For Now

Why I Write

by Eileen Myles

In this raucous meditation, Eileen Myles offers an intimate glimpse into creativity’s immediacy. With erudition and wit, Myles recounts their early years as an awakening writer; existential struggles with landlords; storied moments with neighbors, friends, and lovers; and the textures and identities of cities and the country that reveal the nature of writing as presence in time.
 
For Myles, time’s “optic quality” is what enables writing in the first place—as attention, as devotion, as excess. It is this chronologized vision that enables the writer to love the world as it presently is, lending love a linguistic permanence amid social and political systems that threaten to eradicate it. Irreverent, generous, and always insightful, For Now is a candid record of the creative process from one of our most beloved artists.

Genres: Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Essays, Memoir, Art, Biography

96 pages, Hardcover

First published September 22, 2020

About the author

Eileen Myles is a LAMBDA Literary Award-winning American poet and writer who has produced more than twenty volumes of poetry, fiction, non-fiction, libretti, plays, and performance pieces over the last three decades.

Reviews

[Ailsa]

"Once I tasted time I never wanted anything else. And that is what I'm doing here. The only way I can prove it is that I started writing. Writing is my alibi. A few things must be true." 14

" I think literature is wasted time, I don't think there's anything good about it. It's not a moral project except in this profound aspect of wasting time."

"When my hand hits the keyboard I'm lying."

"Poetry proves me."

[Sian Lile-Pastore · Rating 5 out of 5]

no one else is writing like Eileen Myles.

[Casi ! · Rating 4 out of 5]

A meditation on “why I write,” this piece is an essay Myles read at Yale’s speaker series. They stay true to the fluidity of speech, and even more so the fluidity of ideas, feelings, and being human. It’s a short enough piece that I do recommend it, but I found a lot of the rambling nature of the book to be enjoyable only theoretically (as an appreciation of what freedom in storytelling can look like) while I found the arguments of the piece (where she gets up close to what writing means to her) as really wonderful. But as I move to discussing some take away ideas and quotes, I change my review from 3 to 4 stars bc, look:

“If you ask me to tell you why I love it probably have to do with this deep comfort/discomfort of being in the world and this option of devotion.If I want to sit here and copy all day that might be the best option available to me, it’s not an anti-depressant and it’s not exhilarating and it’s not aerobic But it is a form of chanting and I do do it for religious reasons. I mean it’s my default position.”

For anyone who is getting caught up in the why and how of reading, I recommend this short read to remember that writing is not exhilarating or a “moral project” but a “copying” (a way to connect with the world), “a chanting” (both religious and default), and the ability to “espouse a dream” (where you too get to be a fiction) without the “burden of veracity.”

[Delia Rainey · Rating 5 out of 5]

eileen myles' book is their puppet, emitting their voice but it's fake but it's real. in "for now", time frays out and out and bends and meets many places. time feels endless, endless material of what happened: their rent-controlled apartment in new york and the saga of almost getting bought and moving somewhere else but it never felt right, and the other writing place in marfa and the creation of their shack converted into a bathtub room, and the best part of "for now" which is the horror and intricate searching and asking for the missing box of poems and photos and archival material. the archives. it's all meta because this book is a document aware of its archival purpose and fate. i could go on and on about their non-usage of commas, or colliding thoughts and events that don't need much transition but all fit together because it's all their life. they slip in an unpublished essay called MY SECRET which completes everything. what's great about reading eileen myles is that their writing feels so unserious and like they are just talking to me but it also feels like the world, something spiritual. "a radiant hole."

writing is "copying everything (in words) which is a form of loving the world, aiming and choosing. I suppose just the way it is. life is I do this."

"it really is so much time to be a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself -- like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach."

"I don't know the difference between the mind and body or I do but I am always trying to erase it."

"if you ask me to tell you why i write it probably has to do with this deep comfort/discomfort of being in the world and this option of devotion."

[Rhiley Jade · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 stars!

This was mostly a collection of thoughts. It had no rhyme or reason and long sentences and barely any commas or periods or question marks. I loved how unique it was with it's writing style. However it's also what bumped it down a star. I got confused easily and when the sentences didn't make sense, which I believe was the idea, it frustrated me. Although it was beautiful, it was irritating. I do want to read more from this author!

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

’When my hands hits the keyboard I’m lying.’

Hoe kan je niet van Myles houden?

Een deel van de inhoud kwam mij redelijk voor - uit Time Lost (de podcast van Perdu), het optreden dat ik daar mocht bijwonen en van hun Instagrampagina. Niettemin, een erg aangename lezing.

*3,5

[Julie Grace Immink · Rating 3 out of 5]

A 300 square ft labyrinthine

[Hilary Slauson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I enjoyed this very very much.

[Elina · Rating 5 out of 5]

shedding tears again, always emotional and moved by ‘their’ work :’)

[Julene · Rating 4 out of 5]

For Now, by Eileen Myles is a talk from the Why I Write series that she gave at Yale University. It is in three sections and probably easier to listen to than to read. Still, it is Eileen Myles and so it holds earned wisdom.

Some quotes:
"...I'm thinking how Greek I am, thoughts fading into the either if I don't write them down, forgetting is not stuff, it's the act of once holding information or fact or emotion (in my brain) and then slowly inevitably it drifts away, the void quickly being filled, by the new idea so to speak if the old thought is there at all."

Here she begins to sound like Gertrude Stein at the end of the paragraph, at the beginning she is rifting on a Sherwin-Williams paint ad:
"In part the ad is effective cause it's a good drawing, it's a cartoon. The covers the world part, the caption, is the redundancy we've come to expect from the world. Just in case you didn't get it the first time I'm going to sum it up for you. I suppose the ad's a little colonizing, which is kind of the problem with "your." Your anything. It's self colonizing. "Your writing." It's not exactly "literature," it's thick, it's kind of "other" somehow.
Metonymic, a growth, it's more like habit. The interviewer turns to you after looking at their notes. "So . . . about your writing you've said somewhere . . . ." and you are being thrust into the position of being a specialist on "your work" and probably asked to expand or back up some claim you made in the past probably off handedly about it being an alibi, or a little house, it's just some form of mental illness, though it's "my mental illness," you say proudly, one I built for myself. Yeah it's just a form of employment for the unemployable, a life-long something for the got nothings, it's just what I did (shrug) while I was living in this cheap apartment, and while you're here let me tell you about my cheap apartment . . . my love, my dog. I don't like to ever stay on the it of it too long, I mean is there really an it."

I'm glad she got to keep her NYC apartment on the LES, I'd heard part of this story so was glad to learn the end. I'm glad her archives are stored, and it seems some writers get paid for this? I'm sorry she lost two crates of her writing and photographs.

[Jan Ayers · Rating 4 out of 5]

The more I think about it, the more I wanted to add a star. Eileen Myles' work inspires either instantaneous love or the creep-up-behind-you and take-you-down-onto-the-mat kind of love that happens a day, or week, or even ten years later. So off-handed at first, but carrying a bludgeon.

[Rebecca · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wanted to like this but hard to get past the thoughts of feeling like they deserved to stay in their rent controlled unit because they too were part of the poor class, yet knowing that they owned property in Texas.

[Jillian Acreman · Rating 5 out of 5]

"When my hand hits the keyboard I'm lying"

An excellent and possibly final read of 2021

[Matilda Bickers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Left me with that same breathless excitement to tear up life Myles always does.

[Miryam Jivotovski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! Myles does a great job of explaining the magic of writing. Great lil read here

[May Soshi · Rating 2 out of 5]

unnecessarily confusing and uninspiring

[Donald Grant · Rating 5 out of 5]

A joyous and inspiring read.....

Discovering the way an author's mind works is always fascinating. Myers gives a personal and revealing look into just how her mind looks at life, whether writing or not. With humor and honesty she blends her life story with her desire to "copy" the life around her.
This is an excellent read and I highly recommend it to any and all types of artists.

[Keely Shinners · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The city has taught me almost everything I know about language and existence and being a writer, density of impression etc. etc. of the forms and identities and textures that assault and excite and distract me living here but that's not what I'm about here yet, probably never, I'm really talking about the legal and political conditions my conditions that created me as a writer and I mean largely low rent and thereby time because one gives on the other and how do you use it. It really takes so much time to become a writer and you have to be able to roll in time itself, that was my experience, it seems to me, like a dog likes to roll in dead fish at the beach. Or a dog (my dog) stands in the shit of a stable underneath the body of a horse (trembling) and feels awe. Cause there's so much shit and there's so much horse."

[Glen Helfand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this small, potent book gave me the impulse to get some writing done. Myles writes as part of a series called "Why I Write," and like many of the authors I admire most, the answers they offer are full of contradiction and complication. Writing as alibi, an interior project of becoming real. The stream of narratives that span time, place, and people seems random, but it Myles is seasoned, this is a life of writing, the reasons shifting, poetic impulses merging with narrative arcs. And then there is the fascinating layer of institutions, of the published and archived fictions. They offer permission to work on the self, to be selfish, to live in conversation with the page, with the world.

[Paulette · Rating 4 out of 5]

this book was definitely something i had to ease to since i think their ramble-ish writing style in this book is not really my thing and took me out at times.

also, i found some parts (like where eileen talks about their rent) hard to get through bc like bruh you own a whole house and have a very established career. like writing is always not the wealthiest profession by any means but reading about them being like ‘oh i don’t wanna lose my east village rent controlled apt where my rent is soooo low’ while knowing this context made it so hard to empathize with their struggle.

however they give us some very exciting moments, i especially enjoyed those where eileen gets into their writing. keeping it, archiving it and what that means to them.

[Carrie]

A strange sort of "experimental prose style" (I think) where there are some commas but enough missing commas that it makes one wonder, and it starts to read sometimes like punctuation errors, or is it just more like speech in writing. The other weird thing is that they refer to themselves in the first person mostly but also the third person, all the sudden "Eileen" and then sometimes even the second person.

But loved the notebook writing aspect, and I gotta get back into my notebook writing. And also I too have a missing box story, of my notebooks when I was 38, I had a whole book planned called 38 but now that book will never happen.

[Levy Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent, just what I wanted out of Myles’ contribution to Yale’s “Why I Write” series. Unlike their other novels (which focus on their wild past), this takes a much more present look at their life as an established literary elder, still very much enmeshed in queer artsy subculture. This little book made me want to write, but their literary genius is also extremely intimidating, so maybe I’ll just leave the writing to the experts.

“It’s so much better fetishizing my life than my writing.” (Pg 53)

[Lynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

The third book in a series on why writers write and is very much in the same style of Patti Smith, if this is not too much of a comparison. By being similar in style, I mean that it is very much a wander through the writer's thoughts and experiences rather than a straightforward narrative. This book by Eileen Myles is, in my opinion, more interesting but that could be because I compared Smith's book to her other, much better, writing. I have not read a lot by Eileen Myles and came to this volume after seeing them give a Zoom interview a few weeks ago. I am a bit of stickler for punctuation and paragraphing as I find they help the communicative process but Myles pulls off the free-writing free-thinking process very well. I have been inspired to buy another set of their essays. It's a short book which contains just enough to wet the appetite and not enough to be annoying or boring. Do I recommend this book? Heck, yes!

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was such a perfect physical object that I had to pick it up. I’m a sucker for a clever little book, especially with a matte or textured cover. The contents were more than worth it, with an insect in amber depiction of rent stabilization in New York City, beautiful writing, and fascinating thoughts about poetry, writing, and what it means to be the specific poet and writer that is Eileen Myles. I need to read more of her work.

[Marina Alart · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5/5 - I got this little book on my birthday and I must admit essays are not my favorite. But Myles essay has a particular style, more of a ‘morning pages’ style rather than anything else I know, sort of rambling around with thoughts and memories. Long sentences with no comas or periods, which made them difficult to follow but at the same time, beautiful, and sudden treasures amidst. Why I write is just that – writing as an alibi.

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I have been arming myself with philosophies for years that support the notion that the point is to be here, to be present which I think is the truly hard part, and yet I keep coming back to it, it’s undeniably true and writing it turns out is the easiest way to copy that feeling. I have been doing it for years. I would like to be here, I think I’m here, and the more I write, and the more you read it the more it’s simply a fact. So that’s pretty much done and now I’m living here.”

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

The form reminds me of My Life by Lyn Hejinian and the language Gertrude Stein. References to having to leave a rent controlled NYC apartment because of traveling so much to her 2nd home in Marfa + references to selling one’s archives for a lot of money (in her case Yale) left me with a bad taste of privilege that I unfortunately couldn’t overcome.

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ever since I stumbled over Myles’s Not Me in my college library around 1990, I’ve devoured every book I encounter by them. That 30-some years later Myles has now written about getting their papers ready to go into an academic archives while I have spent the last decade+ working as an archivist feels like a special bonus just for me.

[jules · Rating 4 out of 5]

(on writing)

“Yeah it’s just a form of employment for the unemployable, a life-long something for the got nothings, it’s just what I did (shrug) while I was living in this cheap apartment…”

“I think of writing, at best, as always quickly darting off into what it does. The horizon of the practice. That out there. And even if the subject is ‘me’ it still feels that way. I’m gone. Necessarily.”

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is something just so eye opening here. This isn’t just about writing as much as it is about living or being. And the fact that we are expiring. And the concepts of fact and fiction. What are we made of? What are we writers creating and why were we created? There is a box of our life lost somewhere.
Eventually a stranger will open it and decide who we
were.