Reading into Writing

How my intellectual, professional, romantic and political journey was propelled by the novel...and how I transformed from a leftist organizer to an aspiring novelist

Note: This is an irregular note. I wanted to write something about my intellectual journey to being the writer that I am today. I dunno what else this is. I have been working on some essays for different random publications that'll be out sometime in this summer. I'm trying to write more regularly on here.

I decided in 2021 while I was working at a UPS warehouse sorting packages that I wanted to be a writer. I had been working and living on my friend's couch (to not get my parents sick, this was the height of Covid) during the height of the pandemic. Those were generally not good days. My romantic relationship was dying. I was lost and adrift post-grad. Many of my friends were facing significant jail time after 2020. I was eating frozen pizzas every morning for breakfast. My hair was falling out. It was rough. On the fortunate side, books became my refuge at the moment like they had so many other times in my life. This essay is mostly about books and how I figured out my vocation in life after spending most of my youth and young adult life as an organizer and musician.

To preface, I came of age politically between 2016 and 2020 in perhaps the most exciting moment for the American Left in the past 50 years. I've been involved in anti-police brutality activism, mutual aid, inside/outside prison organizing, radical political education, and various types of direct action. I took part in all of these various activities as a part of grassroots collectives or affinity groups. I was never a part of the institutional Left i.e. never a part of a abolitionist nonprofit or socialist organization with a secret leader. I found my left wing ideas largely at rallies organized by communists against police violence in my hometown, at talks held at anarchist bookstores in Philly or other strange locales where I'd go when I should have been doing professional development or going to class. Despite my parents working at universities, neither of them was super involved in any sort of left wing activism on a day to day level. Despite this, I regularly attended demonstrations in my childhood from Iraq War, labor solidarity and Occupy protests because of them. I’d be brought along despite my reluctance. In addition to talking about politics and taking me to rallies, my parents and I were always at the library. Perhaps it was a way for them to relax. But I’ll return to libraries later. I learned my leftist politics largely from hanging out with different types of people and talking to my parents. I didn’t really find my politics in books. Instead, I kicked it with eco-socialists with chickens in their backyards, Bernie bros who slept in the offices they organized out of, anarchists who squatted and trainhopped, Black power activists who fought white supremacists in Ferguson, and trans communists who wrote poetry about the end of capitalism. I met everybody on the Left. There’s a lot of characters. The Left remains one of the few places that attracts and remains relatively tolerant of society’s outcasts, weirdos and malcontents. At least the Left in places like Philadelphia or Rockford, the only places I experienced the Left. That was my youth. I often felt like a 21st century flaneur.

As I age, I realize that my political and personal development is unique because it happened largely outside and in contention with the university, nonprofits, political parties and various other institutions. I faced serious felony charges my second semester of college after being caught up in a riot. This put me at odds with most on the campus as a “troublemaker” to some or “privileged” to others. I wasn't really concerned with either camp although getting canceled for being too left wing is not a fun experience. I imagine that my deep resentments towards institutions emerged from this point in my life. The institutions of the Left were far more hostile to me than the various subcultures I had grown up around.

Anyway, the only other thing I was doing at that time outside of political activism was playing in bands and rapping. I’d been playing music since I was 16. Sometimes this was compatible with the politics. Sometimes it wasn't. I hosted open mics in high schools. I was a part of a Black art collective that threw benefit shows for bail funds in Philly. I did a thousand different things. And then I got to a point I was describing at the beginning of this essay. I just had to stop cause it wasn't paying the bills. My girlfriend at the time wanted me to move to the city where she lived. I needed money. The unfortunate reality is that many of those with a similar background as mine had become paid organizers. I had no such ambitions or prospects. Not that there's anything wrong with getting paid, I know many dope ass union organizers who be making money.

But while I was at the third worldist reading group or the political prisoner cookout, I missed out on that crucial part of college where you figure out what you are supposed to do professionally and build networks for that. Prior to that moment in 2021, all of my jobs had been proletarian labor with exception to the time I was an assistant to a Black Quaker socialist. And so as I was working in a warehouse and faced with a dying relationship, I decided that I needed to figure something else out.

I landed on being a writer because I had been consuming a lot of literature at the time. In my own way unconsciously, I was reading to figure out my desire to write. While I had read some literature in college, I had mostly abandoned my love of the novel. Instead, I found myself reading about Republic of New Afrika archival documents, James Baldwin essays, Maoist quotations, anarchist anti-fascist report-backs on Nazi rallies, that biography of Malcolm X that everyone hates, social movement theory and other such things. Some of this was directed by professors though most of it was not. The only novels I remember reading from college with any real literary importance were Native Son by Richard Wright, Parable in the Sower by Octavia Butler and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin. I was always reading but typically the novels I read were for relaxation so they were usually mage and musket fantasy books with little substance. I’d consume them with vigor on my one hour commute to and from my college campus in the suburbs to my house in West Philadelphia.

In contrast, during in my childhood and youth, I was fixated on the novel. I found these novels in various libraries from the public library to my high school library. I was even an assistant at my high school library. Some favorites as a child and a teenager were Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, The Odyssey (not a novel but I thought of it that way), Bud Not Buddy by Christopher Paul Curtis, The Absolute True Diary of a Part Time Indian by Sherman Alexie, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Charlie Bone series by Jenny Nimmo, A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, American Gods by Neil Gaiman, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Martin Eden by Jack London, The Bartimaeus Trilogy by Jonathan Stroud, Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, and so many others I've forgotten. The Autobiography of Malcolm X also comes to mind though I'm always unsure if that text should be read as nonfiction or as fiction considering Alex Haley's numerous additions. I read comic books prolifically at that time as well. Many of these novels were political in varying ways. They often had critiques of power and society which was attractive to my young mind. These novels also had characters with agency to fight back against power. So much of our society is stuck in in-action and fear. In these characters, I found people who were taking control of their own lives. The archetype of the superhero appealed to me in that way. Rather than waiting for the State to help, Superman rescues the cat from his neighbor’s tree. Or when the Baudelaire orphans are being tormented by Count Olaf and other evil people, the orphans have to self organize themselves to fight back against his treachery. Huck has to escape his father’s abuse with his own wits. In some ways, reading these books predicted my political activism. Most of them were also all distinctly American in their content. These novels also contained compelling characters, settings and atmosphere. Some of them were geared for adults while others were children's novels. I'll always make the case that a good children's novel is just as if not more important than good book for literary adults.

But as 2021 approaches, my aversion to the novel in my young adult life began to change. I had been doing a little bit of anonymous political writing to accompany the organizing I was involved in back in 2020 and 2021. While I was working at the UPS warehouse, I listened to a lot of audio-books in my ear buds. Easily digestible fantasy and sci-fi novels were my pick for those warehouse nights but I also remember reading a physical copy of Raven Leilani's Luster which re-inspired my love for literary fiction (contemporary and historical). Most of the books I had been reading physically at the time were political. Black Reconstruction by DuBois and Black Marxism by Cedric Robinson were both favorites back then.

Eventually, I decided I needed to be even closer to books so I quit my job at the warehouse (despite the pay cut) and started working at a local library as a clerk where I read a variety of novels and graphic novels. By that point, I knew I needed to write stories about my life and the lives of my friends. Some titles I remember from my few months at the library, my months in the warehouse and my months unemployed at my parents (2021 is a blur) were Shutter by Joe Keatinge, Monstress series by Marjorie Liu, The Black Gods Drums by P Djeli Clark, Smoke and Mirrors by Neil Gaiman, A Dead Djinn in Cairo by P. Djeli Clark, Parable of the Talents by Octavia Butler, Tropic of Kansas by Christopher Brown amongst so many others. Still on a sci-fi wave though I rarely read that stuff now apart from when I have a desire to relax. A few months after being at the library, I moved from my hometown back to Philly quite soon after the romantic relationship I was in finally ended. I told her I was going to be a writer. She's still yet to read anything I've written at this point.

It's funny recounting some of the novels I read in childhood and during the formative period before I was truly a man. These books truly shaped who I am now. I didn't even know it was happening. I was just stuck in that warehouse alone with my thoughts and my books. So much of my life has been receding into books when times were hard. I must write something similar in the future about what I've read in the first four years as a writer. Perhaps once I cross the finish line of my second novel. I cannot be more grateful for the life that I currently live.

Eduoard Cortes, a post-impressionist