Writing
“Human beings cannot always, or even optimally, address the big, the dark, the difficult, the shameful, the guilty, the criminal, the crazy head-on. We have to go sideways, downwards, away from without running away. We use a proxy or an avatar. And that's what stories let happen.” (Winterson, 2017, p.33)
As Ahmed attests, words help us rewrite our life into something more empowered, more emboldened, less passive, less undermined, less shit. “a life can be rewritten; how we can rewrite a life, letter by letter.” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 256)
“Forgive me quickly / forget me quickly. I know that I must forget you. The sea is somewhere anything can happen. You know when two seas come together there is deep pain and pleasure at the border. Tremor of conjoined hopes. Agony of separation after mixing. Let it flow. I sat down. Wrote: GUILT 90% SHAME 90% RAGE 90% FEAR 90% LOVE – “ (Berry, 2017, p.17)
“Women need to become literary "criminals," break the literary laws and reinvent their own, because the established laws prevent women from presenting the reality of their lives.”
― Kathy Acker
My writing is tool of sense making, and self-making. It is where I find and refine my voice. I write as a white cis queer woman from a low income, precarious, single mother family. I write about lived experience. Specifically intersectional queer lived experiences. I write from an intersectional, trans inclusive feminist viewpoint. I’m committed to surfacing and opening up conversations about class, race, gender, sexuality, health, care, aging and poverty. I think my writing is therapy and escape for me. It’s where I get to name and narrate experiences often too heavy to articulate with my spoken voice. It’s where I rage, narrate the occasional complex revenge fantasy, and make myself laugh; amongst other things. It’s where I simply observve what comes up from my writing hand and word-iamge psyche. Perhaps writing in silence and the safety of my privacy gives me some kind of space to speak the unspeakable.
I find myself pendulous, outstretched, naked (Berger, naked is yourself, nude is to be aware of an external gaze upon one’s own naked body). Chthonic rites, or Rites for the Broken Hearted. The deep place, is raw and sticky. It smells of menstrual blood, pleasure and pain, tears, and hard, hard work. It smells of centuries of colonialism, heteronormativity, patriarchy, dissent, and adamantine, kick- back fighting. It smells of unbridled exhaustion.
I write as an appetite. I am hungry for writing. I hunger for the act of ascribing thought to word, but also for the act of reading other people’s intimate and carefully crafted thought processes. I ask myself over, why write this out? Why put feeling to thought? Thought to word? Word to page? I do so, to re-write and reform my experience. To replace an experience that was given to me by force and circumstance. To pour new content into my body-psyche story world.
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Writing is a technology. To write requires access to education, but once word forms can be crawled on the back of anything with a stub of a pencil; writing is an immediate form of expression and communication. Writing is not open to all, because access to education and other forms of capital is not equally available. But, once words can be written; stories can be told. These words, my words, a tool for nuanced thought, reflection, analysis, reassembling self. Story-crafting as a form of sense making. Writing as a method of summoning and letting go. Writing as a process of getting out of my head. Of occupying |
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positions to the words, I think first, the words I think easily. Writing is a
process that brings me space, solace, clarity, release and agency. |
The worlds I often write into, are an act of refusal and cultivation of an alternative reality. They are worlds that document and name the intricacies of my sensations. They are words that quite literally, help me make sense of my phenomenological, affective, and embodied states that accompany my experience of snapping, sinking, and surfacing. The worlds I write into are also spaces for me to acquire new knowledge, play with it in my hand-mind, look at ideas from different perspectives, dismantle them, take them apart and finally, if possible, put them to use in the complex and difficult conditions of everyday life. I’m increasingly interested in the practice of co-writing, of writing with others in a plural mash up of voices and styles. I’m also committed to lateral citation - referencing friends, lovers, more-than humans, as well as more conventional texts from the academy.
A selection of writing can be found below:
Medusa is Laughing and I am Laughing With Her (2021 - 23)
In Praise of Disquiet (2024)
Anlage (2023)