Friday, May 09, 2003
INK & BLOOD
As a young adolescent, I pinned my poems & stories to a laundry line in the basement, just to marvel at the physical existence of the things I had created out of myself - a way of publishing them to my eyes.
The front, side. back, basement & garage door entrances to the writer's art are through reading. Reading is primary, unavoidable encounter. Without reading, every other privilege of participation including criticising, praising, blaming, misinterpreting, & most importantly, influencing the writer's content & tone, is lost. A family that for too long ignores a writer in its midst takes a great risk. A writer already knows that both ink & blood are thicker than water - also knows blood & ink are comparable, even marriageable, mediums for writing.
When a writer arrives at undisguised autobiography - most eventually do - that non-participation by one's family becomes a salient feature of the historical familial landscape. If one's relatives are literate - happen, in fact to be avid readers - their indifference to one's own writing is a naked cruelty, like childhood taunts now implied silently rather than expressed openly.
From a personal fancy in the cellar to now, on an internet Blog forty years later, it is not difficult to envision a very different kind of life from which to draw one's story.
