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“My writing is my home, now.”
calm and safe and affordable are essentials for a writer.
So often you have to run away from home and visit other homes first before you can clearly see your own.
I needed shelter.
We find ourselves at home, or homing, in books that allow us to become more ourselves. Home “is not just the place where you were born,” as the travel writer Pico Iyer once noted. “It’s the place where you become yourself.”
How do you get any sleep at night if you witness stories that don’t let you go?
I can’t go back home to that place where I was raised except through stories, spoken or on paper.
I look for my kin in my fellow writers. Those I know in person and those I know on the page. I feel fortunate at least to open books and be invited to step in. If that book shelters me and keeps me warm, I know I’ve come home.
“Most writers are at odds with their environment or at odds with themselves. For the poetry to be of any consequence, the poet must have a fight on his hands.
poetry, of course, is like magic.
When I’m not writing, I tend to lose balance.”
losing balance, falling
it’s a struggle to survive and to write and not go crazy, not commit suicide. Books were a way of saving myself.
Bread, dreams, and poetry. That’s all I’m after.
all of us young, dreaming our foolish escape.
a thousand candles illuminating a sea of photographs,
A woman whom no one came for and no one chased away.
When you write a story down you have no props but the words, the punctuation, and the white spaces in between. The white spaces for me are as important as the black print. They’re like the sheet music the musicians follow when they perform a composition. Everything should already be there for the reader to follow.
I’d lost my purpose for living. I know it sounds overly dramatic, but that’s the truth. I was tired of the nuisance of staying alive. I couldn’t understand why I was put on the planet if I couldn’t seem to do anything that would earn me my keep.
What does a woman willing to invent herself at twenty-two or twenty-nine do? A woman with no who nor how. And how was I to know what was unwise. I wanted to be writer. I wanted to be happy. What’s that?
Wanting and not wanting.
Sometimes the silence frightened me. Sometimes the silence blessed me. It would come get me. Late at night. Open like a window, hungry for my life.
I moved from a place of powerlessness to action.
I’m afraid I’m not capable of saving you.
I know about words. I’m in the business of words.
I’m a writer. I’m a woman. I’m a human being. In other wars I remember watching Buddhist priests set themselves on fire for begging for no less than what I ask for, and what good did it come to?
I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to do.
I want to believe that everyone falls in love with a book in much the same way one falls in love with a person, that one has an intimate, personal exchange, a mystical exchange, as spiritual and charged as the figure eight meaning infinity.
“The streets have always motivated me to write.”
I could not brave repeating my life on paper. I slept for hours hoping the days would roll by, my life dried and hollow like a seedpod. What would a writer do not writing for a year? For twenty?
When I don’t want people to notice that I’m looking at them, I start writing and it makes me invisible.
it’s because one has no words that one writes,
I’m all my characters. And I’m none of my characters. I can write a truth only if I get out of the way and disappear. And from this Houdini trick, amazingly enough, I reappear. Without intention.
Then it occurred to me that none of the books in this class, in any of my classes, in all the years of my education had ever discussed a house like mine. Not in books or magazines or film. My classmates had come from real houses, real neighborhoods, ones they could point to, but what did I know? I went home that night and realized my education had been a lie—had made presumptions about what was “normal,” what was American, what was of value. I wanted to quit school right then and there, but didn’t. Instead, I got mad, and anger when it’s used to act, when used nonviolently, has power. I asked
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At one time or another, we’ve all been made to feel the other.
It’s not enough to simply sense it; it has to be named, and then written about from there. Once I could name it, I wasn’t ashamed or silent.
When I recognized the places where I departed from my neighbors, my classmates, my family, my town, my brothers, when I discovered what I knew that no one else in the room knew, and spoke it in a voice that was my voice, the voice I used when I was sitting in the kitchen, dressed in my pajamas, talking over a table littered with cups and dishes, when I could give myself permission to speak from that intimate space, then
I could talk and sound like myself, not like me trying to sound like someone I wasn’t. Then I could speak, shout, laugh from a place that was uniquely mine, that was no one else’s in the history of the universe, that would never be anyone else’s, ever.
I gathered different parts of other people’s lives to create a story like a collage.
I edited, changed, shifted the past to fit the present.
You can’t forget who you are.
Rage is a place to begin, but not end.
Audre Lorde
when you finish crying and despairing, you can wipe your eyes and…the work is still there waiting. So you better roll up your sleeves and get moving, girl!
“Evil is whatever distracts.”
syndrome. We can’t afford as women to be mediocre, or even good, especially not now. We don’t have that luxury. Our best weapon in adverse times—excellence.
Tell the truth. Your truth,
the house in the heart, the place where I belong.
writing is a resistance, an act against forgetting, a war against oblivion,
“Beauty is a physical sensation, something we feel with our whole body. It is not the result of a judgment. We do not arrive at it by way of rules. We either feel beauty or we don’t.”
If you can’t control your fertility, you can’t control your destiny.
PRO-CHOICE
Color is a language.
