“Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.” – Fran Lebowitz
Suffused in winter’s sting, Issue XVII will stay with you long after season’s end. From burning short stories that kindle fires out of mankind’s coal-black heart to creative nonfiction that hijacks the senses with an icy veracity, Issue XVII will leave you shivering with foreboding. . . and the feeling won’t subside.
As if an ellipses in fiery boldface, it will flash before you like a neon exit sign. But when you turn back to the page, in desperate need of some tangible certitude, you discover there’s no such notation. No sign that the cold world’s grip might soften, and no silver linings to glean from its darkening skies. Nothing but the lingering predilection that what’s dead and gone is alive still. . . hibernating under winter’s snow-white veil. . . awaiting voices bold enough to broach it.
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Steve Hamelman proves to be one such voice. Unapologetic in its aim, Hamelman’s craft essay Dream Lesson revives the audacity that is inherent to the act of writing.
A didactic piece that’s equal parts farcical and factual, the creative writing professor recounts a canon’s worth of appropriators-dubbed-original thinkers in a surrealist lecture spurred by an all-too-real ethico-existential crisis afflicting writers today.
“Many of you wonder whether creating a persona separate from yourself is akin to ‘bad’ appropriation—to theft. So you back off, second-guess, overthink, look over your shoulder, think of grades, think of classmates, imagine being trolled/shamed, and resign yourself to orthodoxy. How then will you write anything worthwhile? Without appropriation and persona/e, there’s no literature, no art.”
From Edgar Allen Poe to Bob Dylan, Hamelman cites household names alongside their oft-obscured source material as evidence against the notion that appropriation is theft. Hamelman argues instead that artists’ cannibalization of the arts stands as testament to the “codependent nature of [a] creative principle.” Imploring an imaginary classroom of creative writers to “learn to live with contradiction,” the impassioned professor sets up each shot with expert precision, hitting the bull’s eye with pinpoint accuracy.
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For those who’ve experienced firsthand the academy’s slow fade from its foundational charge of ushering young minds toward a critical consciousness in favor of kowtowing to an increasingly dehumanizing ideological dogma, it’s more apparent than ever that the rationalists have seeped into our subconscious to kill the creative.
But imagination can’t be killed. Still, it persists, like an octopus in entrapment. A flailing, tentacled amoeba, left to expire in its slippery juices, the shape-shifting cephalopod will become its own exit strategy. It is known for its prominent head, after all.
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In opposition to the academy’s shifting—and shifty—raison d'etre, Hamelman’s perspicacity on the touchy subject resonates beyond the academy to echo history with startling clarity. According to music historian Ted Gioia, the wide-swept malaise of our current moment and the world circa 1800 have more in common than not. Early 19th century artists and intellectuals, disillusioned by the false promises of The Enlightenment, rebelled against the inhumane agenda of the status-quo, proliferating new aesthetics and attitudes within the arts and humanities and giving rise to the Romanticist movement.
“The new paradigm shocked Europe when it started to spread. Cultural elites had just assumed that science and reason would control everything in the future,” says Gioia on Substack. A prodigious and singular voice of the time, Beethoven is described as a “beast trying to break out of the cage,” as his music grew “more imperious and insistent,” setting the stage for romanticism to flourish over the next century.
Still, only months before Beethoven composed the music that would spearhead the Romanticist movement and pioneer an entirely new musical vocabulary, “Beethoven was still imitating Haydn, Mozart, and C.P.E. Bach,” Gioia reminds readers.
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The other voice in this suspended dialogue, I was knee-deep in the SFC slush pile when Dream Lesson jolted me out of automaton mode. While I’m not too keen to advertise that prickly fact, anybody who knows knows that it happens sometimes.
It happens because we’re humans—writers, mostly—easily bored, most definitely dissatisfied, and operating out of sheer dedication to the craft and art of storytelling.
Naturally, as a reader, I have my own preferences that may not gel with yours, but as humans, I think we’d all agree there must be feeling. And if that feeling doesn’t have a home inside ourselves, we need someone else to color that empty space. A painter could suffice (though nobody does it better than our oldest friend in music does), but to really go deep in search of feeling. . . beyond aesthetics and symbols, tension and tone. . . to hollow out that which has settled in place of truth, is a job only fiction can do.
We see it happen all the time beyond the unreality of literature. Dark fictions permeate society’s most distinguished institutions. Simply take a look at politicians’ campaign speeches or the prosecution’s criminal case or any reality television show and you’ll see a potpourri of fictitious narratives play on as life bleeds out. In the justice system, lying in any way, shape or form is both treachery and business as usual. Still, the suits who came up with the strategy aren’t going anywhere but the bank. If that’s inappropriate behavior, then it’s deemed so in relative terms.
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In Dream Lesson, Hamelman’s defense of appropriation in the arts is wholly more tactful than my little gripe, and for that, I’m eternally grateful. There’s no shortage of people with opinions (you’re listening to one right now) and platforms from which to broadcast those passing fancies, but it’s something else entirely when an arbiter of “original” thought feels compelled to create something substantive in opposition to the orthodoxy that’s hamstringing an artform.
That’s because those who know know that literature transcends the writer. It doesn’t negate the effortful turmoil that writers endure, inside and out, but the real prize has always been the artifact that remains.
Long after we’re dead and gone, what we’ve ingested and regurgitated in our writing will outlast us all. Better still, let’s hope it will be the nourishment that future generations of creative writers will subsist on.
Xenia Gianiotis Turner is a writer, musician, and existentialist. Torn between awe and dread, she writes impressionistic and visceral pieces that probe at herself and the paradoxical across genre. Xenia earned her MFA in creative writing from Manhattanville University in 2024, and has creative nonfiction forthcoming in Inkwell. She resides in New York.
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