by Matt St. Amand

Created on: May 13, 2010

Pryvett Rawgers' art is his daily life.  He's not a writer, an actor, a musician, or a mime.  His art is himself.  It's my job to write about it.

I began writing about Pryvett Rawgers seven years ago with the simple line: “Pryvett is an improbable personage.”

When I submitted that first article to a magazine, the editor replied, “We don’t publish fiction.”

I assured him my piece was non-fiction; that Pryvett was very much an actual, living person.

The editor wasn’t buying it—he’d had fiction submissions in the past come in masquerading as non-fiction.

After I provided names and telephone numbers of people who could vouch for Pryvett’s existence, I received a sheepish apology from the editor, and the Pryvett story appeared in the magazine soon after.

Such is the life of an interloper.

Although Pryvett exists, I’m not entirely sure he’s from this world. My closest guess is that he’s a character from a novel I haven’t read yet, and somehow dislodged himself and now treads terra firma, rather than his place of origin, liber firmus.

Pryvett is an ordinary child of the 1960s. He works in the warehouse of Package Handling Company, Inc., where he is under-employed, over-stimulated, and from which his ire, angst, hilarity and spasms of unsociability springboard.

He studied history in university only to graduate into the Ontario marketplace of the 1980s, which embraced a practice unabashedly named “positive discrimination.” This put jobs he was well-suited for—art gallery curator, animal husbandry technician, school teacher, Towne Fool—out of reach.

So, whether it was during the eight years he spent as a door-to-door market tester, or his abortive attempts in men’s fashion retail, the beer store stockroom, or as a bagel shop sandwich artist, Pryvett lived by Samuel Johnson’s adage: “He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the pain of being a man.”

A writer friend in Iowa suggested:In your introduction, you could compare him to Lenny Bruce.

You could compare him to Diogenes, looking for “an honest man.”

You could frame his seemingly antisocial acts as a philosophical search for truth. Frame him as a philosopher, a Don Quixote of sorts, looking for meaning in life and occasionally stumbling along the way, but always rising and continuing the quest.

You’d have to do this lightly and gently, so as not to make

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