I listened again to Denise Levertov's poem, "The Secret," on YouTube and realized why that poem continues to resonate with me. It so beautifully portrays that sense of wonder writers have when readers make strong connections to their words--and especially when those connections reveal interpretations they could never imagine. That is the power of writing--that ability to connect to others we may or may not know and stir memories of experiences about which we know nothing.
That is why it seems important to me that I also understand my relationship to my writing. If I try to write something exactly as it happened (whatever that means), then it suggests that I also feel I must and can control all interpretations of those words. That, of course, is impossible. Rather, I like to begin with the sense that I am writing personally but through the drafting process begin to see that the text is both me and not me. Like any creation of our making, writing becomes something apart from us. It carries the traces of our fingerprints and the images of our memories, but it also lives within the contexts of its genre, the traditions and practices to which it points, and the processes of dissemination. Even our writer's voice, although distinctive, is not isomorphic with our selves.
This kind of thinking tends to tangle me in knots as I try to describe what I sense about my work; we know so much more than we can articulate or even bring to conscious awareness. It is why I enjoy working in groups of writers, hearing back from those readers and seeing my writing in a way that all my self-reflection cannot muster.
It's been almost a month since the scholarly writing class ended . . . I miss our conversations and the writing, but I am determined to continue the blog. The busyness of March and April stopped me for awhile, but it has become a more public space for me to continue to think about these ideas, and I will continue with regular posts.
