I hath returned

My hiatus is over and I am glad to be back! I have been writing outside of this website, on a personal project I started some time ago and have been mostly curating drafts for publishing, but it’s nice to be back here again.

I’ve been working on an anthology and in working with authors, I’ve been thinking about writing as a whole and what it means. For so many it’s a way to pursue a creative outlet, but for some, it’s about healing. Allowing a person to sort out feelings and emotions they might repress or just need to put out into the world while creating distance.

Take poetry for example. Poems will have a speaker whom experienced something with so much ache in them they needed poetic/lyrical language to truly do it justice. Any poem about love, heartbreak, grief, sadness, rage, hope, etc, is evidence enough. Readers will often believe that this unnamed speaker in poetry is the writer themselves, but it’s not really a good comparison. The speaker is closer to a personification or maybe an aspect of the writer.

It is often done to create a separation between the subject matter and the writer—whether because of time or it is too close to them. There is a perceived self-sacrifice in poetry that the writer must be experience such strong emotions all the time to write as they do, to drag their reader through metaphors and pain line by line; in reality, a reader imparts their own projections as well.

Don’t get me wrong, the words are meant to invoke those emotions, but they only work if a person can relate to them. I know I’m not lifting the veil with that revelation but you’d be surprised how often poems/fiction/art is imagined.

This doesn’t lessen the affect or make the author any less genuine in what they write about. It provides perspective though. Creativity isn’t something that can be curbed, it will lay in wait and fester, and imagining heartbreak can only create part of the scenario. Heartbreak stems from loneliness, or a sense of being alone. Of course it also means an end. Not only a relationship but an end to a dream.

Words are power and it’s amazing how many meanings can be interlaced with one word and how interpretation creates its own versions. Sorry, for the tangent, it’s nothing new really but I just had this sudden surge of how wonderful humans are and how I got to see that so much in authors’ works.

Fiction does this as well, in a larger slower build, and some might argue in a better way. But give it time, if poetry doesn’t make sense, wait till you experience something similar and read it again. It might not change how you read it but it might change how you see it.

There is an importance to writing that I think is slowly being accepted; you don’t have to be a writer do to so. In the writing world, we often say that there is some writings that are just for the author. Maybe it’s a character we add or a scene that gets cut, but always it’s something just for us. I think it’s a danger writers fall into often, that if we are writing we should be pouring it into our projects, and while it’s not entirely tied to our societal conventions or expectations (though heavily influence by it) but it’s there.

There is a desire to produce, to publish everything, to keep nothing to yourself whether online or in-person and I hope I can lessen that in myself and in you who read this. It’s okay to focus on yourself, to create for yourself yes, but also to just exist for something other than sharing or maintaining an online persona. It’s exhausting and in addressing it, we can learn to listen to our instincts and understand our emotions—even if it’s only on the page.

I didn’t mean to make this another tangent but it rings true!

So journal, paint, sketch, sculpt, write, dance, sing, even if you suck because it helps fill our lives with personal purpose (I don’t mean purpose as in career or whatever funny notions of monetary value this can provide but something we can hold for ourselves to have FUN) rather than societal.

Be create, be bold, and be wild.

I hope someday I can say I’ve lived with that motto in mind.