Wendy Brown-Baez's Blog: Wendy's Muse - Posts Tagged "performing"

At what point does a love of reading become the desire to write? In Writing as a Way of Healing: how telling our stories transforms our lives, Louise A. DeSalvo writes that many of us become writers due to something that happened in childhood: trauma, shocks such as loss, death, incest, violence, racism, homophobia, or just feeling misunderstood, outcast, other. At what point did this happen to me, that I began to pencil the first mystery novel in third grade? Was it because I had had congenital hip dislocation and spent a year in a cast and a year in braces? Did I feel abandoned by losing my mother’s attention when my brother was born? Was it the tension between my parents who were too young, too broke, and opposite in temperament? Was it when my mother left me in the care of my grandmother for several days? And yet: my grandmother was my first case of true love. I always wanted to be with her and went for sleep-overs every week-end until she retired and moved to Florida. And my brother, I bossed him around until he got big enough to fight back. I have the photos of our tea parties to prove it. And as for the casts and braces, my father built me a rolling platform so I could scoot around the house and yard. When I turned 7, I started dance lessons and cartwheeled my way to notoriety on the playgound.

It could be something born in our blood as well as a disposition to heal through rectifying, through explanation, through making sense of things, and raising our voices to be heard. Perhaps the stories my mother read to me before I went to sleep were the advent of the Muse. Perhaps I had a vivid imagination and making up stories was only one of the many ways I explored self expression. I also drew and painted, danced and sang, made up plays, and loved dressing up in costumes.

At what point does the gift of words become a necessity, a vocation, a way to interface with the world? Are most poets introverts, are writers naturally reclusive? And so more available to the task of writing down what we think about, what we hear in our inner ear, our inner voices? And what does that mean about the push to market and promote yourself?

I love reading my work, performing my poems, to a live audience. The feeling of connection, intimacy, revelation, removing the veil and removing my self, getting out of the way for the Muse to speak through me. The secret to good writing is transcendent awareness, to be in the “flow” as they call it. There are people who become addicted to the adrenalin rush of thrill seeking, of risk taking, the need to generate those hormones of flight or fight because their brain chemicals thrive on them, they feel more alive. There is always a risk when you are a writer. The risk of failure, of not being understood, of being mediocre, of rejection or criticism. There are other risks as well. The risk of telling the truth, exposing your own fragility and vulnerability to the public, the risk of discovering what you really feel and think, the risk of self awareness and no turning back. There is the risk of experimenting and exploration and the risk of falling flat on your face, of taking leaps and crashing to earth, of giving of yourself only to be emptied.

The risk of standing on stage in front of others is something I never imagined I would do. I begin my poem “My Goodness Girl” with an explanation of how terrified I used to be and how a shot of tequila was my "liquid courage". This terror calmed down after the first few poems and I felt in sync with my audience, saw their compassionate eyes and heard their responses of laughter or sighs or applause. Sometimes saw their tears.

There is controversy about applause at readings. At some, applause is saved until the end, which unnerves me even as an audience member. The cheers and applause and noisy raucous responses at slams were liberating and created excitement and solidarity.

But it is not for the applause that I have overcome my terror time and again to step out in front. And although I know now that I won’t faint if I make a mistake, that my terror will be reduced to butterflies and weak knees, it still surprises me. But the reason I keep going back out there is that I want to speak. Perhaps it is not the traumas and shocks and disappointments and sorrow and grief and fear that made me want to become a writer. Perhaps it was that as a child I was a chatterbox and was told to be quiet. Perhaps I just needed to finally take the stage.