Artists fascinate me. I don't know if that's because I aspire to be one, am one, or am completely deluding myself that my thoughts amount to art. Maybe I have that backwards, and those feelings sprang from the fascination. I cry often at live music and drama less over the content than over the self-effacement and bouleversement it takes to do those things, to set yourself aside and present something bigger, cleaner, lasting. And yet so often what artists (especially confessional songwriters and poets) are supposedly producing are "honest" presentations of themselves. I've been in pursuit of self-depiction just about as long as I've been able to put words on paper, and never come close. I'm not convinced autobiographical art is ever non-fiction... or that it's really meant to be.

I've been writing poetry and songs, consciously dredging up events I haven't considered in years, intentionally self-mythologizing. There's always been an impulse not to go there, not to commit to a single interpretation of my life because it would be somehow inaccurate, like I had a responsibility to act as impartial observer. Well, forget that. I am clearly partial, part and parcel of the events I have lived and the memories, false or accurate, that I've collected.

There's something powerful in drawing from yourself to make something not-yourself. Or is that just the definition of creation, plain and simple?