Megan Stielstra's Blog

So I was asked to take part in a reading at the reconstruction room about my literary hero. Which meant, of course, that I needed to pick my literary hero, and if you know me you also know that's a problem 'cause I have, like, a hundred literary heroes (all of whom would probably scoff at my use of "like" in that sentence [except maybe her]) and how on EARTH do you chose?

So I fretted about it. And wrote all sorts of little ditties about Marquez, Faulkner, Allison, Alexie, Steinbeck, Flannery O'Connor, Meera Nair and Jhump Lahiri and Kelly Link and Tolstoy and Chekov and Ann Petry and Anne-Marie MacDonald and Toni Morrison and Ana Castillo and Katherine Dunn and Nin (for her journals, 'cause she totally made half that shit up) and OMG Rushdie, and also ZZ Packer and Charles Johnson and Tim f'ing O'Brien and it all felt so FINAL, like picking one meant dissing all the others and I put it off and put it off until finally Michelle Taransky, the poet who's curating this whole shebang (who I really love, FYI) wrote me all, "Uhm? Megan? You kind of have to pick," and I wrote back, "I'M DYING HERE, MICHELLE!" and she wrote back, "I need to make the posters," and then I said, "Okay, fine." 'Cause making posters is really stressful.

Here's what I decided, and, subsequently, what I read:

In order to understand why Kafka is my literary hero, the following timeline is necessary:

1. My freshman year of college, this guy in my psych class told me he had a reoccurring dream about waking up as a giant cockroach. I thought that was really fascinating—so I slept with him.

2. My sophomore year of college I starting taking lit classes, and that’s when I figured out that guy used Kafka to get in my pants (as a sidenote, I had a similar realization about the guy who said, “He loved me not for who I was, but for who I will be,” and the one who said, “With you I laugh but not all of my laughter, I cry but not all of my tears”—Hamlet and Kahlil Gibran, respectively—which goes to show how important reading is, girls! ‘cause you might end up a great big whore.

3. My junior year I was angsty and frustrated and listening to waaay too much Nine Inch Nails, so I left school for a year and lived in Italy. There, in an English bookstore, I found a used copy of Kafka’s collected short stories and read it cover-to-cover. That’s when I decided that I didn’t want to study writing—I wanted to be a writer.

4. I went back to college for creative writing and was assigned to study how Kafka’s In the Penal Colony was constructed, a paper which resulted in my first ever F because I wrote about Freudian archetypes and misogyny instead of dialogue or movement or character development or anything at all pertinent to the writing—which is probably why my work sucked for so long.

5. When I finally did write a story I was proud of, it was about how I had an affair with the Incredible Hulk. I figured, hell, if Kafka can be a giant cockroach, I can get down with David Banner.

6. I started teaching creative writing, and assigned Kafka. “I’m already taking a Kafka class,” a student told me, and I asked to see her reading list. Out of twelve required texts, not ONE was anything Kafka wrote. They were all criticism of what Kafka wrote—twelve—TWELVE—books of criticism.

7. A couple years later, the chair of my department offered me a job teaching Kafka classes in a study abroad program in Prague (and I know was I supposed to be all, “What a fine professional opportunity,” but what I actually said was, “NO FUCKING WAY ARE YOU SHITTING ME?”). Over the next several months I read everything by and about Kakfa, including his journals and letters and biographies and what blew my mind was—he’s an actual person. A normal, average guy with all sorts of insecurities and problems and for some reason it always amazes me to discover that these writers I idolize are really just people. Like if Jesus walked into my living room and asked for a beer—that’s what reading Kafka’s journals was like.

8. The week before I left I asked my chair if there was anything else I might need to teach Kakfa overseas. He told me, “Pack your students some Valium.”

9. Kafka was everywhere in Prague—his face is on T-shirts, coffee mugs, anything that can squeeze a few euros out of the tourists. I thought, “Kafka would turn over in his grave.” Then I thought, ‘Kafka would be really disappointed in your use of that cliché.” Then I thought, “Kafka wasn’t alive when turning over in one’s grave became a cliché, he’s not going to give a shit.” FYI: beer is really cheap in Prague. They sell it in booths on the street corners and you can drink when as you walk down the street.

10. I found Café Montmatre, a café Kafka often wrote in. He’d attend readings in Montmatre’s back room, trying out his new work on his friends. I sat in this back room every day and wrote. It was glorious.

11. I didn’t have any religious upbringing. So when I took my students to visit Kafka’s grave, we spent a good three hours wandering around this beautiful old cemetery with it’s mausoleums and overgrown wines and crumbling sculptures—totally unable to find the guy. Finally, someone figured out that we were in the old Christian Cemetery next door to the new Jewish Cemetery where Kafka was buried. “Looking for Kafka in a Christian Cemetery,” I told my students, “is how we define Kafkaesque.”

12. When we finally got to his grave, my students wrote him notes and left them under rocks. A few of them were crying. The air was heavy: history crawled on out skin.

13. I fell in love with Prague, so the following year I went on sabbatical and moved there. My boyfriend and I rented a flat on Belgitzka and everyday I went to Montmatre and wrote all afternoon. I’ve never been more productive in my life.

14. We visited Czesky Raj, which means Czech paradise: five hundred miles of protected hiking forest with stairs cut into rocks and rolling hills and beautiful scenery. We were out there so long it got dark, nearly pitch, and we couldn’t find our way back, and did I mention we were on ecstasy? That’s probably important, anyhow—eventually, our feet found the stone staircase back to our hotel and I thought of Kafka’s line from the Advocate: "As long as you don’t stop climbing, the stairs won’t end, under your climbing feet they will go on growing upwards."

Dude, I thought, climbing those stairs. Kafka is like … here.

15. We went to a beer tasting ‘cause my boyfriend likes the beer—I’m a bourbon girl myself—and while he got good and drunk with all these Czech guys, I had the following conversation with an older man who used to be a teacher: “What are you doing in Prague?” he asked. I told him I’m teaching Kafka, and he told me the Czech people HATED Kafka. “Because he spoke German?” I asked. “No.” “Because he’s Jewish?” “No.” “Then why?” “Because he is too much depressing. The Czech people, we are not depressing. We are the fun!” He pointed to my boyfriend and his new drunk friends, all of them falling off their bench. “See this? We are too much the fun!”

I hear that word—depressing—used often to describe Kafka, but that’s not who he is to me. Sure, he wasn’t a happy guy, and granted, his stories aren’t the most hopeful in the Universe. But when I’m writing—sitting there at my desk, trying to figure out what happens next, getting pissed when the screen saver pops up ‘cause I haven’t typed anything in so long—Kafka is a Godsend because if you open that man’s journals, every other entry reads like this:

Had a hard time writing today.
Today, wrote nothing.
Just now the writing did not come.
More and more fearful as I write—

And it goes on like this, page after page, but he always keeps going. Up to his dying day he kept going and for me, that’s the greatest of all literary inspiration.