Since selections first appeared in the New Quarterly and the National
Post as part of "The Afterword," Steven Heighton's memos and dispatches
to himself -- a writer's pointed, cutting take on his own work and the
work of writing -- have been tweeted and retweeted, discussed and tacked
to bulletin boards everywhere. Coalesced, completed, and collected here
for the first time, a wholly new kind of book has emerged, one that's as
much about creative process as it is about created product, at once
about living life and the writing life. "I stick to a form that bluntly
admits its own limitation and partiality and makes a virtue of both
things," Heighton writes in his foreword, "a form that lodges no claim
to encyclopedic completeness, balance, or conclusive truth. At times,
this form (I'm going to call it the memo) is a hybrid of the epigram and
the précis, or of the aphorism and the abstract, the maxim and the
debater's initial be-it-resolved. At other times it's a meditation in
the Aurelian sense, a dispatch-to-self that aspires to address other
selves -- readers -- as well." It's in these very aspirations, reaching
both back into and forward in time -- and, ultimately, outside of the
pages of the book itself -- that Heighton offers perhaps the freshest,
most provocative picture of what it means to create the literature of
the modern world.
