In Search of Lost Process; or, How I Wrote My First Book

By CE Mackenzie 

In my late twenties, I moved from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest without any ambition other than to be among wild landscapes and to write. I settled into a musty attic apartment in the crusty town of Eugene, Oregon, chosen for its (at the time) low cost of living. My bank account blinked red from fresh debt incurred by an MFA program while I made minimum wage at a cafe, pulling espresso shots for regulars—third-shift Costco shelf stockers who crossed an acreage of parking lot for hot coffee. I lived paycheck to paycheck, but it wasn’t strenuous. I earned enough from tips to pay rent, meet my loan’s minimum monthly payment, and stock the fridge. But I had to live simply. Which meant, among other things, living without internet or a smartphone or TV. If I wanted to watch something, I hoofed it down to the 7-11 where a glowing vending machine spat out DVDs, 24-hour rentals of new releases for only a couple of bucks that I’d later jam into my heavy laptop. Grabbing a six pack of PBRs plus a pack of Kamel Reds, I walked home with my rain jacket up to my throat.

This seems utterly wild to me now, but at the time, having just completed the MFA, I thought the simplicity might lend itself toward writing. Though I didn’t have a choice; I was broke and without health insurance. The one-bedroom attic apartment I inhabited was wood-paneled, moldy in corners. Moss crept across the roof. Bats made their way in, clinging to the brick chimney. I told myself I’d worry about retirement funds later, nor did I need the car that kept breaking down. My bike would suffice.

I was young, full of creative energy, filling black notebooks with pressed ballpoint ink. Time dilated because I was unbothered by the reality of lugging my dirty laundry down to the laundromat every few weeks or eating rice and beans day after day. On weekends, I filled my cats’ water and food bowls to the brim, scratched their heads, locked the door behind myeself and drove an hour east or west to camp in the mountains or at the coast. Surely, inspiration lay dormant and waiting among the high alpine wildflowers of the Central Cascades. With a small notebook stuffed into my pack, I wrote poems by surging hot springs. Then, back home at night, I read in a way I’ve yet to emulate since, sitting for hours in a plaid, thrift-store armchair. For months, I plopped into that chair each night until I completed at least fifty pages of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, taking short smoke breaks on my back steps. When I finished the whole series, I sold the set back to the used bookstore for cash.

My MFA teachers, as I left the charge of their mentorship, gently encouraged me to take more risks. They described my work as “pristine, white lumber, meticulously assembled.” At first, I couldn’t understand this as criticism, as they seemed to describe what’s finished, polished. “Pristine” was good, no? Mustn’t that mean that a piece of writing had reached its final, pure form, shaped by careful hands? Is this not the goal, to finish or arrive, and to arrive having re-enacted life through language?

My desire to move West mirrored my desire for wonder, to be soaked to the bone in reverence. I wanted to be knocked over by green—jade ferns, dark Douglas pines, emerald moss. I wanted to touch wild. On one winter hike, I followed an azure stream until I came upon fresh prints in the wet snow. Cougar. The size of my hand. I believed inspiration could be sought and captured, then transfigured into language and onto the page.

Proust challenges this idealism in his (what I later learned, famous) passage about memory and a madeleine. The narrator, when sitting for teatime, seizes with memory, involuntarily spurred by the sensorial intake of the scalloped sponge and bitter tea. It reels him back to childhood. Time opens and closes simultaneously, as the gap in time—between his childhood and the current moment—reveals itself, immutable yet accessible. Childhood lost, time lost. It is analogous to language, the line between life and life described but never breached:

Iput down my cup and examine my own mind. It is for it to discover the truth. But how? What an abyss of uncertainty whenever the mind feels that some part of it has strayed beyond its own borders; when it, the seeker, is at once the dark region through which it must go seeking, where all its equipment will avail it nothing.

Seek? More than that: create.

My barista gig began to wear on me. My lower back ached and my writing was going nowhere. I still got out on weekends to hike and camp in beautiful places. But the old adage, everywhere you go there you are, proved itself obnoxiously true. I filled notebooks with ideas and poems and lists. But I made inspiration both object and affect, a thing to find and feel. I was lost.

Longing for more connection and overwhelmed by the recent fallout of the 2016 election, I started volunteering with a local HIV clinic and needle exchange. After days of training, I jumped aboard the mobile unit, an RV outfitted with drug supplies and day-old baked goods. My role was simple: I arrived at the edge of downtown Eugene with my team and helped distribute supplies—syringes, Narcan, condoms, alcohol pads, and more. Harm reduction is simple: serve people without judgment or expectation. No one needs to be in recovery or working toward recovery to access lifesaving (life-improving) supplies. Meet people where they are. We’re all in process.

In the beginning, the tangibility of exchange felt diametric to the abstractions scrawled across the pages of my notebook. They were two scenes in a compartmentalized life. But soon enough the differences blurred. I adored working needle exchange each week, moved by its visible efficacy and communal spirit. And when I wasn’t at site, the principles of harm reduction followed me into other spaces—at home, work, even out on trail. Be in the moment, I’d tell myself. Let yourself fail. And at setbacks – keep going. But even more, harm reduction shaped my relationships, to myself, my neighbors, and my political and aesthetic life. I realized “pristine” is punctuative. A pretty perimeter. A false summit. I don’t have to get it right. Truth doesn’t need to be sought as a singular goal. We can do more than that. We can create. Work. Wonder. Tear it down and start over. Retrace our steps and relapse and go for it again. Which is what writing is, what revision and redoing are. As Maggie Nelson once wisely wrote, “One may have to undergo the same realizations, write the same notes in the margins, return to the same themes in one’s work, relearn the same emotional truths, write the same book over and over again—not because one is stupid or obstinate or incapable of change, but because such revisitations constitute a life.”

A decade after finishing Proust, I’m now muscling through the six-book, Norwegian autobiographical novel My Struggle,by fellow Proustian fanboy Karl Ove Knausgaard. Three-thousand pages in length, Knausgaard describes his authorial motive as refusing “the sublime,” that the novel is “anti-ideology,” the very antithesis of pristine. “It’s about the little and the small, where in life we are.” He refuses to exaggerate yet honors the leviathan realities of modern life. He spends five hundred pages on fascism, which, he argues, originates when one allows abstraction to supplant real life, when one becomes an emblem or analogy for political and social polemic. That is, when unchecked abstractions and ideologies are projected onto a human being, so that human beings become the site of speculation. The stakes are high.

In the last few years—in which I got married, moved to Pittsburgh with my wife, adopted a dog, had a baby, and completed a PhD program—while also finally, finally putting together the pages of my first manuscript –  COVID hit. George Floyd was murdered. Then the Black Lives Matter uprisings. A global recession. Russia launched a simultaneous air and ground attack on Ukraine, the largest since World War 2. A few months after that, nearly two dozen children were lost in Uvalde, Texas. The genocides in Gaza and Sudan. Wildfires, floods, hurricanes, each more dramatic and devasting than the years before. We live among (or in) unbearable pain. Each of us witness these crises while weathering our own at the same time. It is overwhelming. It touches the impossible. This isn’t the little and small that Knausgaard means, but it sits in direct contrast to the ephemera of ideology, highlighting why Knausgaard recoils at the sublime.

My notebooks, once filled to the seams with wanderlust, grand landscapes and grand desires, became the place of minutia and complexity. I focused not on truth or argument, but feeling and relationships and questions: how to write in crisis? How do I write about exchange without exploiting those who utilize its services? How do I write with lost inspiration, yet drive and determination, nonetheless? I began to focus on the daily, on moments of connection and renewal. I readjusted focus countless times. I made my “object” of study not a place or person, but feelings itself, how it feels to be on the van passing out Narcan; how it feels to know there are not grand solutions; how it feels to work as if there are, anyways.

These scribbles eventually became my first book, born from “chronic longing,” to “capture feeling in language yet repetitiously failing,” as I write on the first page of Achy Affects. “Writing (much like be-ing) aches under the weight of its responsibilities—to get it right, to do no harm.”  Funny enough, in my late twenties when I was broke, filling notebooks with charged feeling and flighty abstraction, life was seemingly simple. I worked, I drank, I wrote, I read. I’m nostalgic for that era. Live shows down at the HiFi were only a few bucks. Throwing back bottles of PBR while unknown folk singer Phoebe Bridgers sang to an audience of twenty, I stumbled safely home and fell asleep in my cheap sheets and woke up without a hangover.

Now that I’m older, having ostensibly “arrived” in my forties with a family and mortgage (and, thank god, health insurance and a retirement plan), now that I have my proverbial shit together, I find myself blissfully none the wiser. I’m still learning. New synthetics and tranquilizers pop up consistently in the drug supply. The legal landscape shifts constantly. There are new crises that make us all groan and begin again. But now at least I get it. I don’t have to seek out every answer. I don’t have to arrive. Nothing needs to be pristine to create.

CE Mackenzie is an accomplished, award-winning writer of over twenty years. From essays exploring the nostalgic potential of trans personhood to critical scholarship on the opioid epidemic, Mackenzie’s writing spans (and reimagines) many genres, topics, and forms. Mackenzie has a PhD in English and Rhetoric from the University of Pittsburgh, a doctoral certificate in gender studies, as well as an MFA from Bennington College. They are currently the post doc at the University of Pittsburgh Humanities Center, wherein they collaborate with multi-disciplinary scholars, activists, and artists across local and international communities. In addition to their work on healthcare and drug use, they write on trans studies, poetics, biopolitics, aesthetics, wilderness, climate, composition. You can find their writing in Prose Studies, Public Humanities, Journal for Rhetoric of Health & Medicine, and more. Mackenzie lives in Pittsburgh, PA with their wife, young child, and tender doghound.