Harper Lewis

I get a feeling that some of y’all are wondering, “Who is this Harper Lewis, and where did she come from?” I’m new here, so new that I have no idea who the “same old names” are. I know that I’m new and some of my pieces have been noticed. I’m very appreciative of that, and sometimes I post with genuine hope and confidence that I nailed it, that what I tried to convey resonated, that my weirdness doesn’t alienate me.

I’m a little bit of an asshole. No, I don’t think the canon should be a communist idea, that mere volume of work should assure your place in it, when quality is far more important than quantity. I should know, I produce both. In terms of theory, I’m a New Critical-Formalist-Structuralist who doesn’t mind looking through additional lenses, but these are the foundation: if it doesn’t stand up to these reads, it’s not worth looking at through other lenses for a very simple reason: the whole is not intact, and the language doesn’t resonate meaning.

How do I know quality ftom otherwise? I’m educated. I have both a Bachelor’s and Master’s of Arts in English literature. I had to pass a foreign language proficiency exam to earn the second one. I’ve taken courses in linguistics, literary theory, literary criticism, and rhetoric. I’ve written historiographs and annotated bibliographies and theses. I’ve read a great many of the classics. I understand prosody and poetics and delight in the irony of the terms. I’ve edited literary magazines, and I teach English and Humanities on the university level. I’ve done the work, I continue to study the greats, and I think about literary device. I only like rhyme when it’s clever or unintrusive; internal rhyme that resonates is the best use of rhyme for this reader.

If you’ve posted 3000 end rhymes dominated by soul, night, heart, grow, light, love, pain, etc.; yes, you’ve expressed some abstract feelings. A literary critic and therapist would both call that lazy and tell you to do the hard work: be specific, tell your details. Otherwise, you’re not giving your reader anything; you’re just demanding sympathy. Call your mom, write in your journal, make it rhyme if it makes you feel better. But don’t bitch about not winning awards for it; it’s not a contest to see who can be most miserable, it’s a contest to see who can be most skillful at transforming something ordinary, brutal, or horrific into something beautiful. Being lonely in the night searching for light has been said as many times as it’s been done. Nothing fresh there, but “I was the last person in line and they closed the office without calling my number, locking me in the building,”without rhyming, creates a concrete image for readers to grab hold of and create their own contexts, to personally relate to the writing.

My favorite fiction writing instructor essentially said that it’s selfish and lazy to expect the reader to work harder than the writer to make the work good. When we don’t proofread, we’re making the reader work. Am I perfect? No. Do I overlook things? Yes. But I fix them when I see them. I thank others when they catch something I missed. Are there cultural layers that affect whether or not grammar is correct? Absolutely. It’s fine to make mistakes, but it’s not fine to cop out or stubbornly refuse to do the work out of fear of discovering that you’ve been doing it wrong. That’s childish and lazy and probably explains a lot about your general dissatisfaction: read “Theft” by Katherine Anne Porter to fully comprehend this concept.

Some may think I’m being mean, but I’m not. I’m simply not actively making you comfortable. There are standards, and whether or not you like them has zero effect on them. If you think a rule is stupid, break it intentionally, with purpose, not incidentally—show that you understand it and you’re giving it the finger. Otherwise, sorry to say, it doesn’t work.

Yes, it’s fantastic to have this community and these conversations with other writers who actually care, to have winesses when we take out the garbage. We all have to take out the garbage to get to the good stuff, and yes, trash/treasure cliche; however, vice versa, and the courts of public opinion and criticism carry weight. Sometimes they even issue the same verdict, but not often. If you can’t please either court, maybe your argument contains fallacies.

I’m into all kinds of stuff: Hinduism, Anglicanism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Confucianism, witchcraft, tarot, history, philosophy, music, rocks, gardening, reading, swimming, hiking, playing games, cards, talking, drinking, dancing, making love, making out, cooking, traveling, and on and on.

Writers I love, in no particular order:

Byron, Keats, Tennyson, Updike, Carver, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Shakespeare, Matthew Arnold, Tennessee Williams, Robert Pinsky, Emerson, Katherine Anne Porter, Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, Tillie Olsen, Alice Munro, Ann Tyler, Edna St. Vincent Milay, Anne Sexton, Annie Proulx, Joan Didion, Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Fredrik Backman, John Donne, Lewis Carroll, Queen Elizabeth I, Robert Frost, Robert Browning, Tim O’Brien, Graham Greene, Auden, Anne Rivers Siddins, E. E. Cummings, Maya Angelou, E. B. White, Harold Bloom, Cleanth Brooks, Wallace Stevens, Chekov . . . I could go on and on.

This is a little of who I am. I’ll do another piece later today with a different facet of myself.