Vaccination and Other Metaphors1 Catherine Lacey (bio) They must have seemed crazy — the first person to have done it. It must have seemed like a death wish, a sad madness, a suicide. I don't mean the first person to decide to write a novel, but the first person to give themselves a vaccination. Consider it. In order to protect ourselves from a disease, we inject ourselves with that disease. Of all the counterintuitive aspects of modernity, this must be one of the more grotesque, and yet we've learned to see it as unremarkable, quotidian. Imagine if we took this approach in other situations. To escape a burning building, run deeper into the flames. To stave off an allergic reaction, bathe in the allergen. And yet we expose ourselves to mumps to avoid mumps, measles for measles, and every flu season [End Page 179] there's a new permutation of the influenza vaccine, as the virus cracks our codes year after year. Similarly, a well-deployed delusion vaccinates the committed writer from the disease of total delusion. The same goes for loneliness, and also for anguish. In her essay "My Vocation," the Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg argues that writing is not a way to shield oneself from grief. "Because," she writes, … this vocation is never a consolation or a way of passing the time. It is not a companion. This vocation is a master who is able to beat us till the blood flows … We must swallow our saliva and tears and grit our teeth and dry the blood from our wounds and serve him. Serve him when he asks. Then he will help us up, fix our feet firmly on the ground; he will help us overcome madness and delirium, fever and despair. But he has to be the one who gives the orders and he always refuses to pay attention to us when we need him. The delusion that a writing practice is an external entity that will abuse us into our truths is a vaccination against the delusion that we are ever in total control of our work. ________ I have this problem with craft talks, which is that between the moment I agree to give one and the moment I actually deliver it, I change my mind about everything I thought I believed was true about the mystery of the writing process. This often means that the day before I give a talk I have to throw out all my notes and make up something else, which inevitably leads to a moment during the [End Page 180] talk when a sense of insecurity creeps in; I cannot help but fear that tomorrow I will disagree with every word I am saying now. This is neither a sustainable nor a responsible approach to the task of telling an audience something I've learned about writing, or my aesthetic theories or methods, or what I make of the enigmas of literature, but the truth is that I am always in an argument with myself, and writing is the stage for that argument. Perhaps that's why I'm better suited for fiction than anything else, and perhaps that's why attempting to say something definitive about craft is particularly difficult for me; I am not in the habit of being in total agreement with the writer I was last month. Craft is always motile, molten, subject to change. Every time I've written anything true, I wrote it while standing on unsteady ground. I wrote it while simultaneously asking myself what writing is, what reading is, what the utility of any text in a reader's life is, and how a manuscript might function within a writer's life at the moment of its creation. How can the needs of the writer (who is only one person) intersect with the needs of the reader, who is theoretically infinite? However, the problem of the craft talk remains. There must be some way, I thought, to come up with at least a few statements about fiction that I'll still believe by the time a season has passed. This question set off an internal argument, which eventually reached...