My favourite authors write like angels; my writing seems more like Pan. Coyote. A mythical trickster shapeshifter. Unreliable, neither on your side nor against you.
In the 565am dark I woke with this question: what is writing for me?
It's been years (maybe 20?) since I wrote on a regular basis. I feel it beginning to dry up, like my fertility, something juicy and vital that I'm not using, so it's ebbing away.
Writing is a lens - distorting, magnifying, resolving. Bringing focus to my experience. I can shoot the landscape. Wide-angled, I get mountain ranges; close-ups, grains of sand, shards of veiny rock, one rust-eaten leaf.
It organizes my time, makes bullet points of lists, notes in meetings, tracks experiments
then unravels into daydreaming, fantasy, impossible physics and far-fetched desire.
Writing is a sickness, a lucid fever dream. It wakes me dry-mouthed and hungover in the predawn and teases me with turns of phrases lovely or disturbing, smoke signals hanging bright in the gloom, threatening to disappear whether I move toward waking or retreat into sleep.
Writing is a decision, an act of will, to leave the roiling cobwebbed dark, turn on a light, and chase the vapor trail thoughts into words.
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