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Wannabe is a blog series by Chicago area artist Chris Prunckle, author of our serial graphic story Asylum Doors, documenting his trials and tribulations as a wannabe artist.  Check back next week for a new posting.

See the previous installment of Asylum Doors here.  Stay tuned for the next installment coming soon, but now on a monthly basis with fuller stories.

Chris Prunckle is a graphic designer, illustrator and comic book artist banished to the suburbs of Chicago. Though an advertising industry minion by day, he slaves his nights away creating a mad little world.  He’s previously worked on the comics Fisted, Bonesetter, and The Scarab.  Follow him at @midjipress.

Curbside Splendor Publishing and Other Voices Books are proud to present WORDS+MUSIC! Join us at 9pm on Tuesday, May 21st, at Chicago's indie-music mecca The Empty Bottle (1035 N. Western Ave.) as we celebrate the release of new books by three authors we LOVE: Joe Meno, Lindsay Hunter, and Rob Roberge. Then stick around for music by The Peekaboos, Swimsuit Addition and headliners Billy Blake & the Vagabonds. FREE with an RSVP (just click here).  Facebook invite HERE.

“Any general statement is like a cheque drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.”

— Ezra Pound

This is the eighth week that I have been posting for Curbside and every week when the new blog post goes live I ask myself the same question: is anyone reading this? I mean of course Victor and Jacob read it because they have to. And I like to read it out loud to my dog while she waits for her food.

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Wannabe is a blog series by Chicago area artist Chris Prunckle, author of our serial graphic story Asylum Doors, documenting his trials and tribulations as a wannabe artist.  Check back next week for a new posting.

See the previous installment of Asylum Doors here.  Stay tuned for the next installment coming soon, but now on a monthly basis with fuller stories.

Chris Prunckle is a graphic designer, illustrator and comic book artist banished to the suburbs of Chicago. Though an advertising industry minion by day, he slaves his nights away creating a mad little world.  He’s previously worked on the comics Fisted, Bonesetter, and The Scarab.  Follow him at @midjipress.

I was speaking with a good friend and fellow writer, Mike Bogart, about what I should write for my next post, when he brought up the idea of using being a writer as an excuse to make bad decisions. This intrigued me and I asked him to explain. Once he started riffing on the topic I realized that there would be no better way to share what he meant than by simply using his own words. So without further adieu, here’s what Mike had to say:

All the writers—all the good ones—were drinkers. Right? Faulkner, Hemingway, Malcolm Lowry, Scott Fitzgerald, Hunter Thompson. Drunks, the lot of them. So sometimes, alone in my apartment on a Friday night, I would crack open A Moveable Feast and I’d come really damn close to thinking about asking myself: is another beer really necessary? Of course, it’s not necessary. It never is. But I’m going to have it anyways. Why? Because I’ll emote more keenly, weep more openly, know more intimately what waking up on the bathroom floor makes one feel. Because I’m a writer, and I need to know these things if ever I plan on getting published.

Right? Marcus Aurelius, in his Meditations, writes: “Happiness is a benign god or divine blessing. Why, then, my imagination, are you doing what you do? Go away, in the gods’ name, the way you came: I have no need of you.” Old Marcus and his “directing mind”—that reasoning, rational part of his brain that he wanted to cut off from emotion, sense impression, imagination, and impulse—seem to find that these things make him unhappy. It stands to reason, then, that one who uses his or her imagination frequently—a creative type, you might say—is doomed to unhappiness. This is the paradigm of much of the 20^th century canon: the drunk, the recluse, the addict, the hopeless and despairing writer. In order to write, one must be unhappy. Or is it the other way around? In order to be unhappy, one must write?

As an impressionable first year graduate student, I believed in the myths of the Faulkners and the Hemingways, the Shirley Jacksons and the Thomas Pynchons. I believed that merely calling myself a writer meant I had their permission to make bad decisions.