Creative Writing by Alessandro Lazzarini

MEETING MYSELF – FROM HEAD TO P… TOES

That afternoon I had to re-write the whole thing. I chose words. Once I had chosen them, they wouldn’t fit in the context. Once they had fit in, they’d do this in a tone I couldn’t like. You know what would fit? Me, in a bar. If your inspiration doesn’t work, you should try and sink in a glass of wine. Seriously – you can decide to get lost in nature and find yourself; or you can lose yourself in alcohol, an idea that suited me the most. Weird things happen when you’re drunk, so it happened to me I got the chance to meet Edgar Allan Poe.

“It’s a hell of a coincidence” I said to him “since I’m Edgar Allan Perry, and I swear to god one wouldn’t find another person with the exact same name in the whole city of Boston”. I had made his acquaintance a few moments before, when he had seated next to me, asking the bartender something I couldn’t really hear. After a brief handshake and introduction, followed by my surprise I reported just above, we began to chat.

I told him what I was doing – writing, or at least trying. A publisher manifested interest in some of my poems and I wanted to get my first volume finished as soon as I could.

He told me what he was – a lunatic, drug addict, alcoholic, a murderer, a morose and morbid individual who spent much time contemplating violent deeds against the unsuspecting and writing about it.

“Cool” I said. “And how do you manage to be all these things at the same time? They say simplicity is the key. I wouldn’t say it is yours, at all”.

“See, my friend, once a friend of mine told me I was taking risks, jumping from the reality to the fantastic, taking a step on concrete floor just to start running in the fog, being real just to disappear. But you know – it does pay off in the end. When you hold a pen, you hold your reader’s attention. You have to be careful, of course. But do you really have to be yourself? Imagine, write, boom. Surprise yourself, surprise who’s reading”.

When I was drunk enough, I decided it was time for me to go home. I couldn’t remember if I said goodbye to that fascinating character I had talked to; I couldn’t even remember if it was any real at all. However, it left me with so much to think about. If I could be like him, that would be my password, my key to success. Overthinking, I realized I was home.

While I was taking the key out of my pocket, or at least trying to, I could hear Pluto meowing inside, waiting for me.

Explanation: My story puts the young Poe, the one that used the pseudonym, the one that will get Tamerlane and other poems published in Boston, face to face with the “I” in Poe’s stories.

Poe writes in the first person, so I imagined this “I” narrator of his stories being real. The “friend” he talks about is Todorov, who gives his definition of fantastic. A reference to the different nature of Poe as a writer can be found when he says wine suits him more than nature – Emerson wouldn’t be proud to hear this – and that simplicity isn’t the very characteristic of his works – making him totally different from Whitman. The reference to “Pluto” in the end messes everything up – a thing Poe likes to do, too.