Glass Labyrinth

in a bathtub full of salt, she asks a question to the notepad perched upon her knee. she keeps asking until the
water goes cold and she’s forced back into bed, blanket pulled up over her head to keep her safe through
winter.
-excerpt from Glass Labyrinth

It’s January 2023 and I do not have a job. I was drowning in having a job and now I am drowning in not having one, and it’s complicated, the way it both is a choice and is not one. Burnout is too mild a word for the hideousness of it, of throwing your current life away because you just can’t live it anymore. I need a job by March to keep paying rent, and I’m not certain I’ll have one.

I’m in the bathtub, and the ink in my notebook is wet and smearing all over the page.

A lot of things have happened all at once. My debut poetry collection came out in September, and I’ve had two readings and I don’t know how to promote myself. ChatGPT is brand new, and everyone is saying how it’ll replace the need to write, and I don’t know how to deal with the fact that my own, personal need to write is not something that will easily be replaced. But I’m wondering what’s the point, if maybe I’m burning myself to the ground to write and work and I only have to do one of those things, because the other will never make me money anyway, especially now.

In the first apartment I shared with my wife, before we even knew we’d fall in love, the water heater wasn’t very big. There was a special way my future-wife took baths, knowing they’d never be hot enough. Fill the tubs two thirds full, then heat water in the electric kettle until boiling, and add it, and fill the kettle again and add it again, until it finally was enough.

The bathtub I’m in now heats fine, and it won’t begin to leak into the walls for another eight months, when I’ll be unemployed again in different circumstances. In the meantime, I ignore the ink smears and jot down a few more words.

I don’t know at this point that I’m writing a book. I just know that there’s something in my chest that I want to diffuse, some sort of bomb that might still not go off if I can just cut the right wires.

When ChatGPT first came out, I thought a lot about what machines do, and what people can do.

I thought about how stringing together words isn’t the same as a story, especially certain kinds of story. My poem developed paths. What happens if I choose this, what happens if I go this way. I reread Myth of Sisyphus.

the boulder

There is a field of sunflowers at the top of the hill and you
run toward it but you can’t reach it, you run toward
it but you can’t reach it, there is a wooden sign
three-quarters of the way up the hill that reads

ARE YOU FUCKING UP THIS WORK?

a) You will not fuck up this work. There is only a quarter of a hill left before you can rest in a field of sunflowers and dreams.

b) The question trips you up and tears you open. You go down the hill on heavy feet, enter your home, and close and lock the door.

-Excerpt from Glass Labyrinth

Slowly, in starts and stops, this thing I’m writing turns into a book. I get a temporary job. I go to open mics again, and read, and write, and read some more. I ask myself the wrong questions and follow the road until I reach the right ones. I fuck up the work. I fuck up the work, and keep going. I don’t know what’s behind any of the doors, but I start to open them anyway.

Eventually, I realize that what I’ve written is a meditation on grief.

Glass Labyrinth isn’t a sad book, by any means. Like much of what I’ve written, it’s about going through the woods and coming out different on the other side. But this time, there is more than one way to get through the woods. Readers are asked to make choices, and those choices determine what happens next. The meaning changes. The story changes.

Things are different for me now, but I still think of 2023 as one of the strangest, hardest, and most transformative years of my life.

Glass Labyrinth comes out June 27th through Thirty West Publishing House. It can be preordered here

Hailey Spencer is, in the words of her wife Elizabeth, "an absolute cloud of a girl." Her work runs in obsessive circles around fairy tales, grief, and healing. She is the author of Stories for When the Wolves Arrive and Out of Love in Spring. Her upcoming collection, Glass Labyrinth, takes a winding path through a city that is also a forest and does not exist, and through cycles of grief. She is an editor and board member at First Matter Press. For more on Hailey and her work, visit her on Instagram @outofloveinspring or at her website haileyspencerwrites.com.