Hypertext Magazine asked Connor Coyne, author of Urbantasm Book Four: The Spring Storm, “Was it worth it?”
By Connor Coyne
I was seduced today.
The seduction took place instantaneously and was over before I realized what was happening.
After a week of writing and editing for clients, and housework, and parenting, I finally carved out a few hours to focus on writing. This is my passion. And as I sat alone in my bedroom, my laptop on my lap, with a fresh, hot coffee on my nightstand, and the air conditioner gently humming across this hot July afternoon, I heard a song.
It was a song I’ve heard dozens of times, at least: “Talula” by Tori Amos, the most joyful and inscrutable song off an album packed with both violence and mystery. It isn’t my favorite, but I’ve heard it often enough to have memorized every word, every chord shift, every moment of studio magic. The song came up on shuffle, so I wasn’t expecting it, and despite my familiarity, I was taken off guard in the first dozen-or-so seconds: a stand-alone honeycrisp harpsichord hook pulling forth Tori’s unreluctant response: “Congratulate you.” Her bell-clear voice, unexpectedly scratchy. Following the machine as it plays away: “Said you had a double tongue.”
The song seduced me at once and pulled me back to 1996. For one instant, I was a time traveler, enmeshed, motionless and helpless, in the sounds, textures, images, scents, and hopes and aspirations of that strange year.
Now 1996 and I are old friends. That was the year when, high on friendship and love and solidarity, I started writing the novel that would consume the next 27 years of my life. That novel, Urbantasm, a four part magical realist thing about kids living in Flint, Michigan, was also about 1996. Because a lot of the things I wanted to write about happened in that year.
I still know the visceral feeling of witnessing decay in my community, watching my friends and family trying to suture the ruptures in their lives, and above it all, gray skies, too much cold, the stubbornness of winter clinging to spring. It was all strong enough to make me spend my senior year of high school writing a rough draft instead of breaking into abandoned buildings and flirting with friends every night.
Through college and the years after college, I kept hammering away at revisions. A couple weeks after I got married, my wife and I packed all of our belongings into a U-Haul and drove to New York so that I could attend grad school, get an MFA, and maybe sell this thing. I got the degree. I didn’t sell Urbantasm. I changed apartments a dozen times. I started an arts collective and watched it collapse. I moved back home to Flint. I had one child, and then another. They got older and started school. This was a good life, but one of the constants was Urbantasm. Was my work witnessing 1996.
In his remarkable song “Casimir Pulaski Day,” Sufjan Stevens, singing about the death of a young friend, says of Jesus: “he takes and he takes and he takes and he takes.” The straightforward meaning of these lyrics is that Christ takes on every burden, granting peace, and yet sung from the perspective of a young boy, the song seems to turn the meaning on its head: God never stops taking, after all. He has taken everything I have to give, and still he takes more. I can never fill him up.
That’s how I started to feel about 1996 during the 27 years I spent writing about it.
•
I finished Urbantasm this year. I never sold it to a publisher, though. I queried 200 agents and small presses, and the book was too weird, too long, and probably too imperfect to warrant such a colossal risk.
I was very lucky, though, in that a friend offered to finance its publication. I put the story out in four volumes. I was able to promote online, to tour it from San Francisco to New York, to enter contests and exploit every opportunity to get the word out there. Urbantasm received some small critical recognition. It told a few hundred copies. It isn’t going to make it big in the world.
That’s okay. That’s beside the point. I needed to witness Flint, Michigan in 1996. I honored that need. As Paul says, “I have fought the good and worthy and noble fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.”
So why won’t 1996 leave me alone?
•
The seduction was over a moment after it had hit. Like an actual kiss, the fleeting sensation of touch and presence elapsed and left only a fragmentary and fast-fading memory. “Talula” kept playing just as it had in the past. I streamed the song again, but of course I didn’t experience time travel again. Lightning doesn’t strike twice. Time rolls on.
Over the last few decades I have met many writers. A subset of us give ourselves over to one project, one statement, one declaration, one witnessing. And such an uncompromising commitment to an effort that may not put bread on our plate or medals on our breast is crazy, irrational, and debatably unhealthy. Despite all the romance – the prophetic, lonely, unyielding artist still at work, faith unflagging – this is a foolhardy way to try to build a career. Once completed, it is worth asking: was it worth it?
I don’t have an answer.
This is the quintessential “road not taken” conundrum, and, in a form, the problem Frost took on when he wrote his most famous poem. “What else could I have written? What else could I have done with that time? If I had not done this?” Sane and necessary questions.
Still.
In 27 years, our country has gone to war and mortgaged its youth and sold its future for scrap. In 27 years I have met, and wed, and started a family. So much has happened. And yet I am glad, preposterously, ludicrously, that I shared what I witnessed in Flint in 1996.
It was not a waste of time.
It was worthy.
Related Feature: Excerpt: Connor Coyne’s URBANTASM BOOK FOUR: THE SPRING STORM
Connor Coyne (he/him) is a writer living and working in Flint, Michigan.
He’s published several novels and a short story collection, and his work has been featured in Vox.com, Belt Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and two daughters in Flint’s College Cultural Neighborhood (aka the East Village), less than a mile from the house where he grew up. Learn more about Connor’s writing at ConnorCoyne.com.
Hypertext Magazine & Studio (HMS) publishes original, brave, and striking narratives of historically marginalized, emerging, and established writers online and in print. HMS empowers Chicago-area adults by teaching writing workshops that spark curiosity, empower creative expression, and promote self-advocacy. By welcoming a diversity of voices and communities, HMS celebrates the transformative power of story and inclusion. We invite our audience to read the narratives we publish so that, together, we can navigate our complex world.
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