Edward Weston, by Tina Modotti, 1923 or ‘24
It’s Wednesday morning, early May, in the Ohio River valley, Kentucky. I’m sitting at my desk in the kitchen, finishing the last of the coffee, thinking about promise. I’ve been asking myself lately, do I have it? Do I have promise?
This year, I began this Substack, my One Continuous Branch, for reasons which, by now, seem distant or even quaint: I wanted motivation to work on my book, The Tombs of Slate Run, the idea I’ve been working on for four years: the examination of family history to determine, in light of that history, who I am. Who I could be. I wanted to write each week and, to be honest, to make a living, or more of a living, from my writing. I was hoping for paid subscribers, and at the outset I was, as I nearly always am, idealistic.
Within three months, I was exhausted.
It wasn’t simply Substack or the writing that exhausted me. I was also looking for a regular source of income. This spring, I spent weeks writing grant applications to fund the book and my photography both. I was freelance writing when I could, and I’d managed to get a part-time gig doing some corporate writing at an hourly wage. I was searching job sites for something that could provide me a salary and purpose, not to mention health benefits and retirement funds. I wasn’t finding it. And so far, for the writing, I’m not getting the grants.
I parent half the week, as I have been for more than a decade, all the minute things that entail raising a teenager. I take care of the household the best I can, cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, routine maintenance, mowing what lawn hasn’t been colonized by weeds left behind by years of neglect. The rest of the week I live alone, most of my friends scattered across Oregon, Minnesota, even as far as Sweden.
The year 2023 began propitiously. I’d been awarded a photography artist-in-residency at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts in Highlands, North Carolina. Beginning in the late winter, I spent two months in an A-frame, photographing in the Blue Mountains and the Smokies. I had my first solo exhibition in The Bascom’s gallery, and I sold seven photographs. That summer, I took my daughter to England, her first trip abroad, and we spent nearly three weeks in London, Wales, and the Lake District. I put the whole trip on my credit card, intending to pay it off with money from my mother’s will. She’d died at the start of spring the year before.
That fall, my car problems began. When my Prius began to fail—probably, I surmised, a blown head gasket, which would’ve entailed thousands of dollars to determine and ultimately fix—I traded it in for another used vehicle, a Kia with over 150,000 miles on it because I could afford nothing else—no bank would give me a car loan, not even my own credit union, because I had no “regular income.”
I took on teaching that fall, three classes of composition at the university for a little over ten thousand dollars. It taxed my stamina. Then the Kia’s shocks went, and replacing those revealed grease-leaking axles. Then the engine failed. It had no warranty. It took months of rental cars and loaner vehicles and negotiation and phone calls to corporate headquarters to resolve. The costs were as exorbitant as they were unexpected.
Until the end of 2023, I knew nothing about Substack. I didn’t even know it existed. By the end of the semester, I thought, if I am to write a book, the book I have been thinking on, drafting, and talking about for nearly four years (though I could argue the deeper idea has been around for more than twenty years), I must do something risky. I would see posts on social media from Sarah Fay (who consults on Substack, basically), and finally, after hedging for some time, I contacted her to help. I was nothing if not enthusiastic.
Writers know this: anything and everything bleeds time from writing. For years, I worked a company job, and by day’s end, I was tired. Teaching, too, has a way of eroding time for the most unexpected reasons—random emails to be answered, sudden meetings coming up—in addition to the planning and extensive and time-consuming grading. My thinking was simple: if I don’t focus on the book, it will never happen.
After a number of meetings with Sarah, my Substack was established. I got those first crucial subscribers, including several paid. That out-of-the-gate feeling: I’m sure you recognize it. I tried to ignore the fears.
It’ll come as no surprise that for at least a year, my sleep has been suffering. I fall asleep fine, I tell my friends. It’s just that I wake up in the night, sometimes 4:30, or 3:30, or even earlier. Last night, I woke up—after going to bed at ten—a few minutes before midnight. To compensate, I nap during the day, sometimes several times a day. When I told my friend Shachaf that I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, he said, “Stress.”
In late April, I hit the wall. I came to a full stop. Bone tired.
I’d “ran myself ragged,” as my mother used to say. I’d applied for four grants in only a matter of weeks. I’d remade my résumé over and over—for teaching, for copywriting, and finally for grant writing positions. I’d scoured LinkedIn and Indeed, applying for scores of jobs—rage applying, they call it. Just throwing darts as fast as I could. At the same time, I was darkroom printing, preparing for my solo exhibition that just opened last week. It was a good-sized financial investment, as well.
I’d talk to my friend Francine, a poet, and I’d tell her about jobs I’d applied for. When I told her at the end of the autumn last year that I’d spent weeks interviewing with the local Waldorf school to be a teacher, she asked me, simply, “Is that really what you want to do?”
I thought this morning of this very dilemma. I thought, how many of us compromise who we are and take not just a job, but any job?
She’d ask me, what do you want? I couldn’t say. Was it to write a book? Was it security? Was it simply to assuage my anxieties, to sleep the night through and wake refreshed? Was it a retirement account? A girlfriend? A friend?
I’d worked as a copywriter for more than six years, until the start of the pandemic when I was laid off. I spent a long time on unemployment compensation. I’d interview for jobs and not get them. When the health insurance, which was part of my severance, ended, I got on Medicaid, and the state worker suggested I apply for SNAP benefits, too—what we used to call food stamps.
I remembered when my father lost his job in 1983 in the layoffs that swept the country. My mother came into my bedroom—I was 12—and said to me, Don’t tell anyone about the food stamps. The message was clear: public assistance was something to be ashamed of. That stuck.
Later, a friend hired me for some contract work, blog writing. Then he ran out of money, and I went to the Carolina mountains to make art. I’d scrimped and saved so long—being stingy with myself, even—that the money held out, but by last summer, it was beginning to dwindle to the point I’d get nervous. My glasses were old and scratched, and my clothes and shoes both had holes in them. Then the car problems. Then the debt.
Then, this spring, I went to the Bon Air library and took a book from the shelves: the photographer Edward Weston’s Daybooks.
Recently, I finished reading the nearly 500 pages of the Daybooks, the journals Weston kept from 1923, when he left his family in California to go to Mexico and develop his photography efforts, until the end of 1934, when he had settled in Carmel, an established and respected artist.
As a photographer myself, the journals naturally captivated me. In Weston’s ideas of photography, art, and life itself—as well as his criticism of the superficiality of American culture—I found a kindred soul. One idea recurs throughout his writing, that of growth.
By growth, Weston means artistic development. This was his sole concern, even at the cost of his family at times. He was, let’s admit it, a poor husband for Flora, his long-suffering wife, though he was by no means a negligent father. But he would rue any loss of his time, and his boys’ squabbles, the attention of women, and, to him, the need to make money were all obstacles to his development.
I laughed at how often Weston worries over money. Believe me, I understand—I do it, too. And I understand entirely Weston’s abhorrence of anything he views as a mere “job,” and the primary employment for him was as a portrait photographer. He wearied, he often said, of wealthy customers wishing to be photographed in such a way that he had to spend inordinate amounts of his time—his creative energy—touching up negatives to remove blemishes and wrinkles. He found this vain, to say the least.
But mostly, this went against his principles, and that in turn affected his sense of integrity.
Weston was in no way an ideal model, at least not in his entirety. Still, I couldn’t help but find consolation in the fact that, somewhere in time, someone thought almost identically to me. It validated my thinking, and that relieves me.
One thing Weston alludes to frequently is the idea of promise. To him, this word signifies the potential of an artist and the fact that the artist has something very real to contribute. It is the responsibility of society, further, to encourage that development. There is one passage from the Daybooks that is especially prescient here, and I’ve read it to friends, laughing out loud.
On April 14, 1931, Weston writes that the young photographer Willard Van Dyke came to Carmel from San Francisco with a question: should he take a job he was offered with an oil company? In 25 years, Weston writes, when Van Dyke would be 49, he would be given a retirement of $50,000, and that coming after decades of a substantial salary. “An opportunity most young men would jump at,” he says.
But Weston recognizes a fact. First, Van Dyke was not “most young men.” Second, with the offer in hand, Van Dyke hesitated. He did not leap at the offer, but instead drove to Carmel, to Weston, to ask his advice, which Weston found “significant.” As I read this, I thought, I’ve done that, many times over. I call friends, asking for their advice. And I’ve asked myself, often, why do I feel the need to do this?
I did this with the Waldorf job. I’d started with an application, thinking, let’s see what happens. What could it hurt to apply? That led to a phone interview, then an in-person interview at the school. Don’t get me wrong: I’d worked with kids for years, though it was a long time ago, and I’d taught public school—albeit, high school—for years. This job would mean starting with first graders, however, and it also meant at least three summers of training in New Hampshire—and for the summer of 2024, I’d received a grant to travel to Sweden for an artist residency. I, too, hesitated.
What was more important? I’d asked. A job, however demanding and potentially draining? Or something I really wanted to do, my growth, my art? My book?
I’d visited the school and observed the classroom several times. Granted, I felt comfortable there, to the point I even could see myself doing this. But teaching, in the Waldorf tradition, means staying with the same kids through all eight years of their tenure at the school. This meant learning to teach a new grade completely from scratch every year, for nearly a decade. Then what?
I called my friend Anna, my former manager, and she said this: When I’d talk about the job, I sounded exhausted. But when I talked about starting my Substack, she could hear my enthusiasm loud and clear.
So why do I call friends at all? It’s the same reason that Weston said of Willard’s questioning: “he wanted me to back up a decision he’d already made.” And so Weston told him, No.
Don’t take the job. Why? “You would ruin a life that holds promise,” Weston said, “become one of the many misfits, maybe a hopeless neurotic.”
He knew that in the future Willard would have, as I’ve had, doubts. Did we make the right decision? But all he would have to look forward to, aside from tens of thousands of dollars, was “colorless comfort.”
The Waldorf school had scheduled a morning of me teaching there in December, a sample lesson that I would have to develop. Francine said of all those visits, those interviews and observations, “You’ve wasted all that time already.” Finally, standing in the shower one morning, my answer rose up in me. I felt the conviction, a feeling I have tried to remember and stand on. I wrote the school and told them I no longer wanted to be considered for the job. I thanked them, but said I had other opportunities I wanted to pursue.
The feeling of relief was profound. It was entirely physical and, to be honest, a nearly unrecognizable feeling. Because, I would guess, it was one of those few moments of time where I really felt my integrity shine. I went around the house, singing out loud.
I am fifty-three years old. I am a part-time copywriter, waiting for the firm I’ve been hired onto to send me work. I’ve been writing blogs and, though I have something of a talent for it, it’s like Melville’s Bartleby said, “I would prefer not to.” I can hardly stand the feeling of wasting my time. I ask myself, where are my efforts going? What good am I doing in the world writing about “artificial intelligence,” or “standard operating procedures”?
I called my mother’s retirement company and drew about half the funds from the account. With this, I’ll begin paying off the debt: the trip to England (which my friend Francine advised me to never regret doing, pointing out that doing things like that I was most myself, glad to be alive) and the vehicle, most of it on my credit card. I pulled a little extra to give me some wiggle room in the coming months, before I go to Sweden.
My daughter is finishing the ninth grade, and soon it’ll be summer, though I won’t see her much: her mother is taking her to Europe for a few weeks, and then I’ll be in Europe myself with the aid of my grant—I could in no way have gone without it. I’ll miss her fifteenth birthday in July. The yard needs to be tended to, but at least the Kia seems to be running all right—it has a rebuilt engine with a warranty. My sleep, though, comes and goes in its quality.
I learned a French phrase that comes from Jean de la Fontaine (though initially it derives from Aesop), from one of his fables: Lâcher la proie pour l’ombre. Letting go of the prey for the shadow. It’s from the fable of the dog who, seeing the reflection of his prey in the water, gives up the actual prey for the illusion and, naturally, loses everything.
It’s a moralistic tale, certainly—and a deeply cultural one. Take what you can get. A bird in the hand. Don’t try for anything more, just be happy with what you have. This is what I’ve heard my family telling me all my life, my parents and, now that they’re both gone, my siblings. And there is, I know, wisdom in that.
But when the bird in my hand is, as Weston called it, a “colorless comfort,” then what good is it? Of what value is the bird that’s nothing but bones? Or, though its meat may sustain me financially, in the end has no meaning? Is meaning even important? Does it matter? Does it matter whether I’m happy or not?
I taught for years, and what I saw was that what kids needed, high schoolers in particular, they weren’t getting from their classes—they’d tell me as much, especially all the years I worked as a substitute. I worked a company job for years, and though my ego at first was thrilled—look how important I am!—I couldn’t sustain the enthusiasm. I made a salary, health benefits, retirement, and I even had stock options. And I hated each day. Why? Because I could see that it was taking my time from me. This is what Weston saw: what takes your time steals from you. It steals your promise.
When your time is gone, you have no more growth, no more development. I’d come home every night exhausted. I know, I know: there are plenty of writers who will tell me, get up before dawn; use any spare minute; a paragraph a day is enough. I tried. We don’t all work that way.
When, in this past semester, I taught college composition courses just to see if this was something I might want to go back into, I quickly realized, no. I know it is a privilege to be offered a job teaching at a college, but I chafed at the restrictions of the curriculum, the students who showed up late or not at all, the lack of camaraderie with full-time faculty. I was glad to be done—physically, emotionally.
Exactly ten years before, after having taught as an adjunct for four years, I’d told myself, I’ll never do this again. In December, once the grades were entered, I said to myself, I told you so.
On Mother’s Day, I went to the Speed Museum here in Louisville. I wanted to see an exhibit of albumen prints by Timothy O’Sullivan, and when I got there, I learned there was a free screening of a film by Rachel Elizabeth Seed, A Photographic Memory, which is her documentation of learning about her mother, a photographer who’d died when Rachel was only 18 months old. I got a ticket.
The film was incredibly moving, and it didn’t take long before I saw the correspondence with my own project. After the screening, Rachel herself was there to answer questions. She talked about a film class she once took where the teacher had told students to always go back and ask yourself, Why are you doing this? What is the reason? What’s the core idea?
And I thought about my book of family research and realized, I’d never really known my father. All of my research, my digging into courthouse records and censuses and out-of-print books was not only to discover my ancestry but to, in a sense, be like my father. This was something he was interested in, too. It was him I wanted to unearth.
As the credits rolled, I breathed to get control of my emotions. I wanted no one to see my tears.
Why am I writing this post? To be honest.
It strikes me that if I am to really connect with you, I must be honest. This begins with being honest with myself. I want to be a writer, an artist. No: I am a writer and an artist, and I always have been. But all my life I’ve taken many safe routes—employment, whether teaching or writing, in order to pay the bills, to give me a security I supposed my work could be founded on. I think I was fooling myself. I put the cart before the horse.
You may call me naïve. You wouldn’t be the first. People have told me to be satisfied, to accept, to just, well, give up. Even my family has done this. I can’t do it. I can’t just turn away from my need to speak and describe.
There is a deep grief in my family line that needs to be explored. There is a vacuity in our culture that owes itself to the past, and I must discover what it is and root it out of my body. I am writing to heal myself. Divorce, all the deaths, including both my parents, and my own health—I’m not just writing to show readers how they might research their own past, or even to tell my own stories; what I want is to map a route to the gold behind the dragon, and finally to fight the dragon. And triumph.
That’s why I’m here, on Substack. That’s why I ask for support and ask for paid subscriptions. This work I do, to my mind at least, deserves support. I want to believe I have promise. Even at fifty-three, even as a single parent, a divorced man, marginally-employed, lugging around a shame that wears an armor of scales and spits flame, I want to believe I can make sense of this world.
When I left the theater, I thought, my grief is bottomless, and I haven’t even begun to sound its depths. When I saw the photographs of O’Sullivan, I thought, this is what I want to do, to make something this beautiful. I thought about my earliest memory of my father. I thought about my last memory of my father. I can barely look at these things.
My father and I were not close. There was a canyon between us, though sometimes we could bridge it. His love of researching family history was one of those bridges. The fact that he gave me his 35mm camera more than twenty years ago is another. My writing, my photography, my very body, and even, for better or worse, my temperament—all these things I owe to him.
This is about more than genealogy. It’s more than a history book of names and faces I never knew. It is digging into the earth beneath my father’s marble stone and trying to talk to his ashes. It’s about trying to bring something back from death itself.
Once I looked at the sky, a certain streak of cloud over Inspiration Knob in Kentucky, so utterly beautiful it took my breath away, and I realized, Someday I won’t be here to see this. Another time I sat in a pub in my neighborhood, waiting for my food, and heard “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and I realized, Someday I will never be able to hear this song again.
Death came for my grandparents, and my father stood between death and me. Then it came for my father. Now death walks along with me, keeps me company. It begs me to look at the sky, to listen to the song. It tells me, kindly, frighteningly, to look closely, to pay attention, to be alive. There’s so little time, it says.
What will you do, it asks me, with your one, short, beautiful life?