Alexa Mergen's Blog - Posts Tagged "from-fact-to-fiction"
Affection & Attention
My first published poem was "Farmer's Market" in a college journal called Portfolio in the 1980s. The poem notices market patrons, the "neighbors we have never met and only saw on Saturdays."
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
In From Fact to Fiction, Shelley Fisher Fishkin includes Walt Whitman's account of taking "a stroll of observation through a market" that he reported for the New York newspaper Aurora.
How the crowd rolls along!...There comes a journeyman mason....Notice that prim, red-cheeked damsel....With slow and languid steps moves along a white faced thin bodied, sickly looking middle aged man....A heterogenous mass, indeed, are they who compose the bustling crowd....all wending and pricing, and examining and purchasing.
Whitman's description anticipates the rich and rhythmic cataloging in Leaves of Grass published three years later.
I see now how reading Whitman encouraged my interest in the intersections of people and places. (More on that in a Q & A with Prime Number .) By working as a reporter, traveling, and studying biology as an amateur naturalist, I trained myself to observe.
Writers and readers change the things they feel affection for by their very attention. What a wonderful way to love.
From Fact to Fiction: Journalism & Imaginative Writing in America
