This quote, taken from an essay in Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg made me reflect on what writing is to me. As a writing teacher, I coach people through their writing process everyday, being a cheerleader, a drill Sargent, an empathetic listener or whatever else anyone needs to get their writing done. But sometimes I forget to focus on my own relationship to writing. Goldberg's essay, the first piece we read together in Senior English, made me think about my 35 year relationship with writing.
Writing is a comb. In my mind my thoughts are all tangled like a 3-year-old's hair. Bits of weeds or dirty, crumbling leaves get stuck in the knots of my thoughts, and writing helps me smooth it out, putting my ideas and emotions into straight lines. I first really turned to writing when I was a teenager, a time when my whole life and the inside of my mind felt like a child's scribbly drawing. I wrote little poems in tiny notebooks that helped me smooth out all of the fraying and complicated emotions of growing up, moving out, losing people. I often don't understand what I'm writing until I'm done writing it. Too many times, I only figure out my main idea when I am writing the last paragraph, which means that I often delete half of what I have written and start over. This used to make me feel sick with frustration, and it made me think I was not a good writer. I know now, however, that that is just my process. I have to comb my thoughts out with words before I can braid them into something to be read by someone else.
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Top ten reasons to read Just Kids by Patti Smith 1. It is written by Patti Smith--an original punk. 2. Smith is a song writer and poet. Prose written by poets tends to be amazing. 3. And there are pictures. 4. It is a true a story. Reading this book, I felt like I befriended a person I had only heard about, the artist: Robert Mapplethorpe. 5. The way it describes 1970s New York makes me nostalgic for something I never even experienced. It gave me not only the picture but the feeling of being there. 6. Much of the book takes place at the infamous Chelsea hotel, which Smith describes like this; "The Chelsea was like a doll's house in the Twilight Zone, with a hundred rooms, each a small universe." 7. Teenagers should read it because it is a book about the time in a person's life when the world is full of unlimited potential--like a teenager's life. 8. It paints the life of true artists, the hardship and beauty of that path. 9. And this line, "“I thought to myself that he contained a whole universe that I had yet to know.” 10. I hated the book at first; then, I grew to love it. Just like in a relationship, it is magical when that happens. |
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March 2018
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