I Am Literature.

My Edgar Allan Poe trip doesn't have an ending.

This feels appropriate.

Last night, I was in Richmond for work and went to the Poe Museum. Tonight, work sent me to Baltimore.

I hadn't planned an Edgar Allan Poe trip when I signed up for this work trip. I didn't even realize I was taking one until I was already in the middle of it.

I got to Richmond and realized Poe had lived there. There was a museum. Of course I went.

Then I looked at where work was sending me next.

Baltimore.

Poe died in Baltimore. His grave is here. His house is here.

Apparently, I was having an Edgar Allan Poe trip. Richmond first. Baltimore second.

What's next on the itinerary, Boston, Philadelphia, NYC?

I was excited. I planned to visit Poe's house and his grave. It felt like the perfect ending to a trip I hadn't realized I was taking until I was already in the middle of it.

Then we were delayed four hours. By the time I got to Baltimore, it was too late.

No Poe House. No grave.

No ending.

Somewhere between Richmond and Baltimore, though, I had already fallen down another rabbit hole.

After leaving the museum, I kept reading about Poe. One question led to another, which led to a quote.

In a letter to Frederick W. Thomas in 1849, Poe wrote:

For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path. I shall be a Littérateur at least all my life; nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California.

That stayed with me.

There is no seducing me from the path.

All my life.

There was something familiar in the certainty of it. The idea that writing wasn't simply something he did. It was something he understood himself to be.

And somewhere in one of the approximately four hundred tabs perpetually open in my brain, another line surfaced.

Kafka.

I remembered Kafka saying that he was literature.

So, naturally, I went looking. One rabbit hole opened into another.

Kafka wrote:

All I am is literature, and I am not able or willing to be anything else.

There it was.

Poe: There is no seducing me from the path.

Kafka: I am not able or willing to be anything else.

I understand them both.

I am literature. I am words.

I don't mean that grandly. I mean that there is a compelling urge in me to get the words out.

The character. The story. The sentence. The poem. The argument. The piece of prose that appeared from nowhere and now refuses to leave me alone.

It has to get out of my head and go somewhere. A page. A screen. My Notes app. A Margin. A scrap of paper I may eventually crumple up and throw away.

It doesn't necessarily need an audience. It needs somewhere else to live.

That's an important distinction. The compulsion to write and the desire to be read are not the same thing.

Because being read scares the hell out of me.

Writing is an extraordinarily vulnerable thing. I can spend months or years putting some part of myself into a story and then, eventually, I'm supposed to hand it to another person and wait to see what happens.

Strangely, I don't think the worst response would be someone telling me they hated it. Tell me it's terrible. Tell me the idea doesn't work. Tell me you hated every page.

At least you read every page.

Apathy is worse.

I didn't care.

I didn't bother to read it.

I skimmed it.

That fucking hurts.

Because this is my soul on paper. Or, more often these days, on a screen.

You don't have to like it. But the possibility that I could hand someone something containing so much of me and they couldn't even be bothered to really look at it?

That is much harder for me than rejection.

There is a part of me that would rather never publish at all. Keep the words where they are safe. Mine. Unread, perhaps, but never dismissed.

And then there is another part of me that desperately wants to know.

Maybe someone will love them. Maybe something will resonate. Maybe a reader will recognize a feeling she thought belonged only to her. Maybe someone will disappear into one of my stories for a few hours and get a little vacation from their own mind. Maybe their grief will have somewhere else to sit for a while.

If the words can do that for even one person, I think they're worth the risk of letting them go.

Which leaves me with two fears that shouldn't fit together as neatly as they do.

I am terrified of putting my work into the world.

And I am equally terrified of leaving the world before I do.

Maybe that's why unfinished manuscripts bother me so much.

Poe left one. We call it The Light-House.

Except Poe didn't.

He left four handwritten pages of an unfinished story. The manuscript itself had space for a title, but Poe never filled it in. The title by which we now know it was supplied later by George E. Woodberry, who first published part of the fragment in 1909.

That bothers me almost as much as the unfinished story.

I know how important a title can be. Sometimes I know the title before I know the story. Sometimes the title is the thing that tells me what the story wants to become.

A title isn't a label stuck onto the work after everything important is finished. It is part of the work.

So the idea of someone else putting a title on something I wrote after I died makes something inside me recoil. I think Poe would feel the same.

Finishing it for me would be worse.

And then Poe's rabbit hole led me back to Kafka.

Kafka left unfinished work too. But Kafka didn't merely fail to finish it.

He left instructions.

In a note to Max Brod, Kafka asked for the diaries, manuscripts, letters, sketches and other writings he left behind to be “burned unread and to the last page.”

Brod didn't do it.

And because he didn't, the world has Kafka writings Kafka explicitly asked the world never to have.

This is where I become deeply inconvenient.

Because I'm grateful.

And horrified.

I'm grateful Max Brod betrayed Kafka.

I would never forgive him if Kafka were me.

Both things are true.

I understand the desire to protect the words. I understand wanting control over which version of yourself another person gets to see. I understand looking at something unfinished and thinking: No. Not that. That isn't ready. That isn't what I meant. That isn't mine yet.

But I also know what the world would have lost.

So when does an unfinished work stop belonging to the artist? Does it ever?

Does death transfer some claim to the family? The literary executor? The publisher? The archive? The reader? History?

What if the author explicitly said no? What if ignoring that no gives the world a masterpiece? What if someone finishes the manuscript? What if they finish it beautifully?

Is a brilliant betrayal somehow less of a betrayal?

I don't think so. But apparently I want to argue with myself about it.

And then I started thinking about how much stranger this question is becoming for writers now.

A writer used to leave papers. We leave everything.

Drafts. Cloud backups. Notes apps. Voice memos. Emails. Text messages. Deleted scenes. Track changes. Scrivener files. Twenty-seven versions of the same chapter.

Maybe three endings. Maybe no ending.

Maybe conversations with AI in which the writer argued passionately for one ending on Tuesday and dismantled the entire idea on Friday.

Which one is intention? Which one is process? Which one is the work?

What happens when there is enough left behind for someone to say:

We know how she wrote.

We know what she intended.

We can finish it.

No.

You can imitate her. I'm not convinced those are the same thing.

And God help whoever decides to change my title. I'll haunt you myself.

I want the words to remain mine.

I also want them to remain.

Somewhere in all of this, another thing happened.

I got a novel idea. Of course I did.

Or, more accurately, something that has been circling around in my head for months finally told me what it wanted to be.

It has bones now.

A place to put the soul.

I don't know its name yet. I don't entirely know its shape. I'm not ready to explain what it is.

But I'm putting it together piece by piece, like Frankenstein.

Which feels particularly appropriate for a story born from wondering who has the right to put someone else's unfinished pieces together.

One rabbit hole led to another. Poe led me to Kafka. Kafka led me to Brod. Brod led me back to myself.

And somewhere in the middle of all that, an unfinished idea became the beginning of a novel.

I came to Baltimore intending to finish my accidental Poe trip. Instead, I missed his house. I missed his grave. I didn't get the ending I planned.

But somewhere between Richmond and Baltimore, an unfinished idea finally found its beginning.

I came to Baltimore looking for the end of Poe's story.

Instead, I found the beginning of one of mine.