WHY I WRITE
ESSAY BY PETER DERBY
(A purpose statement to the University of Arizona for an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction in 2006.)

As a college student I worked summers on a sailboat for a scrap metal baron, tending his sails and mixing martinis.  His corporate lawyer daughter and her professional friends were convinced that I should be a writer.  One of the women loved to tan on deck, and her breasts often fell out of her suit. Although plump as a popover, she remained serenely unembarrassed. Once her partner asked me if our inconspicuous friend was okay. “Which part of her?” I asked.  She chuckled, remarking that I had a way of saying offensive things inoffensively.  Then she added, “You know, we’ll see that—your expressions—in one of your books some day.”  I never told her that I wanted to be a writer, but the material in my head was becoming writable. 

In fall 2005 I was invited to Chicago’s Newberry Library for a seminar that would prompt a “serious piece” of literary research.  For a topic I picked the wild naked hairy man, whom I had first encountered in Jack London’s Call of the Wild.  A pattern began to declare itself: the “uncivilized” man, free of social accoutrements and displaced to “natural” margins. I studied the zoo as an analogue for the wild-n-hairy. I read the nearby Lincoln Park Zoo as I would a literary text.  The gist of the project was that the distinction between man and animal was not only artificial but social—an argument my mentors Carol Neal and John Horner saluted. But one hundred pages later I had a creative scholarly mess.  At the end of the semester Carol told me, “Maybe you should teach Latin at a prep school.” John said, “This is the most creative and ambitious project we’ve seen, but not, ah, well linked to theory.”  How true.  I can’t say that I excel at predictable patterns of logic or conventional styles of academic discourse. I prefer the missing hairy links—the cryptic, the discursive. The wild hairy man showed me the distinction between a wardrobe of literary studies and my own naked curiosity.

I had to start writing when my dad’s epilepsy, in subtle and attractive ways, changed me.  In grade school I watched his nervous system betray his body as he had his first seizure in his favorite reading chair. If my dad was having a bad day and my mom had to go to school, my brother or I would stay home and watch him.  Dad might have a seizure in the shower, kitchen, or garage, and I would drag his heavy body back to bed so that he could sleep.  Dragging him back to bed and predicting when he was going to have a bad day taught me things I couldn’t learn in school: how to carry an unconscious body twice your size, how twists of plot can rewrite ancillary characters as protagonists, how circumstances impose themselves through unseen forces.  One morning I found Dad standing naked with my mother’s blow dryer, attempting to dry his underwear. Bad day.

I worked in a cubicle this summer filing operations reports, recording scrap metal tonnage, and monitoring productivity just long enough to know my mind needs to run with curiosity.  When I left at the end of the day, I felt like my spreadsheet equations—factored into a remainder of a person by tonnage hours worked and summed up in a report.  This is all to say that I want to write to discover what I know. I’ll keep writing whether or not you admit me, but know that I am powerfully motivated. Plus I speak Latin and can mix a mean martini.