These are the things you want to know. I don’t know yet what you want to know as I don’t know you. I just know me – excessively well, it feels sometimes.
This page exists because I am “the Writer.” And I don’t want to be. What I mean is that for all of my remembered life that includes my ability to put words to paper, and then to screen, I’ve been known for that facility. For, at times, a bit of a case of hyperlexia. I love words, deeply. They have been incredible comfort in aspects of my life I’ve found difficult to hold still in my head. They’ve been dance partners, friends, sometimes a great dark Void with a lip of light so far in the distance it could only be believed there. Words have gotten me through.
However, to friends, to family, to the internet strangers who have become friends, or even, like family…this title is what is known. Not the work, nor the experience, nor the intention. While I’ve published in the school literary magazine, impressed people with a few gifts of writing here and there, I feel in some ways fraudulent. Unknown. Incorrectly classified. I write, but am I a writer? Does any of this count?
I’ve just been the Word Girl. A sticker that a computer prints out to be affixed to a price tag. While blogging for most of the preceding decade, I have not known a forum or a situation where it was comfortable to break what felt like a significant floe of ice in order to bring up the passion of my life.
And the result of this wishy-washy approach to passion is, as many might attest, a deep dissatisfaction at not being properly understood. The silent, plodding work. The story lines that fritter away rather than face an editing pass, the sneer of perfectionism, the joys of landing on the precise language that will describe a moment in time, embalm it in meaning forever…they’ve all been left as internet dust in a vast number of blogs, tumblrs, fora, social media sites.
My records of existing at all are disjointed, out of order, but keenly felt and loved as they were pressed into language.
So: I consider this a coalescing of all fires.
A single bonfire of everything so that even just a single something might be set alight. And what doesn’t burn will simply fall away and I can let go of the coattails of a malformed literary life that I have been chasing all my remembered years. You being here to witness it, if only for a few seconds, is an essential, essential step in this. Thank you.
We’ll edit this more as this page becomes the fully-functional repository I hope that it will. Feel free to contact me in the meantime if there’s any burning questions.