This project has a couple of different aims. For me, the first and most important goal is to reach an audience with my writing. Everything else stems from that.
But the trip itself was a chance to kind of re-create myself, take stock of things while looking into what it is to be American. It's not the type of thing I want to do over and over again as a writer. Maybe three of four times over the course of my life. It's a way of laying my soul bare in a really intense and interactive way so that I can free myself up as a writer to create stories.
Westing is more about living, healing, and feeling
than it is about writing. My short stories are where you'll see me try
to push myself as a writer, and I wanted a platform for them too. So
here it is. I will always be the kind of writer whose self is out in
the open, a focus even, of where the writing is coming from. I'm more
of a blower than a chessmaster. But I recognize that the separation of
the creator and the created has to be explicit to make sure the reader
feels safe enough to open up his/her own imagination, and that's what
Westing can do. Satisfy my need to confess, to exult, to prophesy, so I
don't have to do it as much in my fiction.
The trip quite honestly changed my life. It changed the way I look at
love, at myself, at our country and when you have those feelings and
you're a writer, you better get it down on paper and record it.
The actual project part of gowesting.com is serendipity, the result of
me and Ben Jones having a couple of conversations. He is one of the
people out there who still believes that the internet is a total
revolution in terms of communication, and that the fact that it has not
been revolutionary is about how people have used it, not about some
kind of original sin notion that says everything is always as fucked up
as everything else. I think he thinks that too, but what he's getting
at is that language will only change when thinking changes. So me and
him and Todd started to try to figure out how we would build an
artistic platform for writers that could free us up some from the
choke-hold of the marketing and distribution channels that function as
economies of scale in the publishing industry. The internet should
allow for this kind of art market, a bazaar instead of a department
store, so we decided to open up a stall for business and see what
happened.
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