Unfinished
The Trace Fossils editors discuss what is left when only their writing remains.
All artists want complete work. All artists want at day’s end to look back on the pieces they created and think of them as whole, as worthwhile, as good. But what happens to the work that doesn’t reach these standards? What happens to the ugly, the underwhelmed, the pieces we refuse to publish that are allowed only to exist within ourselves? The topic of unfinished work is a rough one, but is also one that defines what it means to be an artist, and reinvents the relationships we hold with our work. In this special feature, the editors at Trace Fossils Review discuss some unfinished work of our own, with hopes to come to terms with incomplete art and how we see it.
______________________
Linda Garziera
Why did you decide not to publish this piece?
These lines are collected fragments from when I was writing The Bejeweled Chameleon—wispy thoughts that didn’t quite make it into the book but were dear enough to jot down. The lines themselves are blurry faces on the subway, a smell caught in the wind: they’re not meant to make sense together because they come from every cranny of the book. Put together in such a way, they create a skeleton of my work.
The process of writing, fiction especially, calls for such intense revisions that a whole idea might change into another. I call it the “beheading of prose.” These lines were the result of many such “beheadings,” of scenes rethought, of character rebellions, of excessiveness, that didn’t belong in the writing but behind it. It was by writing these lines that others came to be. It is not a question of whether they should’ve been part of the work, but how they contributed to what The Bejeweled Chameleon is now. They’re not the details taken off of a painting, but rather the background colors that make others shine.
How are you related to the writing you cut away? What do you think we lose by paring down our work, and what do we gain?
During my childhood, I moved houses a lot. I got good at packing, taping a cardboard box, layering the things inside—heavy and light, fragile and a buffer. From early on, I learned the importance of letting go, which is hard when you’re eight and have to halve your stuffed animal collection. But the letting go, I realized, was of all the “background” things—the details that were part of my childhood, but weren’t formative of it.
As writers I think we all dislike cutting down our work. It’s uncomfortable, it’s sad. It’s the primary reason why I’ve kept all these lines (and more) from my book—I’d hate to throw them out. Revisions are necessary to sharpen our writing. Overall, I think writing benefits from heavy revision and pairing down, and certainly the reader doesn’t feel the loss of these revisions. So I think the main effect of cutting down is on the writer themselves. Reading back a piece of edited writing, I still see the phantom lines, smell them on the corners of the page, clamoring. Cutting down is not always a negative thing, but it is nostalgic. Compiling the “deadwood” of my book felt like an apology to them. I’m glad they’re being put on the page.
Do you consider The Bejeweled Chameleon a finished work? Why or why not?
There were a couple of forks in the roadmap for writing the novel that I wish I would've taken a sneak peek of, a couple of characters I met too briefly and a few places I would've gladly returned to and stayed in and read about in greater depth. But the book, driven by the curiosity of the two young protagonists and their mistakes, became a living flesh, unable to rest for too long. In this way, I feel that the dynamism was of benefit to me. That chasing my characters through their actions, committing to certain choices and following them through was indeed the best way for me to tell their story.
The truthful answer to this question is an answer of holes and doubts and clashing thoughts. Like a summer: full of hopes and energy and balmy nostalgia. It is the reason these lines exist outside of the book, and the reason that many more were never given the grace to be preserved. But in short, in the aftermath of writing the book, of holding the hands of my characters and mentors through it, of traversing the world line by line—you tell me if it isn’t.
Deadwood from The Bejeweled Chameleon
It was the Fifth Avenue doormen, savoring the arrival of grand clients and their grander tips to come with the festivities, that bustled about the sidewalks.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
At that point, if you were still looking, New York would be transformed right in front of you.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
It wasn’t a special day in the way a mall sales clerk would wish you to have, placing a hand on your arm, maybe handing you a soap sample.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
“See those gentlemen in the corner?” he pointed to the pool players erupting in a mess of hands on shoulders and drinking in the air, “I say they’ve won a game. If they come over and buy the room a drink, then I’ll come.”
“Boon.” Felix was looking closely at his friend. Again Felix had the impression that there was something underneath his smile.
“Alright, just the people at the counter. A drink.”
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
(vodka without beer, they had learned on that occasion, means money to the wind)
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
Glowing, the cigarette tips would somersault onto the asphalt with the certainty of water bound to end up in a sewer, and go out with a hiss.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
Really, it looked a bit like a badly sketched grinning face, but people would assume it was a burn mark and so, naturally, that he was part of a gang. And that, so far, had always served him well.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
He was known to chew off questions and spit out the bones of an argument.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
Like a pushpin and a wall. Like a ring on her finger.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
She stared into his eyes, until their bodies touched. Her chest was padded with layers, Turkish designs on the collars—deep, rich colors melting into one another. On her breath, the black tea they’d been drinking, the honey cake and the cigarettes. Confused and blushing, he held her stare and smiled. In those blue eyes was the desolation of the Steppe, the mysteries and secrets of the Taiga, the inscrutable soul of Big Mother Russia.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
And the oaks and the smell of salt and oil by the bay. And the drag of a boat in water.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
That year, when Lent began, New York became alive. Schools plastered Easter drawings on windows, restaurants arranged flower displays in their verandas, swallows ventured to construct nests in the crooks of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. John’s the Divine. In the Spring of 1998, people walked down the avenues with an undeserved certainty of brighter prospects, better lovers, that the dresses at Macy’s would be all the more fitting and the food at Zandelli’s even more divine. One could leave the front door open and wait for baby chicks and lambs to enter two-by-two.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
As they wandered about the Wat, they saw other monks too: half, strong men who wore their orange Kasaya proudly, their heads glowing even in the graying sky; half in shriveled skin, weighed down by the robes that covered them.
𝄖𝄖𝄖𝄖
It was a season that had never come before.
______________________
Sophia Stadalsky
Why do you consider this an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
“Projections” is an unfinished piece to me because…well, it’s unfinished. I never felt able to communicate what I was going for in the fullest way. It was based on a trip my art class took in highschool to a Vincent Van Gogh exhibit, where projections of his art were displayed on the walls of each room. The light projectors were pointed in every direction, so you could see people staring at the art with A Starry Night lit up on their back or their jeans. I love interesting lighting, but it’s always been a challenge for me to capture with my art; my intention with this piece was to make it into a sort of study, and to capture those projections and the mood they gifted the room. I was never able to make the projection as glowy as it really was, and my poor friend (the subject) wasn’t done justice either.
I get so frustrated when I have a specific image in my head of what I want to create but can't make happen. Like most things that scare me, I avoided working on the painting until it was too late to put it into my thesis, but I regret it now; I think it could’ve been a cool idea to revisit.
The work I don't finish feels shameful, like something I should’ve finished or somehow known better to have avoided completely. I don’t have many examples of unfinished work because of this mindset—I’ve avoided making work simply to avoid what they might not become—but I can see how that has limited my artistic development, and how it’s kept me from bringing my ideas to life in the way they could be. I’m coming to the realization that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, but it’s a slow realization. All artists come to it at some point. I hope to have a large collection of unfinished and ugly art in the future.
Is there an element of your craft—an image, a setting, a sense or a smell—that you find you’re never quite finished making art about?
I love light. It affects everything in a setting, which creates a story and conveys the feeling of a piece. Light and life are a kind of synonym to me, and living things, I find, are what make me want to make art.
People are also an endless source of inspiration because they’re always moving, changing. There’s a connection aspect of it too, an acknowledgement of being a person. People are hard to understand (and hard to draw), so drawing them decodes them a bit. At the risk of sounding creepy, I like drawing people in public places. You can get an impression of who they seem to be at that moment—and that may change based on the minute, the hour, the day. You’re given endless make-believe stories of who they may be, and what that makes you.
Projections
Unfinished
The Trace Fossils editors discuss what is left when only their writing remains.
All artists want complete work. All artists want at day’s end to look back on the pieces they created and think of them as whole, as worthwhile, as good. But what happens to the work that doesn’t reach these standards? What happens to the ugly, the underwhelmed, the pieces we refuse to publish that are allowed only to exist within ourselves? The topic of unfinished work is a rough one, but is also one that defines what it means to be an artist, and reinvents the relationships we hold with our work. In this special feature, the editors at Trace Fossils Review discuss some unfinished work of our own, with hopes to come to terms with incomplete art and how we see it.
______________________
Linda Garziera
Why did you decide not to publish this piece?
These lines are collected fragments from when I was writing The Bejeweled Chameleon—wispy thoughts that didn’t quite make it into the book but were dear enough to jot down. The lines themselves are blurry faces on the subway, a smell caught in the wind: they’re not meant to make sense together because they come from every cranny of the book. Put together in such a way, they create a skeleton of my work.
The process of writing, fiction especially, calls for such intense revisions that a whole idea might change into another. I call it the “beheading of prose.” These lines were the result of many such “beheadings,” of scenes rethought, of character rebellions, of excessiveness, that didn’t belong in the writing but behind it. It was by writing these lines that others came to be. It is not a question of whether they should’ve been part of the work, but how they contributed to what The Bejeweled Chameleon is now. They’re not the details taken off of a painting, but rather the background colors that make others shine.
How are you related to the writing you cut away? What do you think we lose by paring down our work, and what do we gain?
During my childhood, I moved houses a lot. I got good at packing, taping a cardboard box, layering the things inside—heavy and light, fragile and a buffer. From early on, I learned the importance of letting go, which is hard when you’re eight and have to halve your stuffed animal collection. But the letting go, I realized, was of all the “background” things—the details that were part of my childhood, but weren’t formative of it.
As writers I think we all dislike cutting down our work. It’s uncomfortable, it’s sad. It’s the primary reason why I’ve kept all these lines (and more) from my book—I’d hate to throw them out. Revisions are necessary to sharpen our writing. Overall, I think writing benefits from heavy revision and pairing down, and certainly the reader doesn’t feel the loss of these revisions. So I think the main effect of cutting down is on the writer themselves. Reading back a piece of edited writing, I still see the phantom lines, smell them on the corners of the page, clamoring. Cutting down is not always a negative thing, but it is nostalgic. Compiling the “deadwood” of my book felt like an apology to them. I’m glad they’re being put on the page.
Do you consider The Bejeweled Chameleon a finished work? Why or why not?
There were a couple of forks in the roadmap for writing the novel that I wish I would've taken a sneak peek of, a couple of characters I met too briefly and a few places I would've gladly returned to and stayed in and read about in greater depth. But the book, driven by the curiosity of the two young protagonists and their mistakes, became a living flesh, unable to rest for too long. In this way, I feel that the dynamism was of benefit to me. That chasing my characters through their actions, committing to certain choices and following them through was indeed the best way for me to tell their story.
The truthful answer to this question is an answer of holes and doubts and clashing thoughts. Like a summer: full of hopes and energy and balmy nostalgia. It is the reason these lines exist outside of the book, and the reason that many more were never given the grace to be preserved. But in short, in the aftermath of writing the book, of holding the hands of my characters and mentors through it, of traversing the world line by line—you tell me if it isn’t.
Deadwood from The Bejeweled Chameleon
It was the Fifth Avenue doormen, savoring the arrival of grand clients and their grander tips to come with the festivities, that bustled about the sidewalks.
———
At that point, if you were still looking, New York would be transformed right in front of you.
———
It wasn’t a special day in the way a mall sales clerk would wish you to have, placing a hand on your arm, maybe handing you a soap sample.
———
“See those gentlemen in the corner?” he pointed to the pool players erupting in a mess of hands on shoulders and drinking in the air, “I say they’ve won a game. If they come over and buy the room a drink, then I’ll come.”
“Boon.” Felix was looking closely at his friend. Again Felix had the impression that there was something underneath his smile.
“Alright, just the people at the counter. A drink.”
———
(vodka without beer, they had learned on that occasion, means money to the wind)
———
Glowing, the cigarette tips would somersault onto the asphalt with the certainty of water bound to end up in a sewer, and go out with a hiss.
———
Really, it looked a bit like a badly sketched grinning face, but people would assume it was a burn mark and so, naturally, that he was part of a gang. And that, so far, had always served him well.
———
He was known to chew off questions and spit out the bones of an argument.
———
Like a pushpin and a wall. Like a ring on her finger.
———
She stared into his eyes, until their bodies touched. Her chest was padded with layers, Turkish designs on the collars—deep, rich colors melting into one another. On her breath, the black tea they’d been drinking, the honey cake and the cigarettes. Confused and blushing, he held her stare and smiled. In those blue eyes was the desolation of the Steppe, the mysteries and secrets of the Taiga, the inscrutable soul of Big Mother Russia.
———
And the oaks and the smell of salt and oil by the bay. And the drag of a boat in water.
———
That year, when Lent began, New York became alive. Schools plastered Easter drawings on windows, restaurants arranged flower displays in their verandas, swallows ventured to construct nests in the crooks of St. Patrick’s Cathedral and St. John’s the Divine. In the Spring of 1998, people walked down the avenues with an undeserved certainty of brighter prospects, better lovers, that the dresses at Macy’s would be all the more fitting and the food at Zandelli’s even more divine. One could leave the front door open and wait for baby chicks and lambs to enter two-by-two.
———
As they wandered about the Wat, they saw other monks too: half, strong men who wore their orange Kasaya proudly, their heads glowing even in the graying sky; half in shriveled skin, weighed down by the robes that covered them.
———
It was a season that had never come before.
______________________
Sophia Stadalsky
Why do you consider this an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
“Projections” is an unfinished piece to me because…well, it’s unfinished. I never felt able to communicate what I was going for in the fullest way. It was based on a trip my art class took in highschool to a Vincent Van Gogh exhibit, where projections of his art were displayed on the walls of each room. The light projectors were pointed in every direction, so you could see people staring at the art with A Starry Night lit up on their back or their jeans. I love interesting lighting, but it’s always been a challenge for me to capture with my art; my intention with this piece was to make it into a sort of study, and to capture those projections and the mood they gifted the room. I was never able to make the projection as glowy as it really was, and my poor friend (the subject) wasn’t done justice either.
I get so frustrated when I have a specific image in my head of what I want to create but can't make happen. Like most things that scare me, I avoided working on the painting until it was too late to put it into my thesis, but I regret it now; I think it could’ve been a cool idea to revisit.
The work I don't finish feels shameful, like something I should’ve finished or somehow known better to have avoided completely. I don’t have many examples of unfinished work because of this mindset—I’ve avoided making work simply to avoid what they might not become—but I can see how that has limited my artistic development, and how it’s kept me from bringing my ideas to life in the way they could be. I’m coming to the realization that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, but it’s a slow realization. All artists come to it at some point. I hope to have a large collection of unfinished and ugly art in the future.
Is there an element of your craft—an image, a setting, a sense or a smell—that you find you’re never quite finished making art about?
I love light. It affects everything in a setting, which creates a story and conveys the feeling of a piece. Light and life are a kind of synonym to me, and living things, I find, are what make me want to make art.
People are also an endless source of inspiration because they’re always moving, changing. There’s a connection aspect of it too, an acknowledgement of being a person. People are hard to understand (and hard to draw), so drawing them decodes them a bit. At the risk of sounding creepy, I like drawing people in public places. You can get an impression of who they seem to be at that moment—and that may change based on the minute, the hour, the day. You’re given endless make-believe stories of who they may be, and what that makes you.
Projections
______________________
Merrik Moriarty
Why did you decide not to publish this piece? Looking back, does a part of you wish you had?
This excerpt is an early draft of a piece that did eventually end up in Clementine & Beau, but before it even took this form, it was a totally separate story idea I’d had years back. As I wrote it, I found that trying to fit the original themes and characters into the overall arc of the book was like trying to mold hard clay—it needed to be reworked and simplified. In the published draft, the only characters are Pigeon and her family, and while I don’t regret cutting Sadie’s storyline, I like to think that she still lingers at the edges of the finished piece.
What do you think we lose by paring down our writing? What do we gain?
Anyone who knows me will tell you I hate revision—I’m a first draft perfectionist, and I become so attached to my original prose that it’s hard to change it. Writing this book, though, taught me a lot about scrapping pieces and reworking them, rewriting entire sections, and more than that, about the value of simplicity. So many stories refused to cooperate until I’d cut a subplot or a timeline or an entire point of view. I think it’s easy to let that backspaced writing feel like loss, but when we really can pare our writing down to its bones, what we’re left with is often what the piece is really trying to say. And anyway, I save all of my deleted lines in one giant hoarder’s document—maybe I’ll use them for something one day.
Unfinished work from Clementine & Beau
Sadie’s father’s God was a thing of hellfire and holy rage. Pigeon sat in the pew the next Sunday, wood worn smooth against the backs of her legs, and watched him stalk across the pulpit, preaching Old Testament terror. The last time she’d been in a church was a Catholic Easter service years ago, and this was like another world, everything smelling of dust and patterned in stained-glass geometrics, the receipt paper shuffle of bible pages like moth wings all around her. Faulty air conditioning blew the hair at the back of her neck around. Sadie, next to her, drew diagrams of car engines in the margins of her leatherbound bible.
“Who among you fears the Lord?” the pastor demanded.
Afterward, Pigeon watched Sadie’s father smile at people with small white teeth, shake hands and clasp shoulders as they milled around him. Sadie spun through the crowd to throw her arms around him, a tangle of blonde curls and faded blue dress, and he pressed a kiss to the top of her head and turned her by the shoulder to display her. Pigeon leaned against the back wall, arms crossed over her mother’s dress, trying not to look at the pale blue of the pastor’s eyes.
That church? her grandmother had said that morning. That church is haunted.
Yeah, weeping spirits, Pigeon had said. She gave a last look at the way Sadie’s hands were gripping her dress and stepped out into the heat.
Pigeon was halfway out of town when Sadie’s shadow stretched up the road and sprawled under her feet.
Why’d you run away?”
Pigeon shook her head, didn’t turn around. “Got to get home.”
I thought we were working on the car.”
“Right.” She coughed. The dress itched at her shoulders. “That’s what I was going to do.”
Sadie jostled up beside her, all elbows and loose thread. “Did Daddy scare you?”
“I’m not scared of anything,” Pigeon said, and flapped her hand toward the slumped gas station that marked the edge of town.“Let’s go get slushies. Sometimes high school guys hang out in the back.”
“Okay,” Sadie said, but kept walking. “Not even ghosts?”
“That’s baby stuff.”
“Not even your dad?”
“Why would I be scared of him?” Pigeon thought about her father’s dim attempt at a mustache, his nineties workout routines, his rotary of tired jokes. She liked the sickly sharpness of the words on her tongue, the way it made Sadie look at her closer. “He’s kind of pathetic.”
“You shouldn’t disrespect your parents,” Sadie said quietly, and stopped talking as they passed the last buildings and started down the long stretch of bare road. Something twisted uncomfortably in Pigeon’s chest.
When they got to their houses, she told Sadie to wait in the sliver of shadow by the front door and ran in for her cutoffs and a t-shirt, paused in the kitchen for two cups of ice and the big glass jug of sun-warm tea her grandmother was stirring sugar into. Her grandmother smoothed her hair down and handed her the long-handled spoon, glittering with sugar. Out the window, Sadie was spinning across the yellow grass, a hand cupped to the back of her neck.
______________________
Braeden LaRoche
Why do you consider this an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
Ecgonine Tree is what’s left of a larger painting, its majority having been shed. Like all my paintings, I settled at an “end” where I lack the technical skill to revise it toward greater realism or beauty. The relationship I have with my work in general, therefore, is identical to my relationship with the work I leave unfinished. By necessity, I don’t regret leaving anything unfinished. At a point, my efforts must go elsewhere.
What constitutes a “finished” piece of art for you? How do you know when your own art is complete?
For me, painting is a simple extension of a scientific exercise. I invent alien ecologies, and my paintings are visual aids. This lends for a rather bland answer to your question. Fortunately, it’s not entirely true.
Yes, I impose a subject on the canvas. These are the representations in Ecgonine Tree: the striped opportunist and the cratered husk on which it feeds. But also, these impose outward and return by happenstance the harmonies and disharmonies of form which generate the aesthetic element. I suppose it’s my role as an artist to amplify these and tune them toward beauty.
Thus, a piece is complete when I have fully articulated the subject, and when the arrangement of forms can be altered into nothing more beautiful.
What do you think we lose by making art we never finish? What do we gain?
I will claim moderately that the ethical value of artistic exercise is due more regular scrutiny.
To be plain, some artistic endeavors are simply a waste of time. Often when we choose to quit a piece, it’s because we’ve come to our senses.
Ecognine Tree
______________________
Merrik Moriarty
Why did you decide not to publish this piece? Looking back, does a part of you wish you had?
This excerpt is an early draft of a piece that did eventually end up in Clementine & Beau, but before it even took this form, it was a totally separate story idea I’d had years back. As I wrote it, I found that trying to fit the original themes and characters into the overall arc of the book was like trying to mold hard clay—it needed to be reworked and simplified. In the published draft, the only characters are Pigeon and her family, and while I don’t regret cutting Sadie’s storyline, I like to think that she still lingers at the edges of the finished piece.
What do you think we lose by paring down our writing? What do we gain?
Anyone who knows me will tell you I hate revision—I’m a first draft perfectionist, and I become so attached to my original prose that it’s hard to change it. Writing this book, though, taught me a lot about scrapping pieces and reworking them, rewriting entire sections, and more than that, about the value of simplicity. So many stories refused to cooperate until I’d cut a subplot or a timeline or an entire point of view. I think it’s easy to let that backspaced writing feel like loss, but when we really can pare our writing down to its bones, what we’re left with is often what the piece is really trying to say. And anyway, I save all of my deleted lines in one giant hoarder’s document—maybe I’ll use them for something one day.
Unfinished work from Clementine & Beau
Sadie’s father’s God was a thing of hellfire and holy rage. Pigeon sat in the pew the next Sunday, wood worn smooth against the backs of her legs, and watched him stalk across the pulpit, preaching Old Testament terror. The last time she’d been in a church was a Catholic Easter service years ago, and this was like another world, everything smelling of dust and patterned in stained-glass geometrics, the receipt paper shuffle of bible pages like moth wings all around her. Faulty air conditioning blew the hair at the back of her neck around. Sadie, next to her, drew diagrams of car engines in the margins of her leatherbound bible.
“Who among you fears the Lord?” the pastor demanded.
Afterward, Pigeon watched Sadie’s father smile at people with small white teeth, shake hands and clasp shoulders as they milled around him. Sadie spun through the crowd to throw her arms around him, a tangle of blonde curls and faded blue dress, and he pressed a kiss to the top of her head and turned her by the shoulder to display her. Pigeon leaned against the back wall, arms crossed over her mother’s dress, trying not to look at the pale blue of the pastor’s eyes.
That church? her grandmother had said that morning. That church is haunted.
Yeah, weeping spirits, Pigeon had said. She gave a last look at the way Sadie’s hands were gripping her dress and stepped out into the heat.
Pigeon was halfway out of town when Sadie’s shadow stretched up the road and sprawled under her feet.
Why’d you run away?”
Pigeon shook her head, didn’t turn around. “Got to get home.”
I thought we were working on the car.”
“Right.” She coughed. The dress itched at her shoulders. “That’s what I was going to do.”
Sadie jostled up beside her, all elbows and loose thread. “Did Daddy scare you?”
“I’m not scared of anything,” Pigeon said, and flapped her hand toward the slumped gas station that marked the edge of town.“Let’s go get slushies. Sometimes high school guys hang out in the back.”
“Okay,” Sadie said, but kept walking. “Not even ghosts?”
“That’s baby stuff.”
“Not even your dad?”
“Why would I be scared of him?” Pigeon thought about her father’s dim attempt at a mustache, his nineties workout routines, his rotary of tired jokes. She liked the sickly sharpness of the words on her tongue, the way it made Sadie look at her closer. “He’s kind of pathetic.”
“You shouldn’t disrespect your parents,” Sadie said quietly, and stopped talking as they passed the last buildings and started down the long stretch of bare road. Something twisted uncomfortably in Pigeon’s chest.
When they got to their houses, she told Sadie to wait in the sliver of shadow by the front door and ran in for her cutoffs and a t-shirt, paused in the kitchen for two cups of ice and the big glass jug of sun-warm tea her grandmother was stirring sugar into. Her grandmother smoothed her hair down and handed her the long-handled spoon, glittering with sugar. Out the window, Sadie was spinning across the yellow grass, a hand cupped to the back of her neck.
______________________
Braeden LaRoche
Why do you consider this an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
Ecgonine Tree is what’s left of a larger painting, its majority having been shed. Like all my paintings, I settled at an “end” where I lack the technical skill to revise it toward greater realism or beauty. The relationship I have with my work in general, therefore, is identical to my relationship with the work I leave unfinished. By necessity, I don’t regret leaving anything unfinished. At a point, my efforts must go elsewhere.
What constitutes a “finished” piece of art for you? How do you know when your own art is complete?
For me, painting is a simple extension of a scientific exercise. I invent alien ecologies, and my paintings are visual aids. This lends for a rather bland answer to your question. Fortunately, it’s not entirely true.
Yes, I impose a subject on the canvas. These are the representations in Ecgonine Tree: the striped opportunist and the cratered husk on which it feeds. But also, these impose outward and return by happenstance the harmonies and disharmonies of form which generate the aesthetic element. I suppose it’s my role as an artist to amplify these and tune them toward beauty.
Thus, a piece is complete when I have fully articulated the subject, and when the arrangement of forms can be altered into nothing more beautiful.
What do you think we lose by making art we never finish? What do we gain?
I will claim moderately that the ethical value of artistic exercise is due more regular scrutiny.
To be plain, some artistic endeavors are simply a waste of time. Often when we choose to quit a piece, it’s because we’ve come to our senses.
Ecognine Tree
______________________
Gideon Reid
Why did you decide not to publish this piece? Looking back, does a part of you wish you had?
There are only two stories in A Whistle in the Dark from Gideon’s perspective, even though she’s the main character. Gideon goes missing when she is four, and like so many missing girls, her story enjoys a few weeks of dedicated news coverage before she fades into a cautionary tale. When a girl goes missing, we tend to make her mythic. I wanted the book to function as a chalk-outline: a collection of brief encounters and echoes that tell the story of her life without her necessarily being present. Gideon’s absence defines the story. So I don’t regret not publishing it, but it is an excerpt I hold dear.
How are you related to the pieces you don’t finish writing?
What I don’t finish writing is often what I connect with the most. These pieces usually remain unfinished because the search for the perfect words gets between me and a fully realized work. I’m left with bits and pieces of stories that I keep close to my chest, and completed works I tend to stand at arms-length from.
This year, I want to work on giving up. I want to quit the search for the perfect words. I want to take these pieces I hold close and let them breathe, listen to them a little more, and maybe they can tell me after all this time what they’re trying to say instead of me trying to speak for them.
Unfinished work from A Whistle in the Dark
Once, he was a boy with a gun in his hand. Maybe this is false—maybe his stories, like everything else, are a cruel twist of fiction—but she knows what she knows and it’s too late for him to shake his own myth. He spent countless mornings crouching with his dad in the jon boat looking through the scope, tide sinking around them, as they waited for mallards and pintails to flock overhead. Once, he was a boy with anticipation brimming behind his teeth. Once, he was a boy—
She’s never touched a gun. She’s standing in front of an old display case, staring at a pistol and its belt and wondering where she remembers the smell of buckshot gutted clean.
One of the workers asks her if she’s shot anything before. She hasn’t; she knows Thomas hasn’t either. All those mornings, he tells her, all those hours, and he never managed to kill a thing. Some nights he blames it on a lousy trigger finger, on his ever-worsening vision, but once he told her the truth is that he couldn’t stand the bodies. Their stillness. How the duck would crumple mid-air and sink from the sky like a star, its feathers matted with blood as dark and slick as ink.
The worker looks at her, studies the stiffness in her shoulders. It’s just the two of them in this room of cowboys and horses and wild west dreams. She sips on coffee she bought for a nickel in the front room, and Thomas wanders around downstairs because here’s a pit stop here’s a neighborhood here’s a roadside tourist trap honey stretch your legs a little and I won’t even watch you do it honey even though I want to c’mon you know me. You know what I mean. Here’s that terrible burning in his eyes when he does this—lets her off the rope just long enough to tease before yanking it all back again. What a lovely little playhouse family. What an American fucking Dream.
______________________
Bella Cosentino
Why do you consider “Mess With the Bull” an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
For one, this is a sketchbook page—and far from my best. It irks me now, and it irked me then. I put it together in a few days instead of a few hours. My desk was full of the regular junk, so I moved to the floor. I got paint on the carpet. I was antsy—I think you can see the itchiness. I flipped it sideways. I stuck and unstuck it. I turned off the lights and kept at it. I kissed it. I covered it up. I scratched it in.
It was a strange weekend. I went to a dinner party and felt I hadn’t been myself. I listened to Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” again and again. My roommate’s best friend passed away and together we laid in her bed talking of anything but. I mishandled my copy of Pet Sematary and a page tore out. I watched a video of Oscar Peterson playing piano—I tried to capture his hands, moving so surely that they looked to me like flighty birds.
I consider this an unfinished piece because it’s got too many arms and legs, in the way most emotionally-driven drafts do. I’ve always been a perfectionist—my sketchbook is an attempt to combat those instincts. My incomplete work is a kindness and an embarrassment. If I were a better artist, I would have the courage to call it finished, and if I were worse, I wouldn’t call it anything at all.
Before trying collage, I struggled to experience the catharsis of visual art—but the act of fitting jagged edges together feels to me like proof I can reshape the parts of my life I’m dissatisfied with. That as long as I keep moving with surety, I will find myself cohesive. Making unperfected, unfinished art is learning to accept things as they are. I think this is why, time again, I return to the blind contour—I paint my hand in the dark or my face without looking. There is a charm to the work born to be raw. If it’s a labor of love, give it a kiss.
Mess With the Bull
______________________
Gideon Reid
Why did you decide not to publish this piece? Looking back, does a part of you wish you had?
There are only two stories in A Whistle in the Dark from Gideon’s perspective, even though she’s the main character. Gideon goes missing when she is four, and like so many missing girls, her story enjoys a few weeks of dedicated news coverage before she fades into a cautionary tale. When a girl goes missing, we tend to make her mythic. I wanted the book to function as a chalk-outline: a collection of brief encounters and echoes that tell the story of her life without her necessarily being present. Gideon’s absence defines the story. So I don’t regret not publishing it, but it is an excerpt I hold dear.
How are you related to the pieces you don’t finish writing?
What I don’t finish writing is often what I connect with the most. These pieces usually remain unfinished because the search for the perfect words gets between me and a fully realized work. I’m left with bits and pieces of stories that I keep close to my chest, and completed works I tend to stand at arms-length from.
This year, I want to work on giving up. I want to quit the search for the perfect words. I want to take these pieces I hold close and let them breathe, listen to them a little more, and maybe they can tell me after all this time what they’re trying to say instead of me trying to speak for them.
Unfinished work from A Whistle in the Dark
Once, he was a boy with a gun in his hand. Maybe this is false—maybe his stories, like everything else, are a cruel twist of fiction—but she knows what she knows and it’s too late for him to shake his own myth. He spent countless mornings crouching with his dad in the jon boat looking through the scope, tide sinking around them, as they waited for mallards and pintails to flock overhead. Once, he was a boy with anticipation brimming behind his teeth. Once, he was a boy—
She’s never touched a gun. She’s standing in front of an old display case, staring at a pistol and its belt and wondering where she remembers the smell of buckshot gutted clean.
One of the workers asks her if she’s shot anything before. She hasn’t; she knows Thomas hasn’t either. All those mornings, he tells her, all those hours, and he never managed to kill a thing. Some nights he blames it on a lousy trigger finger, on his ever-worsening vision, but once he told her the truth is that he couldn’t stand the bodies. Their stillness. How the duck would crumple mid-air and sink from the sky like a star, its feathers matted with blood as dark and slick as ink.
The worker looks at her, studies the stiffness in her shoulders. It’s just the two of them in this room of cowboys and horses and wild west dreams. She sips on coffee she bought for a nickel in the front room, and Thomas wanders around downstairs because here’s a pit stop here’s a neighborhood here’s a roadside tourist trap honey stretch your legs a little and I won’t even watch you do it honey even though I want to c’mon you know me. You know what I mean. Here’s that terrible burning in his eyes when he does this—lets her off the rope just long enough to tease before yanking it all back again. What a lovely little playhouse family. What an American fucking Dream.
______________________
Bella Cosentino
Why do you consider “Mess With the Bull” an unfinished piece? What is your relationship with the work you don’t finish making?
For one, this is a sketchbook page—and far from my best. It irks me now, and it irked me then. I put it together in a few days instead of a few hours. My desk was full of the regular junk, so I moved to the floor. I got paint on the carpet. I was antsy—I think you can see the itchiness. I flipped it sideways. I stuck and unstuck it. I turned off the lights and kept at it. I kissed it. I covered it up. I scratched it in.
It was a strange weekend. I went to a dinner party and felt I hadn’t been myself. I listened to Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Wave” again and again. My roommate’s best friend passed away and together we laid in her bed talking of anything but. I mishandled my copy of Pet Sematary and a page tore out. I watched a video of Oscar Peterson playing piano—I tried to capture his hands, moving so surely that they looked to me like flighty birds.
I consider this an unfinished piece because it’s got too many arms and legs, in the way most emotionally-driven drafts do. I’ve always been a perfectionist—my sketchbook is an attempt to combat those instincts. My incomplete work is a kindness and an embarrassment. If I were a better artist, I would have the courage to call it finished, and if I were worse, I wouldn’t call it anything at all.
Before trying collage, I struggled to experience the catharsis of visual art—but the act of fitting jagged edges together feels to me like proof I can reshape the parts of my life I’m dissatisfied with. That as long as I keep moving with surety, I will find myself cohesive. Making unperfected, unfinished art is learning to accept things as they are. I think this is why, time again, I return to the blind contour—I paint my hand in the dark or my face without looking. There is a charm to the work born to be raw. If it’s a labor of love, give it a kiss.
Mess With the Bull
______________________
Jessie Leitzel
Why did you decide not to publish this piece?
This excerpt is from a much larger body of work, “Caesuras,” a thirty page essay that kicked off what would become The Small Hours. My family is from a small coal-mining town in the eastern Pennsylvania mountains, a region so vastly different from my now-home amidst the marshes and low-lying bridges of coastal South Carolina. My writing at that time was all about the northeast; we’d moved when I was seven, before the region became something my parents’ didn’t recognize. As a consequence, I’d forgotten a neat many of the details, and I blamed myself for it.
Around that time, too, I stumbled upon Emilia Phillips’ “L’Appel du Vide,” an essay on visual caesuras and erasure. Phillips spoke about intentional blank spots poets place within their work, a kind of literal “call of the void,” something that begs us to pause, and then jump. The caesura deeply intrigued me. I started looking into the intentional placing of gaps in writing, and I couldn’t fathom it: people were leaving spaces in their work when I would have given anything to fill the spaces in mine. The only thing I wanted at the time was to accurately represent the region my family had loved and left; if I couldn’t, what kind of a writer was I?
It killed me. There were realizations I needed to come to before I could go on writing anything else. And because of it, “Caesuras” was all over the place. It looped in and out of focus, it rambled—it was nonsensical, at points, to anyone who wasn’t me. But in this final excerpt—my grandfather, covering the physical distance between my home now and my home as it could have been—the piece leveled. I had found my answer.
“Caesuras” will never see the light of day. There are some pieces you write simply because they need to be written. Those pieces, while stowed away, are published in you. So yes, they are “unfinished,” but it doesn’t mean they were meaningless. They accomplished what needed to be done.
How are you related to the pieces you don’t finish writing?
While the kinder side of myself knows all the writing I do is worthwhile in some way, there’s still pain when I look back at old work. I’m the type of writer that latches onto ideas when they come. I want the piece to become everything and anything, and often because the subject matter I’m drawn to defines who I am, it feels as though, should I not accomplish that inclusivity, I’m somehow hurting the peace I could gain from that essay. I find that a lot, actually; my writing is an attempt to bring myself some peace.
The hard truth is that there are some ideas for which we lack the technical ability to bring to life; the even harder truth is that you’ve got to write it anyway. You have to try. That’s how I end up with pieces like “Caesuras,” these big, odyssey works that may not have lived up to my hopes, but begged to be written nonetheless. The pieces I don’t finish don’t leave me, but not because they haunt me. They look toward future work. They promise something new.
Do you consider The Small Hours a finished work? Why or why not?
I went into writing this book knowing I wouldn’t be satisfied. When you write nonfiction—when you write about family and tradition and a place with the hope to honor it—your writing never seems good enough. That’s why, in the end, only half of the essays I wrote ended up in the final manuscript.
But at the same time, I believe that’s also why I’m okay with having so many; the writing may not last, but the ideas do. Their being unfinished only makes them larger. As Gideon said in their lovely review for my book, The Small Hours is my first great search for origin. Unfinished work invites all the good that’s yet to come.
Unfinished work from The Small Hours
My grandfather is the longest-lasting of three brothers. Currently, he’s driving up trafficless highways to visit my great uncle, in hospice, possibly for the last time. He has always loved the road, the gravel rushing under him, how smoothly the tires cover each mile when it appears they aren’t moving at all.
In these hours, he’s covering just shy of six hundred miles, from coastal South Carolina to Schuylkill Haven, a region deep in the right side of central PA. While my father and I can complete the route in a little over twelve hours, my grandfather will usually extend his trip to the span of three days—enough time for sit-down breakfasts and steak dinners in various Longhorns along the great American highway system. As I write this, he should be somewhere in Virginia, savoring the trees and the shade they bring from this infernal summer.
I’ve spent years searching for others who have placed gaps in their art, and here my grandfather is: able to stretch a half-day into a six hundred mile silence, into the adrenaline and stillness of movement. I don’t want this essay to make him realize the space he has made before he is ready, or how he has stretched the journey between himself and the reality of Pennsylvania and our people there. But I do believe there is something in the void, in how we create one as we grieve. Popi, keep driving. You are teaching me lessons on distance. On the ways I forgive myself, however subtle they are. I’m coming to terms with all I’ve lost, or am in the process of losing.
______________________
Jessie Leitzel
Why did you decide not to publish this piece?
This excerpt is from a much larger body of work, “Caesuras,” a thirty page essay that kicked off what would become The Small Hours. My family is from a small coal-mining town in the eastern Pennsylvania mountains, a region so vastly different from my now-home amidst the marshes and low-lying bridges of coastal South Carolina. My writing at that time was all about the northeast; we’d moved when I was seven, before the region became something my parents’ didn’t recognize. As a consequence, I’d forgotten a neat many of the details, and I blamed myself for it.
Around that time, too, I stumbled upon Emilia Phillips’ “L’Appel du Vide,” an essay on visual caesuras and erasure. Phillips spoke about intentional blank spots poets place within their work, a kind of literal “call of the void,” something that begs us to pause, and then jump. The caesura deeply intrigued me. I started looking into the intentional placing of gaps in writing, and I couldn’t fathom it: people were leaving spaces in their work when I would have given anything to fill the spaces in mine. The only thing I wanted at the time was to accurately represent the region my family had loved and left; if I couldn’t, what kind of a writer was I?
It killed me. There were realizations I needed to come to before I could go on writing anything else. And because of it, “Caesuras” was all over the place. It looped in and out of focus, it rambled—it was nonsensical, at points, to anyone who wasn’t me. But in this final excerpt—my grandfather, covering the physical distance between my home now and my home as it could have been—the piece leveled. I had found my answer.
“Caesuras” will never see the light of day. There are some pieces you write simply because they need to be written. Those pieces, while stowed away, are published in you. So yes, they are “unfinished,” but it doesn’t mean they were meaningless. They accomplished what needed to be done.
How are you related to the pieces you don’t finish writing?
While the kinder side of myself knows all the writing I do is worthwhile in some way, there’s still pain when I look back at old work. I’m the type of writer that latches onto ideas when they come. I want the piece to become everything and anything, and often because the subject matter I’m drawn to defines who I am, it feels as though, should I not accomplish that inclusivity, I’m somehow hurting the peace I could gain from that essay. I find that a lot, actually; my writing is an attempt to bring myself some peace.
The hard truth is that there are some ideas for which we lack the technical ability to bring to life; the even harder truth is that you’ve got to write it anyway. You have to try. That’s how I end up with pieces like “Caesuras,” these big, odyssey works that may not have lived up to my hopes, but begged to be written nonetheless. The pieces I don’t finish don’t leave me, but not because they haunt me. They look toward future work. They promise something new.
Do you consider The Small Hours a finished work? Why or why not?
I went into writing this book knowing I wouldn’t be satisfied. When you write nonfiction—when you write about family and tradition and a place with the hope to honor it—your writing never seems good enough. That’s why, in the end, only half of the essays I wrote ended up in the final manuscript.
But at the same time, I believe that’s also why I’m okay with having so many; the writing may not last, but the ideas do. Their being unfinished only makes them larger. As Gideon said in their lovely review for my book, The Small Hours is my first great search for origin. Unfinished work invites all the good that’s yet to come.
Unfinished work from The Small Hours
My grandfather is the longest-lasting of three brothers. Currently, he’s driving up trafficless highways to visit my great uncle, in hospice, possibly for the last time. He has always loved the road, the gravel rushing under him, how smoothly the tires cover each mile when it appears they aren’t moving at all.
In these hours, he’s covering just shy of six hundred miles, from coastal South Carolina to Schuylkill Haven, a region deep in the right side of central PA. While my father and I can complete the route in a little over twelve hours, my grandfather will usually extend his trip to the span of three days—enough time for sit-down breakfasts and steak dinners in various Longhorns along the great American highway system. As I write this, he should be somewhere in Virginia, savoring the trees and the shade they bring from this infernal summer.
I’ve spent years searching for others who have placed gaps in their art, and here my grandfather is: able to stretch a half-day into a six hundred mile silence, into the adrenaline and stillness of movement. I don’t want this essay to make him realize the space he has made before he is ready, or how he has stretched the journey between himself and the reality of Pennsylvania and our people there. But I do believe there is something in the void, in how we create one as we grieve. Popi, keep driving. You are teaching me lessons on distance. On the ways I forgive myself, however subtle they are. I’m coming to terms with all I’ve lost, or am in the process of losing.