I think I have always wanted to write. Even as a kid, I think that desire was buried somewhere deep, but it was there. I read voraciously as a young person. I was reading heavy books too, Roots, Shogun, The Chronicles of Thomas R Covenant, just to name a few. Reading for me, unbeknownst to me at the time, was most likely a form of escape. The stories in those books were filled with places I could go to avoid pain. As I continue to dive deep into this journey that I am on, I am confronting the patterns of many others, and seeing similarities. Reading like I did as a youngster is definitely a common theme.
Despite the fact that I have often had a blog as an adult, I also know how much eleven years of university sucked the joy of reading and writing from my bones. It is only in the last year that I have even started to pick up a book, and the same can be said with writing. I attended a food and wine writing workshop in Kelowna in 2013, hosted by my friend Jennifer Cockrall-King, and truthfully I have often wondered why. That conference was a great experience in terms of the activities that we participated in, but the writing workshops almost had a negative effect on me, shutting down my desire to write. I think that I, like so many others, struggle with the basic notion of being a writer. What do I have to offer, what would I write that anyone would want to read?
I picked up Steven King’s “On Writing” this week and started in on it today. I started Margaret Atwood’s Master Class this week, and both offer up the sage advice that you aren’t a writer if you don’t write. So start writing! Like many who like to watch programs about cooking, but don’t cook, I think I adopted this perspective about myself in terms of writing.
I guess I had already decided a while ago that I was going to just write, regardless of what people thought about what I wrote. While this isn’t entirely true, I haven’t yet written with complete abandon, I have already let that horse out of the barn.
Back in December I asked people which book they thought changed their life.
I am indebted to my friend Dave Z for recommending “The Brothers K” by David James Duncan. It is a beast of a book! And to be honest, I have listened to this book via Audible, and not sat and read it (which probably would have been faster). I am almost finished, less than 30 minutes left in the over 28 hours of audio. I have spent a lot of time walking, and listening, getting to know the Chance family. The narrator of this book should get an Oscar (if they had one for reading audio books!). If you haven’t had a chance to read this book yet, I too, highly recommend it.
As someone who is emotionally stunted and emotionally illiterate, I am beginning to discover that books, or maybe more accurately, the accumulation of language is perhaps a key to unlocking the cage which has held all of my emotions locked up all these many years. Obviously writing about my journey in this blog has been therapy of sorts, but more than that, I am beginning to actually experience an emotional response as I listen to books like The Brothers K or Washington Black. Prior to this, I would say that it was only while watching movies that I felt any real emotions, and now that seems to have expanded to the realm of words.
The character Irwin who is emotionally damaged after his stint in Vietnam and a military mental asylum (electric shock therapy and all) begins to find his way back to being human by building wood stoves. It is his way of trying to climb back up from the nether regions of previous trauma. Irwin’s brother Peter names this intermediary emotional world as Stove Land. This idea of Stove Land resonated with me. The idea of climbing up from a world devoid of emotions, finding something to cling to, some common language to speak in the process. I am beginning to understand that perhaps writing is my Stove Land.
I know that one of the tasks at hand is to broaden, or more accurately develop, an emotional vocabulary. I don’t even have words for most of what I feel, which makes it hard to articulate those feelings with any precision. I recently finished reading “Running on Empty” by Dr. Jonice Webb and she has an appendix of words to describe one’s emotions. It is a very long list, I have a lot of words to learn.
I am also determined, perhaps not yet fully committed, to writing a book. I haven’t yet decided whether this book will be fiction, or not, whether it will be related to my life, or not, but I am going to write it. You may never get to read it. As Margaret Atwood says, the waste paper basket is God’s gift to the writer. Having said that, I will most likely eventually put it out there, with trepidation, but then as I am discovering, this is the plight of every writer. Until then, this blog and the Transcend blog will have to do.