"But why abuse such a man in a literary portrait? In the end, knowing the nature of the universe (that it is a union of opposites), we can and should be thanking those who use lies in the interest of falsity or in service of their own ends; it’s they who create the possibility, the necessity, of there being an us, the writers who lie in the interest of truth."
In this mash-up of autofiction, essay, screenplay, and epistolary, writer Benjamin Obler campaigns editors at the American Psychological Association to include a syndrome in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, even though he's the only known case. John Cheever's "Goodbye, My Brother" and "The Enormous Radio" are the subjects of literary tributes in real-life stories of touring the Midwest during the initial horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic. Well jostled, readers arrive at an imaginary park where monuments pay tribute to the inspirational and instructive men in his life.
Upstate New York during the arrival of COVID-19 to America's shores. Milwaukee, Minneapolis, and points in between, across rhetorical landscapes, in Zoom with Aspiring Writers, in assorted texts and fictions.
This manuscript is 84,600 words, and the work is unmistakably literary, being a writer's writer's book, and being experimental in form and largely figurative.
"Highway 61 Revisited" by Bob Dylan.
