writing unblocked, in two steps.

As of late, I’ve wrestled a great deal with my writing. Of course I continue to do it everyday, but the focus, the joy, the diligence, is not as consistent as I'd like it to be. I’m blaming this block on self censorship due to the fear of failure. As a response to my block, or apprehension more aptly, I decided to rummage through my library, but after careful perusing, I could only find faces I've already read, the faces I've memorized and recited too readily before. So, naturally, I hopped in the Jetta and cruised route 4 to b&n for a fresh jolt. Welcome my three new additions:  Narrative of Sojourner Truth, The Heart of a Woman,  and  remembered rapture.  I’ve decided that step one in unblocking the writing must include burying my face into the words of female writers before me. This will not only give me something I've been craving, but reveal a necessary network, a family.

Bell hooks’s book of essays, remembered rapture, offers frightening, but bolstering familiarity and a touchstone that not only validates my apprehension, but also elucidates my sentiments by articulating her own so cleanly.  Her words tickle me, giving me the same giddiness that started me writing years ago, the same jollity that threw me to the floor in my room as a little girl, stomach pressed to the carpet, urging me to tell my journal all of my crazy ideas, even if no one cared to read them.

Refusing to let this block own me, I’ve found release in hooks’s prose.  In her first essay, “writing from the darkness,” she opens with an anecdote from childhood. Recounting the words her granddaddy shoed upon her as she made her way to the outhouse before bedtime, passing through the darkness, she writes,  “‘there is light in the darkness, you just have to find it’” (3).  His advice resonates. The oxymoronic phraseology reminds me again that the act of writing is fluid, shape shifting inside and outside bounds of what we think we know. It floats, almost weightlessly between the realms of imagination and critique. My own process is swimming fervently against the current, pulling away from the critic, so I can get something down on the paper.

           

Perhaps the second step in unclogging my block is an attention to space. Maybe if I spruce up the place, I thought to myself, I can get the ideas flowing, clear the air and make room for creative energy. Hundreds of dollars and two trips to Ikea later, I’ve a new space. Together, my imaginative and critical self carved a space where the three of us can co-exist. Perhaps, the critic can lounge in the new, cubed bookcase, while the imagination explores the autumnal afternoon sunlight, and I can write. Seems to have done the trick, at least for now.

With a little advice from the experts and a rejuvenation of space, I’ve words to paper.

And, I am happy.