01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Work

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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PJ Harvey:
Working For the Man

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04. WRITING
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I really wanted to write something funny.
Something about the very worst job I’ve ever had, one summer when I worked in an office for a biology professor that I never actually met. He didn’t even interview me – I was hired by a graduate student who worked as his research assistant, and I never saw my “boss,” who was away doing research on diseased fish. I had no real responsibilities beyond listening to PJ Harvey in a basement office, on a campus abandoned by the semester break. Then I suddenly got word that I was being lent out by that professor to spend two weeks on the agricultural north end of campus, squatting inside an empty tank the size of a suburban above-ground swimming pool, scraping dried algae and fish waste from the lining of that tank with a razor blade. It was August, and everything around me smelled like dried algae and fish waste.
If viewed scientifically from above, the concentric circles of my environment were: a swimming pool-sized tank full of dried algae and fish waste; then an aluminum pole barn without fans or air conditioning; then a vast field of cows in various stages of scientific experimentation; then a Midwestern land-grant university campus; then the pleasant, hand-shaped peninsula of Michigan; then the blue marble of Earth; then a vast inky blackness.

I also wanted to write something poignant.
Maybe about the experience of perpetually repairing our deadly, hundred-year-old house, and the ways that it perpetually confounded my desires. Anything I wanted to change would hang on stubbornly by a thread – pieces of trim, cast brass hinges painted over with ancient shellac, stripped screws that seemed entirely made of rust. But when I climbed onto the roof to repair dozens of mortar joints in the chimney, the bricks would come apart in my hands, disintegrating into nothing and staining my gloves red. It so elegantly resisted my work, keeping and letting go exactly what it wanted to.

I wanted to write something political.
Down the street, they’re transforming the site of the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37 into green space. That is to say: nothing. A sign in a field. A nice place to walk, which is fine. They're calling it “Reclaiming Chevy in the Hole.”
I was inspired by all the songs I love that told stories of work that don’t look anything like the Flint Sit Down Strike of 1936-37: Lizzo’s “Werk, Pt. II;” Clipping’s “Work Work;” Dolly’s “9 to 5.”

I also really wanted to write something fictional, that might speak to the human condition.
I’ve had a story in my head for more than twenty years, based on a real thing that still fascinates me: in 1977, two unemployed Polish mechanics decided that they were going to dig up Charlie Chaplin’s body and hold it for ransom. Chaplin had just died and been buried in Switzerland. These two men decided that it would be a brilliant thing to rob his grave, and then demand payment from his family.
And they did it! They went and dug a hole and hauled Charlie Chaplin out of the ground under cover of night, and then demanded money for his return. It turns out that they just put him into another shallower, sloppier hole in the ground, stashed in a nearby field for safe-keeping while they waited on their fortune. They failed spectacularly in their plan, but I’ve often tried to imagine what they were thinking – the sensation of the shovels in their hands; how they must have felt the interior thuds and clatter of Chaplin’s bones against the sides of the coffin as they jostled it between themselves; how desperate they must have been to conceive of such a thing. How they must have hoped to never worry about working another day in their lives. 

But instead, I rolled all of these ideas around in my head to more or less the extent that I've described here: enough to consider some broad contours, but not enough to make anything real out of them. They were all pushed out of my brain as I let my mind race in bed, until I was exhausted enough to fall asleep. I kept my hands busy doing dishes or making coffee. I watched the world burn. I tried to escape myself as I was sick with migraines. I cried a bit. I maybe should have cried more? I wrestled with the knots in my stomach as I unexpectedly found myself getting my first COVID test. I checked to see how long it had been since I’d paid my electric bill, and I tried to play something new on the guitar, something that I hadn’t already played hundreds of times before. I found that the work of living was all I could bring myself to do.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Flow

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Joe Henry:
The Gospel According to Water

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04. WRITING
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When they finally told us that the water was poisonous, I was drinking coffee, pretending that it wasn’t really water. I was still pouring it into everyone and everything I love, trying my very best to not remember that I’d been doing that all along. I was trying my very best to not imagine how it might hurt them. I was trying my very best to not feel my blood move inside me and imagine it heavy and sluggish and sharp. I was trying my best to pretend that my blood wasn’t really water.
The blood of everyone and everything I love flows from the center outward to our fingertips, and to the ends of our tails, and to the city limits sign, and back in again. It flows from one of us to the other, and it flows through the ground, through a heavy metal spider web, through a column of spent trees, and into polypropylene containers tinted blue to let us know that it’s temporarily pure. It flows through spring-loaded release mechanisms and fixtures and money and money and back to the center and then outward, to everyone and everything that I love, and to the sky and to the ground. And eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it, heavy and sluggish and sharp.
I am haunted by waters.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Almost

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Maestro Fresh Wes:
Let Your Backbone Slide

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04. WRITING
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I am hanging halfway out the window of a Volkswagen Fox, listening to late 80's Canadian hip-hop and going 70 miles per hour on a Toronto highway in January. I'm doing this because the windshield washer fluid nozzles are frozen over, and so I have to continuously douse the moving wipers with liquid for the driver to see the road, but it's so cold that the windshield immediately freezes back over with every swipe. I am 13 years old, it's absolutely the most dangerous thing I've ever done to that point in my life, and I am both strangely numb to -- and intensely aware of -- the risk.
(Dumps washer fluid)
(Thinks, "I could actually get very hurt doing this.")
(Dumps more washer fluid)

When my dad and his family came from Europe, they became part of an extended network of sponsors -- people from Poland and other Eastern Bloc countries that had established roots in North America, and who would help new immigrants. These people became friends of our family, and we would visit some of them, like the ones in Toronto, two or three times a year from as far back as I can remember. We would go to grandparents' houses that smelled like cabbage and had photos of Pope John Paul II in every room. They would pinch our cheeks like real grandparents.

These family friends had children, who were like cousins to me. The oldest one was a boy 3-4 years older than I was, and he introduced me to cool things in the way many older cousins do -- things like Canadian rappers, designer jeans, Doc Martens, and so on. On the car ride that I served as window washer, he was driving, because it was decided that we were old enough to go out and have a night hanging out, just us and his friends. He had friends that had started going to University in the city, and we were driving to pick them up. After we picked them up, we did a lot of standard, boring teenage stuff -- we went to a convenience store, and then he and his friends smoked weed in the wooded area of a park while I watched. I knew with absolute certainty that I didn't want to do that with them, because for better or worse, I was immune to a lot of standard teenage peer pressures. Despite my behavior in the car, I was not a thrill-seeking adolescent. On a similar trip to Toronto years earlier, I saw my dad smoking a single cigarette while listening to music and talking with his friends, and I was so upset that I ran out of the house and into the street. Even though he'd smoked off and on in his life before I existed, I'd never seen him do it before. And I didn't want my dad to die.

Driving back to the house later that night, I was back on windshield duty, with my friend driving. In a few years, he would be diagnosed with macular degeneration, and with every day that passed, he would become gradually more blind and justifiably angry. Everyone grew up and further apart, and we eventually stopped visiting so often.
It was even colder driving back than it was earlier that evening, and so with every dousing of fluid, the windshield froze more quickly. I would yell back into the window, "ARE WE ALMOST THERE?"
We were not.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Junk

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Hüsker Dü:
Too Much Spice

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04. WRITING
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In the 1600s, Europeans were in love with nutmeg.

It was believed to have beneficial medicinal properties, and it was also delicious. And exotic, and expensive, so wealthy Europeans displayed it prominently on their tables as a marker of status.

Lots of exotic spices were expensive at the time, and difficult to get — Europeans knew only one island in an Indonesian archipelago where nutmeg grew, and the indigenous islanders had developed their own system of trading and selling it. So the Dutch, who wanted a monopoly in the lucrative "Spice Islands" deported or murdered the indigenous people to gain control of the territory. They would run islanders off of cliffs to their death, or behead them. In the end, the Dutch murdered over 90% of the indigenous people. Every sprinkle of nutmeg has been soaked in blood and is screaming with ghosts.

Over time, nutmeg plants were smuggled out and came to be cultivated on other Indonesian and Caribbean islands. One of them was controlled by the British, and in the mid-1600s, the Dutch wanted that island, too. So they made a deal: the British would trade that nutmeg-growing island for Dutch-controlled New Amsterdam — what is today Manhattan.

Several years ago, I was in New York City helping a friend move out of his tiny apartment and back to Michigan. It was summer, and so everything in New York was sticky and smelled of garbage. We had reached the point in packing up a home where you begin making ruthless choices about what you are willing to put in a box; about what you REALLY want to take with you. In the kitchen, sacrifices were made in the spice rack: nutmeg, peppercorns, cloves.

"I haven't even used most of this stuff in three years." 

So we threw it all away. He'd buy everything new once we got back home.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Cells

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Prince:
I Wanna Be Your Lover

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04. WRITING
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Prince died of an accidental overdose of the opioid pain medication fentanyl. He had lived for a long time with severe chronic pain from a double hip replacement that was required as a result of years of performing on stage in high heels. That sounds more pedestrian and mild than it should, but it seems in poor taste to qualify debilitating chronic pain by saying that both the performances and high heels were absolutely fucking magnificent. You can see footage of Prince rehearsing with his band The Revolution in 1984, crafting a stage show, doing the splits, sliding, dancing, earning the shit out of all that pain. Making it beautiful.
It was explained to me as I signed a stack of consent forms that I would be given fentanyl as part of an anesthetic cocktail to induce twilight sedation – a fanciful-sounding term that meant that I would not be fully unconscious, but would be sedate enough to allow the procedure to go smoothly, and allow me to wake up free of any memory of what had happened.
And so the last thing I remember is playing Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” in my head as they shot fentanyl into my IV.

Not very long ago, I learned that I have a genetic mutation that indicates a high risk for early forms of gastrointestinal cancer. My mother found out she had it by accident, and her diagnosis came with a form letter that would let family members know that such a thing existed, and that they could also be tested for it. I had a 50/50 chance of also containing this malfunctioning gene. And it was easy to discover that I did. And so the only thing to do was to be put under twilight sedation and thoroughly scoped from both ends of my body to see what my cells had been up to. I’d never presented any symptoms and had always been in excellent health, so there was every reason to believe that my cells were behaving. There was every reason to expect they might not find anything.

What they found while I was drifting in twilight were lots of polyps. Lots of little places that my cells had decided that they would experiment with division, for no other reason than the fun of it; no other reason than that they knew all along that they must. They were just following the instructions they were born with.
Doctors removed them on the spot, but there were so many growths that I still need to go back again to get the biggest ones, the ones that were so unexpected that doctors hadn’t safely prepared to address them.
When I woke up, a nice person was there to explain all of this to me. They explained that given my particular genetic glitch, each tiny cellular experiment that they removed came with a 70% chance of becoming cancerous if it wasn’t identified and addressed. I would be doing this once or twice a year now for the rest of my life. And then I made an appointment for my follow-up procedure.

This is not an emergency. Not right now. Right now it’s an inconvenience.
This is nothing like twenty years ago, when I would be regularly shaken out of sleep by my lover’s father to hear that she had spiked a fever in the night, and that we needed to go to the hospital immediately, because her blood might be septic. I was living with them, staying in her sister’s old bedroom that now housed dozens of porcelain dolls made by her grandmother, and now also housed me. She had leukemia, and her blood cells were doing all kinds of dangerous experiments. I’d get shaken awake often, and every time, it would mean that she would live in the hospital for two weeks. We would all watch the same movie on TV over and over again. I’d eat the desserts off her tray that she was too sick to eat anyway. I would help to keep a spiral notebook, recording everything that went into or came out of her, so that we could all imagine that there was some rationality to this insane body horror. I was glad to do what little I could, because we were in love.

Twenty years later, when I emerged from twilight, she was there, as strong as I was sleepy. We are in love. I still had Prince somewhere in my head.

I am fine. But as someone who has been lucky enough to have stayed largely out of hospitals and general anesthesia, to suddenly encounter the thing that might kill me was…strange.
Because it’s not out there – probably not, at least. Not a knife point, or alligator, or airplane debris. The call will come, so to speak, from inside the house. Our cells now continue to do the millions and millions of things that, in aggregate, make us all exist as bodies that walk and talk and take up space in the world. And then, perhaps, some of our cells will decide that it’s time to do some wild thing that was in them to do all along. Divide into infinity. Experiment with destroying each other, or themselves. Follow instructions.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Mathematics

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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The Sundays:
I Feel

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04. WRITING
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There was a girl in high school that I knew, but not well — we were friendly, though not exactly friends. She was older than I was. But she was one of us weirdos, so we often found ourselves together.

She would drop acid before geometry class because she said it helped her "see the shapes." I thought about that a lot. I thought there were probably worse ways to understand mathematics.

Late in her junior year, she suddenly started selling lots of random possessions, including all of her CDs, to people she hung out with. "I need an abortion really fast," she explained. She had a shoe box full of CDs in her locker for $5 each. I bought the Sundays "Blind" from her box. We lost touch after that, but I still listened to that album every night for a long time as I fell asleep.

Almost 20 years later, I saw her from a distance — even though she was a grown woman, her features were unmistakeable to me. She was with two young children, trying to manage them as they entered some store together. I don't know if they were her children. It doesn't matter.

I was glad to see her, glad she made it. I was glad we both made it.

01. Writer
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Stephen Wisniewski

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02. Theme
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Commute

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03. MUSIC INSPIRATION
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Metallica:
Stone Cold Crazy

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04. WRITING
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Here’s the thing: When I was 17 years old, I found an unmarked, dubbed cassette tape in the parking lot of a tiny black box theater in downtown Flint, Michigan.

On the cassette was Metallica’s “One” and “Stone Cold Crazy” – their B-side cover of the Queen song – repeated over and over again, both sides, for the entire duration of the tape’s 60 minutes. Once upon a time, someone made the effort to stand in front of a dual cassette deck and make that two-song mix tape, repeated into infinity, and then lost it in a parking lot. It told me that story when I put it into the cassette deck of my blue 1995 Geo Metro.

I don’t particularly like Metallica. Especially not in 1995, when the Black Album was still part of the soundtrack to every high school dance – hack DJs used it to follow a slow jam like “End of the Road” as a promise that the party wasn’t done rockin’.

But during the early summer of that year, as my junior year of high school was ending, those two Metallica songs were the only thing I listened to.

I was driving back and forth between my parents’ house and Buckham Alley Theater, where I was rehearsing for a play. It wasn’t a very good play. The cast was just me and one other person, and we played angels having a conversation about the pluses and minuses of heaven, and what we thought of the human condition. My position was that heaven was ultimately unsatisfying, and at the end, I make a decision to go back to earth and live as human. I take off my wings, and the last thing I do is to sing a song in my white robe about how excited I am to be mortal again. The song was to the tune of Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” It was not a good play.

I auditioned for it for something to do; something to drive to; something to bridge the gap between the school year and summer. I was increasingly living in my own head, and my own head was increasingly inhospitable, so I wanted distractions. I had another year of high school left, but in lots of ways, I was already done, already gone. I didn’t really like this play, and I didn’t really like Metallica, but they gave me a reason to be elsewhere, and provided background noise. Those couple of months were all Stone Cold Crazy and New York, New York. They cleared my head, in the way that something you don’t particularly care about can. They were the only soundtrack I had for that moment when one thing is ending and another is going to begin – the strange seasonal twilight when you’re holding on to the muscle memory of one mode of being, while at the same time unlearning it.

Downtown Flint, Michigan in 1995 was an empty place. Empty in an existential, Reaganomics way. Empty in the way cities are in bad 80’s movies, with almost every door and window covered with plywood. It was also empty in a way that made it feel all yours if you were able to be creative there, which I had become addicted to – playing tiny punk shows and now doing black box theater. It wasn’t all ours, of course, but it had the power to make you feel at home in a way that New York, New York can’t. I thought about all that as I drove through Flint in my Geo Metro.

The Geo Metro was not a good car. But it made me feel at home in a way that other cars couldn’t. It was small, and so was I. It was comically small, and flimsy, and so I really had to crank up the cassette player to drown out the road noise.

Stone cold crazy, you know…(dun dun, dun dun)…

I did like Queen, but Metallica sucked all the Queen-ness out of that song in favor of speed. The speed that made Metallica acceptable crossover listening between metalheads and punks is what made a strange, playful song into…something else. Instead of harmonies that come out of nowhere, it’s all cymbal grabs and dive bombs. James Hetfield grunts out “UGH” before the solo, punctuating the chugging, macho thrash. But it’s the only cassette in my car as I commute to and from the theater. It was like listening to nothing, with guitar solos.

Commuting can be a strange place where the space becomes blurred between not liking something, and being kind of into it just because it’s there. You stay on a radio station way too long because you don’t like what’s playing, but fuck it. It’s not terrible, and there’s going to be something else coming up anyway. It’s a space where you become aware of what’s behind you, and what you’re about to do, and those two points are within the same moment that is also not really anything at all – you’re not here, and you’re not there. So fuck it. Wait for the next song. (The next song is always Stone Cold Crazy.)

Oh shit, guitar solo…

James Hetfield: UGH!

(Plays air guitar on the impossibly thin plastic steering wheel of a 1995 Geo Metro)…

Am I listening ironically? I’m not even really listening. 

I’m not there. And I’m not really here.