Why I Write

What I would that heaven be... is all the world arrayed before me, every moment ever conceived like little pebbles lining the long shore of time

What I would that heaven be… is all the world arrayed before me, every moment ever conceived like little pebbles lining the long shore of time. In a heaven made for me, I could pick up every pebble and inspect it for cracks and faults, sheen and texture, palm it in my hand, weighing, and skip it on the water. What I would that heaven be is a boundless field where all possibilities may pass underfoot with every stride under a radiant sun. Heaven for me would be a gallery of still-lifes from my life. Little moments I observed and appreciated, but could not steal from time: sunset’s glow playing on my bookshelf on a winter evening, those occasional still and perfect mornings where it seems like all good can come to pass, nights when I am swaddled by darkness and slip into a swift stream of sleep.

What I desire is to have all those moments for myself again. And I want your moments, too. What I want, I suppose, is to be able to jump into your life with a snorkeling mask and feel your experiences pass me like schools of fish. I would like to be with you in every joyous victory, in every humiliating defeat. I want to be a friend to a trillion different people in a trillion different lives. I want to be a mountain, I want to be a pond. I want to be every hero, every villain, every evil and every good. I want to slice through every cloud as a falcon, touch every wave as a seagull, stalk every mouse as a cat.

That’s what I hope heaven is, but being a mortal man, being myself, I have only my life and my moments to use how I'd like. I cannot take every turn, see every sight, climb every mountain, read every book, be every man. I am too concrete, too physical. I am flesh and bone and cartilage.

When I write, I sometimes think the compulsion must come from this instinct of mine, the part of me that wants to consume the universe. When I write I have the freedom to live many lives, explore many places, observe many people, take part in many dramas and intrigues and fights. In short, when I write, I can, on an incredibly small scale, live out a little slice of my personal heaven, which is to be one with the world and apart from it all at once.

But there's another instinct at work, too, which is perhaps in some ways opposite to that one.

The other less gluttonous and voyeuristic part of me finds the human experience too intangible, too nebulous. All our selves are too ethereal and vast for the absolute finitude assigned to us. This part of me wants nothing more than to be concrete. I want my soul to be observed by the people I love. I want to be held in hand, weighed, inspected, regarded, treasured, considered, pondered. There are whole worlds inside of me, somewhere, and I want to dig them up and show you. There are adventures and romances and dramas for me to discover and share. My stories!

The stories are part of me. They are me. They're me for you. Packaged up as best as I could with clever phrases and twists of language. A little way for you to see me, and for me to see myself. I don't think anyone can see themselves or anyone else in totality. We can only catch reflections and shadows and flickering impressions of the people in our lives and love the approximation.

This part of me writes because I want to empty myself out, bottle up different parts of who I am and make my mind tangible in that way. I want to pour myself into something that can hold me. See myself under a million different lenses.

But maybe I've gotten too grand by this point, and I don't want to give you the wrong image. I don't mean this in a lofty way. It's all play. It's exploration and discovery and curiosity and wonder! I've come to perceive the artistic process as being inherently archaeological: it is the discovery and expression of artefacts from a rich interior world with its own symbols, mythologies, patterns, and grammar. That's all the stories are, new ways to metabolize myself, the world, the things I've seen, the people I know. It's play-pretend on paper, and that's a delightful thing. I write because I need to, and because I can't help it, and because it's fun. I’ve been doing it for a long time.

When I was a boy my family used to build a village under the Christmas Tree.

Young Juan Lam standing by a nascent Christmas City

This spiraled into a large and unwieldy holiday project by the time I was about twelve. A Christmas City. We’d build it every year.

The Christmas City

I would spend hours looking at it as a kid, listening to the Christmas music, listening to the train rumble by, imagining whole lives for the little ceramic people. I would imagine myself as one of them. Would I spend the day at Tim's Lumber Shop today? Or at the ice rink? What would I be if I were a little ceramic fellow in that big old wonderful city?

Now I’m grown up and I look at the world around me and figure, maybe I am a little ceramic man, and every day I wonder what I would be if I were myself.

I guess that's when I started telling stories, and I don't know if I've ever stopped.  If there were some better way to convey myself, explore the interior and exterior worlds, then perhaps I would turn to that instead. But so far there isn't, and thus stories it is.