Remember the Mundayzzz Bear?

This is something my professor wrote about some journal entries that I have written in my English 354 class. I think this may be the best compliment I have ever received.

In my Stories and the Human Experience class I’m teaching we’re studying James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” today. What reading across your journal entries so far made me think of is a scene in the story where the heroin-addicted brother of the straight-laced narrator hears a woman sing and compares it to shooting up. He says,

“When she was singing before, her voice reminded me for a minute of what heroin feels like sometimes when it’s in your veins. It makes you feel warm and cool at the same time. And distant. And sure. It makes you feel- in control. Sometimes you have to have that feeling.”

You posit in your last installment that writers don’t necessarily write to live, but instead life writes them. This powerful idea has me thinking that in most of the good writers I’ve been experienced with, both things are simultaneously true. Not only are writers, as you claim, aware enough to makes sense of the world while it happens, but getting these ideas down on the page functions for them like music functions for Sonny in the quote above.

The sense I get from reading your writing so far in this course makes me believe that the same is true for you. The sense-making catharsis of the Falls City collection and the way you’ve pushed your thoughts so far in the first project lead me to believe that in some way, you’re also doing both- writing to live and letting life write you at the same time. While the emotional energy this taxes a person with is a great sacrifice, my sense is that for some people (namely you and me in this case) we don’t have much of a choice.

:-)