By E.N. Couturier
At the online newspaper where I work, I am instructed to get better at making people interested in me. (Well, not “me,” just my ideas, what I say, what I think, what I mean, what I notice, what I believe, who I am.)
Historically my writing and my life have only interested specific people with the same questions I have. I am in the habit of thinking this is an advantage, that it’s better to have a real connection with a few than something fleeting with many. Sometimes I wonder if I am a coward to not sell myself harder.
I find my stories interesting, the people in them surprise me with their thoughtful depth, but the public won’t click unless the headline promises something shocking and impossible. They seem to want it to hurt.
I say to my editor, I’m almost done writing this lede but I want it to suggest more narrative. We don’t need narrative, she says. We need intrigue.
She has worked here for 50 years but admits nobody knows what that really means. Maybe one of us will crack the code today. But then we’d develop into some new problem; such is progress. If we aren’t struggling towards something, we aren’t living for anything.
Our office takes up the first floor of a big brown building in the center of the city. Seagulls hit the windows like cannonballs. Pigeons shit and die on the wide front steps. This morning I almost slipped on the stucco, which someone had flooded with bleach to neutralize the stains. Another tiny egg had already fallen from a nest in the overhang and shattered into the sanitation. The bird was fully formed but had not yet fought its way out of its shell.
In our air-conditioned open newsroom with tinted windows, I sit at a long, shared desk and deconstruct what would interest me about off-season maintenance activities on a lowbush blueberry farm. I write about how the land is lit on fire to make the plants produce more fruit; four hundred people read it. This number is far too low. We are losing money. I am costing money. I don’t earn it. Steve the sports guy brought in off-brand Twinkies called Hoo-Dees, and all of us are smiling. Steve cares about our lives. Last week was butterscotch candies. You’ve got the touch, the CEO said to me before they started tracking my numbers. You’ve got your finger on the pulse.
Sometimes when I get anxious about my failure to restart humanity’s heart, I think reflexively about biting into somebody’s neck like an apple where it meets their shoulder. I’m just convinced I would find some relief in an undeniably real intersection with the world of other people. I’ve had it before, but whenever it goes, I think I’ll never know it again.
This image of sinking my teeth in doesn’t help me relax, but I invite it without wanting to, gnashing my jaws like plastic wind-ups alone in my car at the thought of how my work could have been better, could have meant more to more people if I only knew what interest was, how to draw it and how to bear it.
One of the only poems that ever did anything to me ends on the lines: For here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. Whatever I do, I want it to change something, make someone understand that they are changeable.
My poet friend had a God complex in middle school. He describes lying in bed believing he was the Messiah, that he had to be careful what he dreamed at night because it would all come true. We joke that maybe it takes this kind of narcissism (his word) to become a writer. But I don’t disbelieve him, really, 11-year-old Sammy in the puka shell necklace. Why would God give you the chance to act if He couldn’t use your movements?
For this reason, I wonder if I should find it selfish that I am so comfortable receding into the background. Other women with jobs like mine make their companies money by filming themselves trying things for the first time, playing up a wide-eyed stupidity about reality that I am unwilling to replicate. Maybe they help more people than I ever will. I don’t want anyone to look at me, even though I need them to.
Before this, I reported on local government for a small paper focused on print where nobody talked about interest. It was already on the page, so everyone saw; they didn’t have to choose it. People said we were a relic of a workplace, the kind of world that didn’t exist anywhere else. Somehow that didn’t make things any easier.
I broke my own heart in spite of myself there over a video game player, the first person I could have had a future with. We were both old-fashioned and slow and new together, set aside from whatever it is that most other people seem to share. He studied sewer lines carefully at work and told me he meant what he said and took long walks around town after midnight in a leather jacket he’d worn for 10 winters. Lying in bed, I thought about him passing by my apartment, knowing he could be close to me at any moment without my realizing.
But we didn’t want any of the same things; after work he looked past the world, liked to watch television and go to the movies. Forgetting helped him stay nice, he said, kept reality from warping him. Underneath his affection ran a current of bitterness for everything before. I wanted to fix it but also feared it would surface once who I really was became undeniable, moved beyond the walls of the office where I came to see him after hours. This is sparing us both, I said when we called things off, without feeling any better. Later, I kept remembering how his hair touched his shirt collar.
To forget, I started seeing a guy who worked on the printing floor baling paper with a foot-pedal machine that whipped plastic cord around the stacks and melted the ends together on top of his dry pink fingers. He smelled sharp like ink all the time, even in his weekend clothes. Privately I referred to him as Friggen’ William, because he kept designing notes in Photoshop to tape on my car and texting me seven times in a row. I let him into my life because he was so relentless about wanting it.
It was easy to slip away from this attention because it was just my face, really, that he thought all the other things were attached to. He would pause to ask accusingly, You aren’t catching feelings, are you? like they were terminal, and I’d say no, William, I’m not. When I asked him why he wouldn’t buy curtains for his bedroom, he said no one ever looked in.
Sometimes now, when I’m not happy with an article, I’m almost relieved nobody is reading it. The television monitor mounted to the wall above my desk displays our top stories today: A man crashed a plane and broke both big toes, a swimming pool is closed for high levels of human fecal bacteria, the university hockey team’s prospects are grim, and an aquarium downstate is now home to a rare albino lobster.
I really hoped the last story I wrote would be up there. In it, I interview a man who has spent decades taking photos of wishing wells. Most of these wells drew water a century ago. Later, homeowners capped the tops to keep their children from falling in and built decorative fences around them, attached little blue buckets to the handles. He knew of an old book I mentioned and told me it was a wonderful resource for people who are interested in things other than Instagram and artificial intelligence.
Like me, perhaps, he wants to grab everyone in the world by the hair and make life matter to them, to fight through reality. The book moved backwards from buildings and went on to say that trees are magical creatures, fantastically intelligent beings millions of years old who can figure out survival better than any of us ever will. Sometimes, when apple trees fall down in old age, their branches stab the ground and grow up into new plants rolling across the landscape.
People like to say that you can only help somebody who really wants to be helped, reach somebody who is already searching. Plenty aren’t. Most aren’t, supposedly. I still find that hard to believe. Why does one sheep run from you?
I drive home by myself, perfectly untouched. No single men work at the online newspaper. Sometimes I don’t know if anyone sees me, so I stop at a gas station for a slice of slick pizza just to remember what it feels like. All week, I observe people carefully, photograph their faces and their hands, take pages of notes, listen to their recorded voices again so I can replicate them for the public and love them in this way. Still, we don’t get close to each other.
Even the most sensational headlines sometimes don’t bring in more than a few hundred clicks. Intrigue alone isn’t enough; the audience waits for a factor nobody can isolate.
Once in a rare while I deliver it to them without realizing I have until thousands of people are sending the story to each other, until all of them are talking and understanding what they want to. Sometimes I think nothing we do could ever be explained, any impetus captured, beyond the shape of the action. You don’t have to talk to your hands to make them move; they just do it. I’m depending on you to see what I tell you is there.
E.N. Couturier is the author of Organic Matter (Autofocus Books, 2025). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Offrange, The New Territory, jmww and elsewhere and has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize. Find her online @witnessborne.