We recently connected with A. Jay Adler and have shared our conversation below.

A. Jay, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about when you first realized that you wanted to pursue a creative path professionally.

I was a shy, sensitive, dreamy child who was lost in fantasy and feeling much of the time. I read a lot, watched a lot of movies on TV, and played with my toy soldiers and building blocks, creating with them dramatic, melancholy stories of heroism, sacrifice, and loss. So that creative, narrative and lyrical impulse was there from the start. Of course, I experienced years during which, in typical developmental fashion, I imaginatively tried on future selves such as fireman or marine. But by the time I reached 15, the urge – the need, really – to write had begun to assert itself as the essential expression of my early creative impulses.

I had done “creative” writing before then, to fulfill school assignments. But those school assignments had been efforts enlisting my developing writing skills. The first artful words I ever wrote, the first artful sentence – I remember it still – was “I died in a fire.” You see my narrative conceit right there. “I died in a fire” was my first attempt at self-originating artifice, my first uprising in artistry.

During the remaining winter of my fifteenth and early sixteenth years, I wrote several somber short stories. One I recall that I titled, I believe, “Come December,” I drafted long hand sitting at a window in my parents’ bedroom after school, while they were still at work in Manhattan. It was deadest winter – all winters on the Rockaway Peninsula of New York City are the deadest, most desolate of winters – and the snow drifts high. Winds cut to the bone even viewed through an eighth-floor apartment building window, and their otherworldly howling through the casement cracks were actual and only felt as if they came from me. I worked at setting that scene and conveying those feelings.

Sometime after that sixteenth birthday, I fell in love for the first time, and that ultimately led to grief, so I gained a lot more pain from that endeavor to feed my creative sublimations. I didn’t write poetry about it, which is common for sensitive teens in pain – I didn’t begin to write poetry for many years – though I did study it for the first time in a high school senior year elective, along with a first creative writing class. I wrote fiction and essay. And then, because I wanted to be a filmmaker, too – I studied film in college and made a second home of the city’s filmic art house theaters – I wrote screenplays.

There was, then, a 2–4-year period in which my recognition of myself as, by nature, a writer an artist emerged and took unbreakable hold of me. It wasn’t so much a question of profession as of identity.

A. Jay, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I have published or been recognized for my writing, in some way or other, in every genre. This is my particular fulfillment as a writer. I confess I take pride in it as an even more essential representation of my identity as artist and intellectual. These days, many who know my work will identify me as a poet, because my recent 2021 book publication was the poetry collection Waiting for Word. I’m certainly gratified by the label and proud to be a poet – more than one great philosopher has identified poetry as the highest form of writing, the closest to philosophy itself, and I agree. Still, it isn’t all, and besides poetry I write fiction, memoir, drama, screenplays, and essays of all kinds, from literary and film criticism to cultural, political, and historical commentary. My primary Substack, Homo Vitruvius, named after the iconic Leonardo da Vinci drawing known as Vitruvian Man, aims to serve that wide-ranging vision of an artistic and intellectual writing life.

For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?

There are multiple rewards but none greater than doing the work itself. I feel born to write and feel I’m only being the fullest expression of myself in the world when I’m writing. Many people called to different endeavors feel this sort of thing when they’re fully engaged and seemingly lost to themselves in that essential activity. Athletes refer to it as being in the zone. I’m in the zone when I’m writing. All my existential anxiety, all my loss and sorrow, is overcome while I write. It’s still there waiting for me in my life when I return from where I travel, but writing is how I convert all that into art, which is a form of transcendence of all that human fallibility and inadequacy. That’s not just some elevated idea I have about the nature of art; it’s my human experience in making it. Writing enables me to live. When I don’t write, which I have allowed myself to do at times in life for different reasons, I feel empty and lost. The reward for me of writing is being myself.

We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.

In the broadest, truest sense, the answer to that question is my entire life and the resilience I’ve had to demonstrate in remaining a writer. I did not meet with early success. I haven’t met with great success. I’ve experienced many disappointments that are of the kind that commonly lead artists of all types, and people with other kinds of dreams and ambitions, to give up and forge instead some kind of more practical and sustainable life. I did that in part when I decided to go to graduate school and become an English professor rather than continue struggling and hoping to make a living solely from writing – a very hard thing to do. Many experiences over my life deflated, discouraged, and distracted me – including money and success in other endeavors – but I did not allow myself to be deterred, even against that attraction.

There is, then, a more specific story in that regard. In my later twenties, I quite unexpectedly developed a business career in which I met with great success. I was offered an opportunity that, had I accepted it, would likely have made me wealthy. The career had been invigorating and life changing, and the money was certainly an attraction. I was tempted. But I know what I was meant to be in life, and I knew I would regret it terribly if I gave into temptation. I turned the opportunity down, and, in fact, resigned my job.

Life isn’t a Hollywood movie, though. Mine hasn’t been, anyway. I reaped no great reward from that daring choice other than to get to be a writer again. More resilience. Either you know you are meant to do it or you don’t.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://ajayadler.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ajayadler/
• Other: Bluesky: @ajayadler.bsky.social

  Substack: https://ajayadler.substack.com/

Image Credits

Photos of A. Jay Adler reading and in fedora and for the cover of Waiting for Word all copyright Julia Dean, with her permission.