On Anticlimax

Stephanie Pushaw

I didn’t finish the book at a writer’s retreat. I didn’t finish it in a sun-drenched café or an isolated cabin or under the creative haze of mushrooms in the desert. Oh, I’d “worked” on it in all those places, in seven cities, on three continents. I told people I was “writing a novel” for ten years. Come dissertation time, I finished it in four weeks. I finished it in Portland, in the last gasps of winter, in that uncinematic type of rain specific to the Pacific Northwest: a gray, tepid drizzle that settles over everything like a sigh. I barely left the house. I became a sort of hunchbacked goblin in my study, writing always after dark with my neon lights surrounding me and the glow of the insinuating screen in front. I wrote and deleted. I panicked and procrastinated in the gym and the grocery store. I wrote it off in public discussions as though it were something easy and casual, something I could just dash off.

There’s nothing less romantic than writing a novel, except writing a novel on a deadline. There were no epiphanies. No grand breakthroughs. Just nine-hour days, sometimes more, of chasing scenes down like mice in the walls. I would write until the inside of my skull buzzed and then crawl into bed next to my long-suffering husband and my patient dog. Then I’d wake up and do it again. I stopped answering texts. I resented the sound of my own name.

This is the part they don’t put in the author bios. The part where your back hurts and you wear the same sweatshirt three days in a row and your novel—your dissertation, technically—isn’t a tidy philosophical treatise but a sprawling, messy hybrid of fiction and disaster theory, patched together with citations and nerves. There was a whole week where I forgot how to write a paragraph, where I stared out the window into the haze of greenery that comprises the back of my apartment complex, watching rabbits.

And yet, somehow, the pages added up. The novel took shape. Not all at once, but gradually, like fog lifting just enough to see your own hands. It was never about brilliance. It was about momentum. About staying in the room long enough for the story to stop fighting me. About finishing the sentence, then the page, then the chapter, even when it felt like I was building a house out of wet paper and sleep deprivation.

When it was done, or close enough to not be completely embarrassing, I over-prepared for the defense. Of course I did. I had lists of potential questions, longer lists of erudite comebacks waiting for warranted criticism. I braced for ambush. My committee said the project was ambitious, precise, unflinching. That I had done something structurally unusual, and it had worked. Believe me when I say that the use of the word “brilliant” is not a humblebrag here, but a blown mind. The way a cacophony can be contained, and from the outside, look smooth. 

Rereading your own work is a special kind of torment, but there was one part of the book I could stand, a meditation on black holes and what waits before creation. It’s from The Garden of Earthly Delights, not the painting itself but the closed version—before the chaos, before the naked bodies and pink fountains and bird-headed tormentors. Just the orb. Earth on the third day of creation. Pale, colorless, sealed in shadow. God, spectral and silent, like a footnote in the upper left corner.

“It’s not creation, exactly, it’s a type of pupation. A chrysalis in the dark before the wings begin to form—potential curled in on itself in a gelatinous sea.”

That’s what the blank page felt like, most days. Not empty, just unlit. The breath before sound. The nothing that holds all the somethings.

I still don’t know exactly what The Disasterologist is. A novel? A dissertation? A survival mechanism? Probably all three. It really doesn’t matter. There’s something deeply unspectacular about finishing a project like this. No fire. No lightning. Just rain on the windows and a document saved under four different filenames. Just a body in a chair, doing the work. Finally doing the work.