"I started out in silence, writing as quietly as I had read, and
then eventually people read some of what I had written, and some of the readers
entered my world or drew me into theirs. I started out in silence and traveled
until I arrived at a voice that was heard far away –first the silent voice that
can only be read, and then I was asked to speak aloud and to read aloud. When I began to read aloud, another
voice, one I hardly recognized, emerged from my mouth. Maybe it was more
relaxed, because writing is speaking to no one and even when you’re reading to
a crowd, you’re still in that conversation with the absent, the faraway, the
not yet born, the unknown, and the long gone for whom writers write, the crowd
of the absent who hover all around the desk.
Sometime in the late nineteenth century, a poor rural English girl
who would grow up to be a writer was told by a gypsy, “You will be loved by
people you’ve never met.” This is
the odd compact with strangers who will lose themselves in your words and the
partial recompense for the solitude that makes writers and writing. You have an intimacy with the faraway
and distance from the near at hand.
Like digging a hole to China and actually coming out the other side, the
depth of that solitude of reading and then writing took me all the way through
to connect with people again in an unexpected way. It was astonishing wealth for one who had once been so
poor."
2 comments:
very moving account of the writer's experience. I'll have to investigate her - thanks!
Love this.
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