What I Know About Writing

Three years ago, I sat on the floor of the Staten Island Ferry Station with a good friend — and I pulled out a chapbook I had just bought from Boston the night before.  I remember picking it out from the piles of everything else, and had  then found it impossible to put down.  So, here we were, reading poems about Cambodia and about aching and about the love in the arms of another as we waited.  It was winter, blustery, and cold.  She had just told me about her discovery that she had bipolar disorder — told her story that at each turn, was more shocking and embarrassing.  All at the same time, I was so grateful to be with her, sitting thigh to thigh, mulling over words that soothed and wouldn’t let us go.

She was a poet, and I had not claimed that name for myself yet.  I remember writing though, about how she was like a kite taut against the sky, not letting go of her grasp on life.  I did this, as the Statue of Liberty loomed close and then distanced itself in the wind outside.   And when I read those words I wrote years ago, I am brought back.

What I know about writing is that it makes me slow, it makes me look, and it makes me become aware with every pulsing in my body.  It centers me, like a magnet that pulls — and then makes me remember the importance of every detail and the sincerity in every effort.  Writing is a marinating process.  All that simmers in my experiences finds breath when it is down in words, real and realized, and I am forced to remember these moments.

 

 

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Thank you for reading and staying with me.  This is the last of the Round Robin writes.  They have been brought to you by 10-12 minutes of unedited writing, every single day for the past 9 weeks.

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