An audio version of tonight’s Entrée is available at this link.
My dear Kirsten–
You once suggested that I write a blog explaining why I write a blog; I recall you suggested it as my first blog, but I think I have run out of other questions at the moment, and I want to avoid writing too much about Europe, so I think I will come back to it now.
I cannot remember a time that I did not want to be writing. As a child, I was always imagining, so imagining first games and then increasingly complex stories came naturally to me. For the past 40 years, I have generally fallen asleep to some story or other I am telling myself. When I did write as a teenager, the bad poetry and the stories became shorter and shorter—compressed. By the time I was in college, I was always thinking of short stories, and occasionally showed somebody else one.
Eventually, marriage, work, and academia came to exhaust my time, and I simply stopped writing.
The blog was a last ditch effort to try to start again.
I wish I could be content training horses, as you do, or working a little farm up in the mountains, or even gardening, but for me, these are just chores. I wish I could be happy only working in a bookstore, or a restaurant, or teaching, or baking bread; I love doing all these things, but they are just pleasant occupations. I enjoy spending my time with them, they relax me and refresh me, and I enjoy the company of others they offer, but my mind is drawn again and again to the world of words and ideas.
I love the way words feel as they flow off the tongue, and the way they look flowing 
across the page. I love the way words fit together, finding their way into a seamless weave in a well-crafted sentence. I love the welcome pain of beauty that clicks into the mind and the heart upon having completed a sentence or paragraph or phrase or story or lecture and just knowing it is right. I love feeling ideas explode when I read, and explode when I write, as if I am discovering new universes within a book or within myself. More than anything else, I love the moment of the gentle bond with some other soul as a phrase or idea connects, and for just one moment we are in the same place, together.
However, as far as writing goes, here is the problem, this has always been my problem as a writer: I can’t just write.
I am a conversationalist. I need someone to write at. I am happiest in conversation.
Not a single person who knows me will find this in the least surprising, but I really am happiest in conversation. I love the banter and give and take, the flow of ideas and stories and wit. I love telling my weird stories, and listening to the fascinating experiences others have to offer. Even in Philosophy, I see the whole enterprise as a long conversation going back to Socrates and even before; I love the banter of Philosophy and the ongoing shared examination of this big ol’ goofy world. I love the stories of the people in it—I love to tell them, and I love to hear them.
I both love and am pained by writing this blog: it gives me a chance to throw a just little bit of that conversation out there, but it is all terribly one-sided. A conversation without another voice is, “alas, like an ale without a wench, or an egg without salt.” It relieves the urge, but is still sadly unfulfilling.
You know I love you, gentle readers, but I do dislike the loneliness of writing.
Would it kill you to write back?
I bought a horse journal many years ago.. It was a Gwani Pony Boy (Native Am. Horse trainer) journal and its beautiful, with pictures of horses and poems about horses every ten pages or so. I looked at it and looked at it, thinking of all the things I wanted to write but then decided that nothing I had to say could possibly be good enough, or well thought out enough, to put in that oh so beautiful journal. I still have it, of course, we both know I still have EVERYTHING but I never wrote in it. Now my hands hurt too much to write, I can type longer without the numbness and pain but it just isn’t the same as putting it all down in a lovely book. Maybe my mistake was buying a beautiful journal. Maybe it would have worked out better if I had bought an ugly journal. I might have been like J.K. Rowling if I had only bought an ugly journal.
I really understand that, and you put it so well. I really like the way you discribed that. I often feel that way about the “Terror of the white page,” and especially about pretty journals. I started this blog in a cheap free journal from Lincoln Christian University, and don’t think I could have written it in a nice journal.
Really loving reading what you are writing. Always happy when Facebook tells me there’s a new feature at the bistro!
After a lengthy discussion with Grace about the ethics of plagiarism, I feel compelled to point out that the odd phrase in the penultimate paragraph is a reference to the line:
“A cup of ale without a wench, why, alas, ’tis like an egg without salt or a red herring without mustard,” from Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking Glasse, for London and Englande (1592) My source, of course, is Alan Bradley’s book A Red Herring without Mustard, the third book in his excellent Falvia De Luce Mystery Series.
I resisted the urge to write for a very long time, knowing that I had nothing new nor novel to add to an already huge collective body of “work.” Like you, what I desired was a conversation. Blog conversations can be, as you know, one-sided, and a bit like floating a bobber, waiting and waiting for a nibble.
Yay! I was hoping you would see that I was back, especially since this one was sort of addressed to you!
How are you?
All is well, trudging right along. I am grateful to you for tuning me into WordPress; such a supportive group of bloggers, some very funny, and many who like to converse.
I used to be quite a prolific writer; I wrote terrible fiction through high school and into college, and I kept a well-maintained blog for most of those years, too. I fell out of the habit while I was in Egypt: a consequence, perhaps, of the lack of computer/internet access, or the need to be present in the real world rather than the worlds I have always constructed in my mind. (Which is not to say I did not write in Egypt; I wrote pages upon pages in a Moleskine notebook of deeply personal thoughts which will likely go unshared until I depart from this mortal coil. But there was very little fiction and a lot of emotional trauma in those days.)
When I returned from Egypt, I found that many of my old internet friends had drifted away, whether due to my inactivity or their increased activity elsewhere. And with that loss (and my impending graduation and all the hustle and bustle that entails), I slowly stopped writing. There have been missives here and there over the last three years, but nothing on the scale of what I wrote then, when I had something to say nearly every day (and sometimes two or three or even four things!). I’ve missed it, and with the onset of graduate school, I wonder if I will rediscover my ability to write creatively, about worlds both real and imagined.