A Writer

I am, at my most fundamentally, a writer. It was the first identity I tried on and loved. I was told I was a boy, told I was a McPherson, told I was from Massachusetts, told I was white. But the first thing I told anyone was that I was a writer. I wrote a six page double spaced story in second grade called The Quest for Life and I sold it for ten cents a copy to the other kids. It was primarily the plot of a game called KingsQuest. I didn’t know I was a writer when I started writing it. I hadn’t written a one page story I was proud of. But something about putting my hands on WordPerfect every afternoon after school felt right. It didn’t feel easy, but it felt resonant.

My life has been about finding ways to “write” without being alone. Me and Brad Schroeter started Fungle Toxins when I was in sixth grade. A punk band with words to our songs but no singer. Me and Brad knew the words, but we agreed that neither of us were qualified to sing them. I played guitar, I wrote the words. We agreed on the words but we never sang them.

I came to music as a writer. I was more fascinated by creation than duplication. The first order of magic is in the song, not the band. I landed as a bass player. Rightfully so. I am, at my second most fundamentally, a bass player. Perhaps even moreso than a musician. I feel a kinship to the role of the instrument, to the spirit of the instrument, to the personality of the players. There is some sort of resolvable, welcome tension between being a writer and a bassist. Like being a gardener and a demolition worker. Bass is a blue collar instrument. And that goes for McCartney, Mingus, Pastorius, Pettiford, Weymouth, Barrett and every other great. We are supports, we are foundations, we are musical infrastructure. If we exhibit the highest forms of style, of decoration and of freedom while being the infrastructure we are golden gods and godesses. If we exhibit the highest forms of style, of decoration and of freedom while not contributing to the infrastructure we are trumpets.

I came to trivia as a writer. I was more fascinated by camaraderie than by facts. Trivia being questions that demand answers seemed like an ultimate complete protein. How many times have I heard artists say that the role of the artist is to “ask questions not provide answers”? Circa a bajillion. Part of me thinks and has always thought “what a half assed job you espresso drinking shitbag” when I hear that line. I appreciate the truth in the line, but it presumes that there is some other line of work where in their long interview sections they say “the job of the ice cream store clerk is to answer the questions that the espresso drinking shitbag artist has asked”. No, not true. You, artist, you are uniquely qualified to answer the question because you wrote the question. I don’t mean you are the only one qualified, I don’t even mean you are the best qualified. I mean you are uniquely qualified. And if you take that off your job description definitionally I think you are kind of a shit.

Let’s be fair. The great writers of the world don’t ask trivia questions. I am now envisioning Friedrich Nietzsche working bar trivia sucking down a couple weisses off of his $20 tab and saying “Round 2, Question 4: When you stare into the abyss, what does the abyss do? Again, question 2, round four. If you stare in the abyss, what does the abyss do?”

I have been more rewarded in life asking questions there are answers to. Trivia, interviews, random would-you-rather questions. Building a conversation has been more rewarding than fashioning myself a star. Ultimately, as an artist I don’t believe my role is to ask questions. My role is to make art that asks questions. But I don’t feel the clear clarion call of an artist. In the journey that has to do with work I feel the push and pull of an entertainer, a host, a bass player, a songwriter, a curator. But, below all of these, deeper than most anything in me, I am a writer. And as I willfully pushed down my writing ambitions in junior high to make room for music, to write songs at home and play songs in Jon Baker’s basement in Lanesboro, I thought it might bubble up again, later. Maybe I didn’t think it would bubble up sitting on the second floor of paradise at First and Rittenhouse in Bayfield, Wisconsin on my seventh straight summer vacationing on this corner. But it has. And I am in Paradise a fifty-yard dash from Lake Superior. I am a writer.

You are what you do everyday. That means that there are many things we all might moonlight as doing but we haven’t actually “stuck our dick in”. It’s a crass way of saying it, but it’s the way I’ve heard the work described for decades by creators of all stripes and all genders. I’ve done the music work everyday. I spent a time doing the songwriting work everyday but I regret to say that some of my early successes as a songwriter clouded my ability to believe the work ethic had to tighten up. I’ve done the trivia work everyday. I’ve done the radio work everyday. And by virtue of this blog I’ve started to do the writing work everyday. But I’m ready to tighten shit up.

This summer I worked with a student intern at Jazz88 from South High named Laelah and she is a gifted writer and a tremendously gifted young person. She wrote a bunch of small reviews for Jazz88 and I was sad that I couldn’t line edit her writing. I couldn’t give her the sentence structure guidance I bet she’s getting from her teachers at South. I took it to my awesome writer committee of Chuck Terhark, Martin Devaney and my brother Steve McPherson. These men are all awesome writers and we spend some of the downtime of our life in a long text conversation talking about all sorts of miscellany. They pointed out that there is no better activity for learning to write than reading. I simultaneously agreed and rolled my eyes. I read a lot. But I had stopped reading like a writer. I had stopped looking at the handiwork of a writer with the reverence that I use when I listen to a bass player, when I play another company’s trivia night. But on this vacation, here in Bayfield, Wisconsin in the quasi-wicker deck chair I sit in now I engaged in some ancient-to-me process I remember doing as a kid. I saw a sentence, and I put my thumb near it. I worked it over in my head. I said it out loud with my mouth closed. I looked at a how it felt and I let it burn into my memory, into my writing muscles, into my craft. The writer is Jessamyn Ward and I’m reading her because Rachel and I agreed to pick off some of the fiction from the New York Times list of Greatest Books of the 21st Century that we haven’t gotten to. I don’t know much about this woman but the book is amazing so far. It’s called Salvage the Bones. Here’s the sentence:

By the time the meat is done cooking, has turned brown and small with as many hard edges as a jewel, the boys have come.

I don’t know how to explain it’s excellence, but I’m not sure you need me to. You know it’s excellent. And I know I’m a writer.