A note on my creative process

Reading and writing has always been a way to get closer to life, my own and others. For as long as I can remember, I have desired this ability to reshape and reclaim a story.

I write about time and I write to resist time. Joseph Brodsky said that the only true subjects are time and language. Sometimes the resistance in writing might be to language itself—to a narrative—to the limits of a self as a fixed thing. A narrative, like a self, is never fixed. I write to resist the silences or the erasures that grow up around a self- a self in a family, in a country, in a body.

Time—yes, what is this desire to write, to put pen to paper, to put words in certain order, to make various meaning, to create an identity or identities out of fragments—a play for, if not immortality, than other totalities—what do I want to do but write against the tug of mortality—aging, disease, death.

When I began writing in notebooks, I did not have a voice or did not think I had a voice with any validity, so I learned to be a reader. That was the way I made meaning of my experience.

I still read and write because I want to be in conversation with other writers and artists, both living and dead. My artistic practice is not limited to the hours or minutes I sit writing. I believe that being an artist is a way of being in the world, a matter of seeking inspiration wherever one might find it.

I know that my writing, my coming to be a writer, has been driven by the loss of my mother, her early death. I’ve been visited by my mother in dreams, and I often think that if my mother hadn’t died when I was nine years old, I’d be an entirely different person. Who would I be? How much of our personality is shaped early on, before we are aware of it, by the loss and trauma we can’t process? If I spent a number of years denying this influence, I’d spend as much time pursuing it in my writing.

In trying to heal the wound that never heals lies the strangeness in an artist’s work.

As I write these words of Lorca, I think, too, of David Foster Wallace, who wrote an essay about Kafka, in which he illuminated the key to Kafka’s humor:

That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. . . you can tell them that maybe it’s good they don’t “get” Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his art as a kind of door. To envision us readers coming up and pounding on this door, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it, we don’t know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and pushing and kicking, etc. That, finally, the door opens … and it opens outward: we’ve been inside what we wanted all along.

This is something that is central to the writers I adore, from Marguerite Duras to Jamaica Kincaid. Writers who seem to be working out a self on the page, who stand over the void: writers that Cixous describes as “the dying-clairvoyant kind.”