Friday, August 17, 2018

Listening to Many Voices and None of Them in My Head

I haven't visited this blog in a long while. My adventures have been of the nerdish variety -- teaching writing, math, research methods, professional chit chat, social media managment and overusing the gerund. I quit teaching as a full-time gig and decided to do other things as I keep up what makes me me. I know life is about experimentation and a slip into fantasy is part of that experiementation. I just ordered E.F. Benson books from Amazon because my local bookstore hasn't been built yet, and I ordered the books to do research on my childhood. These books allowed me escape from a culture that always seemed foreign to me. My childhood was full of noise and unexpected catastrophe. Benton allowed me to slip through a secret escape hatch to daydream about being a 1920s woman whose only concerns were the guest list for a party, what flowers to put on the table and to whom she should send 'thank you' notes. Without having looked at the books in decades, I may have forgotten any allusions to World War I, its suffering, privations and aftermath. But, the human memory is always convenient like that. I finished a novel, mainly by hand, and like a sweater, I unraveled it -- I pulled a string of words and changed its direction. I plucked a character out of some cruel troubles and placed him on stable ground. How magical to be able to pluck someone out of a landfill, allowing him to shake off the gruffness of experiences I put him through to start again down another road with a new pair of shoes, a new suit, a new past and a new trajectory. I love the power of us powerless little writers to make magic even if for an audience of two.

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