Clay With Stain-Glass Eyes

Considering myself a writer is not easy.  It has no framed, signed document, hanging on the wall.  No papers with editing marks and comments from the teacher in red.  Writing a blog is very loose in its permission of freedom.

When I think of myself as a writer I have to brave the unknown affect of my words.  Along with the unknown, I have to realize it can have an affect on myself and others. 

Dorothea Brande says in her book, Becoming A Writer,  "You are persuading your reader, while you hold his attention, to see the world with your eyes, to agree that this is a stirring occasion, that that situation is essentially tragic, or that another is deeply humorous.  All fiction is persuasive in this sense."

I don't consider persuading an audience by what I'm writing.  Most of my writing is written from a place in me I sometimes don't even know. A stranger.  I guess that's why I tend to think I'm crazy.  My logical ordering side reads my writing after it's done and says, "Where did that come from?"  My emotional, passionate side reads it and says, "Where did that come from?"  I write.  Until I have a breakthrough of thought.  When this happens my hand can't even keep up with my thoughts when I let it go.  I dig deeper when it starts flowing.  I can easily spend three hours at a time sitting, writing, in a fog of thought.  I prefer to leave it as it is for a time and return to it the following day, week or month, even.  When I finally edit my work it's not for spelling errors and bad grammar.  It's for meaning.  I read it out loud and see if it feels right to my voice.  When I do this I can find huge holes without meaning.  I don't see these holes when I'm in the writing process.  I think the ideas are clear. But when I revisit the writing I usually have to add or delete a word here and there or a even a whole page.   

I have to keep out criticism from my writing flow.  Self-criticism and audience criticism.  It's difficult. No, it's VERY difficult.  I've written poems with notes at each stanza explaining what I meant in each part.  It was my worry someone might misunderstand or misinterpret what I was saying. This nightmare behavior comes from past high school writing classes tearing apart beautiful poetry piece by piece.  How horrible to be long dead and someone is telling a classroom of potential writers what you meant was…blah…blah… blah. Not that I have any queenly ideas about my writing being the topic in an english class, but I try not to let this sway my writing.

I'm done with that nonsense.  I have to feel immune to what others interpret in my writing.  Just as I would be by an audience interpreting the meaning in my portrayal of a song I sing from my heart.  I deliver it, I become the voice and the audience sifts through the meaning and reaction they feel on their own.  Madeline Milidonis-Fritz, an artist friend, creates these amazing emotion-filled nest, cocoon, lair-like pieces.  Receiving a gift from her art doesn't need any analysis.  I don't need to ask what each feather, stone, antler, twine, or twig means.  I feel meaning the moment I look at them.  The magic from her art is for me, personally.  Just as my writing is for each unique person who reads it.  What we bring to a creation becomes a part of the art.  My personal connection to Madeline's pieces may bring me to tears but you might feel nothing.  My words may make someone feel angry, sad, bored or nothing.  I want my readers to be open to my art.  Let it touch you or not touch you.  Let it be what it is.  It's my creation.  You feel what you allow it to let you feel.  You may not even finish because it might bore, offend or make you feel uncomfortable to read.  As an author I hope for my writing to connect to you personally.

I have to tell you.  I would not write if I had to be careful about what I say.  I learned a lesson when I was younger that stayed with me all these years. Bib-overalls were in style when I was a teenager.  I loved them.  They were baggy, comfortable and all I had to do was throw a shirt on (any color) and pull up those baggy bibs and I was out the door, ready to go.  There was definite mixed reactions to those faded bibs in the seventies. It was hard for me to deal with personally and not be swayed by public judgement of wearing them.  I had to come to terms with the criticism and decide I was wearing them for me, for my comfort, for my expression.  Now that experience is a color I see through in the stain-glass.

I will end by quoting John O'Donohue from his book Anam Cara,  A Book of Celtic Wisdom.

"In your clay body, things are coming to expression and to light that were never known before, presences that never came to light or shape in any other individual.  To paraphrase Heidegger, who said, 'Man is a shepherd of being,' we could say, 'Man is a shepherd of clay.'  You represent an unknown world that begs you to bring it to voice.  Often the joy you feel does not belong to your individual biography but to the clay out of which you are formed.  At other times, you will find sorrow moving through you, like a dark mist over a landscape.  This sorrow is dark enough to paralyze you.  It is a mistake to interfere with this movement of feeling.  It is more appropriate to recognize that this emotion belongs more to your clay than to your mind.  It is wise to let this weather of feeling pass; it is on its way elsewhere.  We so easily forget that our clay has a memory that preceded our minds, a life of its own before it took its present form.  Regardless of how modern we seem, we still remain ancient, sisters and brothers of the one clay.  In each of us a different part of the mystery becomes luminous.  To truly be and become yourself, you need the ancient radiance of others."