as if they are carving their words into stone. And maybe they’ll be read on a mountain someday 100 years from now.
I suppose I was always just happy that these words existed between covers in the first place and that they might be read. That’s only as far as I can ever see. Now and the next one.
What are you writing for? Now or forever?
Jami
You are reading Craft Talk, the home of #1000wordsofsummer and also a weekly newsletter about writing from Jami Attenberg. I’m also on bluesky and instagram.
I used to write for some imagined future audience. But this older me is grateful for the immediate reader, the now spark of connection, even the reader who finds me by happenstance and sighs a private solo yes.
What an interesting question. I never thought about it. I think there’s a hyper nowness to my writing - read it, laugh, move on. Disposability, even, like garbage!