Creation

I'm getting back to it again. Writing. But I've been considering what it means to "write" lately. Writing. Is it a mindset, a goal, a verb? Is it creation of new or recreation or re-creation of what has already been written? Is it sitting down with a new mind every time, or is it returning to that which can work and discover? Is it love, surprise, a chore?

When you are no longer in a writing program, when you no longer have thesis, thesis, thesis, dripping down your back, when your MFA diploma is leaned against the wall, still in its mailing envelope, on the top of your dresser, are you now, or still, or finally, a writer? I wondered that all along, whether my writing was real. Whether I was writing and meant to be writing or writing to do it and accomplish and accomplish and succeed. I knew this after would be the test. Would I write when I no longer had to? Would I write by choice? What would I create?

It has been difficult here. I haven't questioned my desire to write--only my ability and discipline. And here, in this whirlwind of a life, set here in the Piedmont of South Carolina, in the distant shadows of the Blue Ridge, in the deep starlessness of a city, amid two jobs and a fractured mind, writing has been a struggle. It has been that thing that scrawled itself on my desk, facing the double windows where I wanted it and needed it, under Snickers exposed belly and the heat of a computer set on Internet. Writing has shown up and hidden itself in notebooks all over--my writing is as scattered as my self. It wants to be writing but is sometimes journal. Journal sometimes becomes writing but more often becomes complaint, list, new deals with myself, with health and love. Writing sometimes becomes something--inspired--but then I walk away from it and start anew, unable to finish, to continue, to work toward a whole. All I have are pieces, and these old pieces--pieces from the thesis that are not what I want them to be--pieces that need put together, found and matched up, fractured and re-membered.

I have been here for nearly four months, and, at last, I am working on a whole. Revisioning a piece. I have merged two pieces and am trying to discover how they work together. They do, but how. Where. What do they mean?

This return to work, though I could see it coming, is a direct response to the fact that I have to read something in front of an entirely new audience one week from today. Spartanburg will hear my voice for the first time, these kind souls who publish and sell and love literature every day and asked me to be a part of it. And my voice, my rhythm, has changed slightly in the last six months since that thesis was turned in, since I really worked. What I read needs to reflect this newness, this fresh tinge of language.

Jedsen tells me I am no longer the nineteen year old he fell in love with. I have changed, he says. He no longer feels like he has to protect me, pity me in my smallness. He thinks I am a woman, a woman he loves. A woman whom he calls every day and talks about teaching, about writing, about loving, and missing, and tennis, and his parents who still make each other blush. I certainly feel different but not old enough. My brain feels stuck in fifteen, my eyes settled on a face of acne and fright. I have been trying to wear my hair differently lately, less straight, to feel less straight. To feel loose and open and alive and wise. Like a woman. Like one who knows. Like one who can.

Tell me, words, can I at least be free with you?