About the Writing
Sometimes I write.
It’s probably the most challenging of my creative expressions. There’s more work to it and less play than making pictures or music. Mostly I guess my music and pictures have more room to portray emotional content. And these words, well, they are colder, starker, and just don’t lend themselves to the richness of the other avenues.
Alena Ruggerio spoke at the 2008 EEWC conference “A Place at the Table.” She’s into words and the study of language and rhetoric. She said how English as a language doesn’t really do well carrying emotional content. I found that interesting, because I think that’s why I tend to reach for other means of expression first, for most things, and why I have to labor so over what I write. After I write something I have to come back at it from different angles and at different times, just to see if I’ve really typed what I meant. (Alena’s talk, “Theapalooza: The Rhetorical Turn in the Third Wave of Biblical Feminism” is archived here on eewc.com).
Sometimes I think my writing is just the pressure relief valve of my wordy brain. When there gets to be too many words in there I can let some of them run off onto a page.
I usually don’t write to say things to other people. Even when I use second person I’m writing to myself, to get a handle on what I am thinking and feeling. Seems to me that maybe some other people are able to just think and feel and let that be that. For some reason I have to take one step back and create to look at what the hell is going on.