Epigraph

No, not epitaph. Epigraph.

I am working on finishing my capstone for my master's (oral defense on Monday)and came across this piece that I wrote for a class with Aaron Levy, a friend of mine who's a big part of the reason I'm at ASU. I like this piece, kind of reminds me of why I'm doing this whole Ph.D. thing...

“When I find nothing by me, much may have been done in me.”
-Francis Thompson (poet, sometime opium addict, pursued by the ‘Hound of Heaven’)(‘Discovering Francis Thompson’, Gregory Allen, Mount Carmel 49,2 (1992) pp. 81-92)

I hope that Anne Lamott is right; I hope publishing is overrated. That’s partly because I haven’t published. I mean, I have a few by lines, some poems that a few of my friends and professors like, but my name’s not hanging out on the spine of a book battling dust allergies in some library or anything. Not that I don’t want to publish. I do. But some days, maybe most days, especially if I haven’t written for a while, I’m not sure I have much to say. I’m not sure I have anything to say. But I show up and, as a teacher, I ask my students to show up too. And I ask them to trust me, to write, which to them is the same as asking them to die. But they do—write a little… and die a little… and head straight for the center of things. The days go on, and we write every day at about the same time. Partly it is to trick ourselves into forming a habit, partly it is a debt of honor, a sort of prearrangement with ourselves. And we write with the stubborn hope that if we just keep showing up, eventually it will come.

Sometimes it takes a lot of figuring out what we don’t have to say before we ever land on what we do have to say. Sometimes it takes three pages to get to one sentence. But it is always worth it. Worth the struggle, worth the waiting. It’s hard to say what exactly it is we’re waiting for. It’s different for all of us. But we always recognize the start— that choke in the throat that comes from the fear and thrill of saying something true, something the rest of us are too scared to say or see, but something we all feel glad and a little relieved to have heard. It is a sort of settling into ourselves, a coming home. After a while we start to relax and take ourselves less seriously. And in an odd sort of way, that means taking ourselves more seriously. Finally, we get into it. We are writing. At our own pace we finish one piece and move on to another. And it turns out that this thing that we had to force ourselves to do is what we most needed. We needed to hear ourselves, to hear each other. And somehow, when we manage to say something right and true and say it well—and it doesn’t always happen, there are no guarantees—it feels like we’re living up to something, like we’re coming alive.

Besides, it was either that or:

When I write, I feel like an armless, legless man with a crayon in his mouth.
-Vonnegut