You Can Never Be Overdressed Or Overeducated

The girls in white from Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Suicides.

Oscar Wilde once said, “You can never be overdressed or overeducated,” and I think that's mostly true. 

I've always gone back and forth about wanting to focus more on my writing or more on building up a clothing brand. There has always been a want to combine my love for both clothing and writing, but I struggled to find a balance between how to be taken seriously as a writer while also having an interest in fashion.

William Faulkner in his swimming trunks sitting before his typewriter.

Faulkner was one of the largest literary heavyweights of his time (he's one of my all-time favorites), so why was he permitted to lounge out in his swimming trunks while Virginia Woolf (another favorite) had to cover it all up? 

Virginia Woolf in a long black dress in a room that might have been her own.

That's getting a little off-topic, but the point of this post is to say that I'm excited to launch a shopping section on my site that will feature some of my favorite items and be displayed next to my editing services and writing work. And once the items here on my site sell out, you can find many more great clothing pieces on my Poshmark shop, Moon Closet (username there is moonbeamface).

It’s funny, because my writing could not be more different from my personal style. Fashion is never an issue of life and death, but I think fiction should be continually examining those very elements. The act of writing is difficult, but life is difficult, and the writing should reflect that. In some ways, I really do try not to take myself too seriously as a writer, but I do think that literature is indeed serious. In life, I consider myself an optimist, but in my writing, especially the novel I’m working on now, there is often a very pessimistic view of humanity. My novel's protagonist does not believe that people are inherently good, and the novel as a whole examines themes having to do with the violence that humanity is capable of.

I’m inspired by other writers who understand this and explore similar ideas in their own writing, authors like Cormac McCarthy (check out Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West for the violent adventures of The Kid across the Texas-Mexico borderlands), William Gay (try the original Twilight, a Southern Gothic novel of a brother and sister who discover that the local undertaker is inappropriately fiddling with the corpses after they dig up the body of their recently dead bootlegger father), and Ian McGuire (The North Water is a must-read; imagine Blood Meridian in the Arctic with a murderer onboard the icy ship). I have similar taste in films as well—I really don’t enjoy comedies. My favorite directors are those like Steve McQueen and Alejandro González Iñárritu whose films explore difficult topics like the 1981 hunger strikes by prisoners in Northern Ireland (McQueen’s Hunger) and the exploitation of the poor and the criminal underworld that creates in Barcelona (Iñárritu’s Biutiful). There are so many terrible and difficult things that people across the globe experience every day, and I respect writers, directors, photographers, painters, or any kind of artist who seeks to explore those difficult aspects of life.

Fashion is beautiful and fascinating in its own regard, but it inspires me in an entirely separate way from how I am moved by writing.

So, anyway, check out the Shop the Goods section of my site, and let me know what you think!

Header photo by Stephanie Sunberg for Ebb & Flow.