I graduated this past April with a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing with no real plan for my life other than to get married and move back to my home state of Illinois with my seven-year-boyfriend-turned-husband. I pictured a hazy happy ever after house with dogs in a beautiful, idyllic central Illinois town. I pictured a 9-to-5 office job, or an adjunct teaching position somewhere with leisurely lunches, likeminded friends and plenty of time and desire to write and finish my first book. In other words, I stupidly forgot about the recession.

Eight months later, my husband and I have two dogs, one house, three jobs and two friends between the two of us. I forgot what it’s like to not reside in a community of writers, I forgot what it’s like to worry about not having health insurance (or really, I never had to worry about that until now), I forgot what it meant to not have anyone protecting my time, or to not even understand what it means to need time to write. The reality of the recession for us means that my husband and I make ten and nine dollars an hour respectively, pay $360 a month in student loans, and have one day off in common. I often work nine and ten hour days and vacillate most days between feeling lonely and feeling fantastically bone-tired sore. Recently, I told my boss at the food service job where I work that I would like to work earlier in the day so that I might have time to “do things” after work, rather than come home, eat, watch two episodes of Arrested Development and go to sleep. She looked at me. It was a suspicious look, her eyebrow cocked like a doubting furred question mark. She said, “What things? What do you mean? That’s life, honey.”

Trying to articulate what you need to live is weird and impossible. You know it largely by its absence, by the amorphous outline it left in the wall as it busted out of your life and took off for more accommodating environs. These days I think most of the time I exist in a dormant fugue state, moving from sleep to meals to work seamlessly, with little visible decision-making. I am so lucky to have a job, and I know it. I also know what life is, and I know my food service job, and the instant noodles following it, and the eight hours of sleep following that, isn’t it. Sometimes something glances off my fugue bubble and the Technicolor glare of real life is so startling and painful, I can hardly stand it. Recently, I came home from a ten-hour shift and my husband had decorated the house for the holidays with lights and garlands of fake pine branches. The lights were low and he’d made a fire. My brother-in-law had made homemade chili and it was hot on the stove. They looked at me worriedly and asked was I okay, a question the asking of which somehow asserted my okayness to me. The huddle of family love was almost more than I could bear. It was beautiful and it was real and it was life and it hurt.

Why do we need art? It’s not often quantifiably necessary and that makes people feel weird. In the case of poems, you can’t really monetize it because it’s outside of the capitalist system of supply and demand. There is no demand, only an endless supply. I don’t actually know the answer to the ’why’ question, only that I must assert that it is important. I believe that what we do at The Dirty Napkin, that is, curate the “other” part of what it means to be human, is essential. It’s essential not because it’s therapy—I don’t actually believe it’s inherently important, artistically, to express yourself. It’s important because it’s like hearing someone speak a language you thought was dead, then finding that you happen to be fluent in that language and that you craved, secretly, your whole life, to hear a single word spoken in that dead language, and then it’s like knowing that there are two of you in the world, at least, who can speak to each other in and about this beautiful dead language. It makes both speaker and listener feel less alone. It tells us something of the nature of what it means to exist outside of the grind of supply and demand. It tells us we are worth something other than nine dollars an hour and that there is something in us that cannot be sold or held or even known. It is apart. And it needs time to itself to “do things.”

Since 2007, I have been listening intently to you speak to me through submissions to The Dirty Napkin and now I find I don’t have the time or the energy to devote to it. I know it needs more care than I am able to give it, and I know it will get that care in the form of the brilliant and capable Stephanie Dugger and Emily Skaja, both women I happen to personally know and love. The Dirty Napkin is beautiful and real and it’s life and it hurts. May it continue to hurt me for many years to come, in the best, most wonderful ways.

Sincerely,
Katie Schmid