Writing: A Love Letter of Sorts

Never fall in love with someone because of the way they write. People are more honest when they write, even if they are not telling the truth their words are manifestations of something veracious with in them. That much authenticity is intoxicating, enrapturing, electrifying, misleading. People do show themselves with their word choice and their characters but the private self that writes, even when you choose to send those words out into the world, is not who appears when the computer shuts off, the pen rests, the typewriter’s keys stop singing. A person will reveal a lot about themselves by the way that they write, their intelligence and humor, their patience and their love. You can’t help but know someone better through their words.

I’ve been thinking about writing and writers this week and even though I know enough not to date them I still want to be surrounded by them. I’ve been thinking about dedication to craft mostly because I joined a new writers group. I looked around DC at a couple of different groups and found one in which I was significantly dragging up the average age and one in which I was dragging it down. In both of these I was not impressed with either the talent of the writers nor the quality of the feedback they gave. My writing group back in the Bay Area set a very high bar for quality of both writing, critique and, most importantly, a sense of community.

One of the things I like most about writing groups is that it satisfies my shameless love of compliments. There is nothing better than having someone tell you are brilliant on an otherwise average Wednesday evening or that your characters really touched their heart, crystallized an allusive thought or made them laugh. I like that the time I spend alone writing can have a positive impact on someone. But what really makes these compliments carry weight (besides the fact that I wish them to be true) is the people who give them. The members of my group back in the Bay and my new group (neither young nor old, but just right) are by and large brilliant but quiet artists who take the ordinary building blocks of our world, language, faces, feelings and landscapes, available to all of us, and construct works of great beauty.

I crave this type of group because they never fail to surprise or inspire me. Some of these writers have been published and some of them will be and should be published in the future. But there are no guarantees that any of what we write will see the light of day or even the dusty back shelf of a book store. The reason that we write is that we love it. That there are certain things that are worth saying and worth exploring even if no one ever knows that this mountain has already been climbed, this terrain has been tread upon before. I think I can safely say that I am in love with the process, the rocks that get in between my toes, the mud that gets all over my clothes, the sweat rolling down the back of my neck from the exertion of it all.

Modern Poetry for the Old Soul

 “The Russian Greatcoat” by Theodore Deppe

While my children swim off the breakwater,

while my wife sleeps beside me in the sun,

I recall how you once said you knew

a sure way to paradise or hell.

Years ago, you stood on the Covington bridge,

demanded I throw my coat into the Ohio-

my five dollar “Russian greatcoat,”

my “Dostoevsky coat,” with no explanations,

simply because you asked.

 

From the height, the man-sized coat fell

in slow motion, floated briefly,

one sinking arm bent at the elbow.

At first I evade the question when my wife asks,

as if just thinking of you were a act of betrayal.

The cigarette I shared with you above the river,

our entrance into the city, your thin black coat

around both our shoulders.  Sometimes I can go

weeks without remembering.