A Liminal Writer; An Ideas-Slut

Where to put this one? We don't know which shelf to Holz should sit on, because Holz never knew, either.

Her work being awkward to place is apt, because she was an awkward person. They say dogs are like their owners. Believe you me: the humble canine has nothing on this body of literary nonsense, with an almost gynaecological level of insight into its author's guts and soul.

On any given day, Holz would have freely agreed with you that her work was simultaneously over-rated, under-rated, and difficult to pigeon-hole (and not in the good way).

A smart author would squint at the market, assess what is selling well, what genre her work should sit in, and work backwards to a skeleton of a bloody good book. From this we can perceive that Holz might have been clever, in the way that, many moons ago, made teachers smile or sigh depending on the subject, but she was not smart. Today, we mourn (do we?) a lifelong professional amateur; a stubborn ass who would complain how difficult it was to distribute her work when it was impossible to categorise it, and yet make no great effort to simplify that categorisation.

Her greatest weakness was her reliance on writing, rather than storytelling. All fur coat and no knickers, you could say. All fluff, no action. A skillfully spun atmosphere is all very fine, but something has to happen in it, no? This was a person who could wield a semi-colon with surgical precision, but could she plot a character arc? Only with varying levels of success.

Like a butterfly or a moth, with a pen for a proboscis, she spent her life flitting from one colourful idea-blossom to the next. Gulping greedily, only to be distracted by the next bright petal of inspiration. And then to look back mournfully, on occasion, at a previous concept that withered away from neglect.

You may say this: this was a person married to the page. Determined to keep writing, every day. Given the length and frequency, you'd really expect the results to become more consistent and, you know, good. But let's be kind.

"Kind" means not speculating about possible narcissism and almost certain voyeurism. That is difficult, because Holz said,

I am never so naked as I am on a page

...and for this we can have both great respect, and deep disgust. Respect for the striving towards authenticity, and revulsion at the perversity of it. Some things can remain private, you know. Leave something to the imagination, goodness me. It follows, really, that such a ideas-slut should ejaculate publicly across the page with regularity.

Holz would say, (and did, on more than one occasion) with not a stitch of shame at the derivative nature of the statement, that writing is like bleeding.

I make a gash, bleed on to the page , bang away at the keys to pin ideas down before they can escape , nailing them to the page , in a weird stigmata , of creative wossname

S.E Holz, The Process

As a lifelong eschewer of romance as a concept and a genre (read: snob), trust Holz to delight in such gory imagery, and shy away from the effective and honest analogy that alludes to pleasure.

You'd be forgiven for picturing her as a ditzy waif, a clock dandelion of a person. Especially with comparisons to butterflies and so on. Disabuse yourself of this notion. Holz was a weirdly-shaped lump. A perpetual square peg in an unforgiving round hole. (And you can be sure that had she ever found a square hole, she would have found a way to a. be round, and b. make a dirty joke about holes and/or roundness). At best, we can cast her as a self-indulgent, self-deprecating blob of clay, forever shying away from the firing that would have literally made her.

Self-deprecating, yes, but for good reason.

In closing, then, it is with great sadness that we reflect on the untimely end of a talented writer as a result of a freak stampeding chicken incident.

Yet, perhaps it would always have felt untimely; a career "cut short" even had she lived to be eleventy-one and change. Because the real tragedy is that she never got up enough of a head of steam to create something substantial. For this reason, we may privately heave a sigh of relief that death stoppered these eternal pre-ambling ramblings. It was surely the only thing that could. For heaven's sake, Holz, you might say, Shit or get off the pot!

And now she has. Got off the pot, that is. In the most terminal way possible.

May a non-specific deity rest her inky-black soul.

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Thank you for reading!