Roughen it Up

I was not a good writer in my younger years. I was stymied, arrested, by the wrong idea of what beauty is. I thought the language had to course, unstopping as a song. I decided that if a thought, a moment, a scene could not be expressed with some degree of beauty that it should not be expressed at all. It was always all about words for me. I could not see beyond that fence.

But there is room, in writing, for the forcible, physical, coarsened, unfinished. For the gap, the pause, the uncertai