IWSG September 2020

 The Insecure Writers Support Group meets virtually (well before it was cool) on the first Wednesday of every month (except in 2013, but we don’t talk about 2013) and generally follow a prompt, which in this instance means answering a predetermined question (letting members ask, and answer, their own led to Phil being banned, but that’s another matter entirely).

This month’s question: Which writer, living or dead, would you love to have as your beta reader?

This is a ridiculous question, because for me there’s only one right answer, and that’s the late Chilean genius Roberto Bolaño, who is best known for his novel The Savage Detectives, which is not about detectives (in the conventional sense) at all but a community of savage poets (the only kind worth being a member of) who track two members in general (based on Bolaño himself and his best friend) in their wild international adventures.

Bolaño was a literally genius. He considered himself first and foremost a poet, but he was a novelist of the first order (2666 is the best book I have ever, and will ever have, read), whose specialty was short novels, in which he would sometimes ruminate on his country’s little-reflected-upon history with Nazi exiles. 

The portrait Bolaño so casually paints of a country (a series of countries; he spent many years traveling, and in Spanish exile; many of his experiences, like Savage Detectives, are reflected in his work, such as in The Skating Rink, in which he spent a summer bumming it) filled with poetry workshops, like they’re libraries or something you just kind of visit in your neighborhood at your leisure, it’s intoxicating. I’ve never encountered anyone who literally seemed to breathe literature like him. 

I’ve tossed in little odes to Bolaño in my work, sometimes outright borrowing his most frequent fictional alias (Arturo Belano), or riffing on his stories. Although I have a lot of wild ideas, sometimes I think it could be a lot worse than to find success the way he did, by writing about the very heart of his experiences.

So to work alongside him...Yeah. Roberto & Tony...those crazy detectives of the world’s insanity...