Reach through the threshhold: This moment is special, y'all
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Ink it on yr back.
This stunning piece was designed and tattooed by
Claudia De Sabe at Frith St. tattoos. She's currently working at Jolie Rouge.
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Famous folks have long talked about labors of love, how writing is, for them, painful. It's taken me a long time to actually understand this. In my first creative writing workshop, I read interviews w/ Vonnegut & William Styron: each talked about how writing physically pained them.
I'd never considered that option before. It was news to me. Young and troubled, it was the only place I could exist in fantasy - up, up, & away. I'd lose my breath: helium and altitude and something else. Oh, I could scale mountains in those books.
Remember, growing up, the only room in the house that had a lock was the bathroom. Thus, when I needed to be alone, I'd throw myself into that sauna-like shell - the walls so thin they shook when my father coughed - and write or read.
BUT. I understand now. I get it. The more I read, the more I understood about the different ways words come together: the effect of white space, cadence, word choice, dialect, syntax, and the like. I stocked my lil' poet's toolbox to the brim - the lid won't shut and my mouth won't shut up about this new tool or this new blueprint.
Now, there seems to be more at stake. Once you put names to ideas and take the time to read and read, the work shifts. I want to articulate what's going on: the point of a sentence perfectly sharpened so readers understand on many levels. Writing becomes more intense, more than scribbling and stories.
Instead, it's diagnosis and treatment or the building of something brick by brick. Pieces do not exist in a vacuum. I feel responsible to understand these intersecting effects, to consider the impact a word or punctuation mark will have on the overall effect of a piece.
It's labor. Maybe it's not the back-breaking work in the fields or the calloused work of my mother, but it can be painful as it is blissful. I get it now: labor of love.
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Pantone tins!
viaviavia
*** "The Rules of Chess"
There are eight pawns, like a city. They are babies cast down the river. The knights disappear into an L-shaped darkness, two fiery preachers. Each bishop drives drunk in sideways rain. Rooks turn their collars up, muffle doubtful sighs. The one king resurrects slowly. The queen plays dead, is a stubborn ghost.
-- Lindsay Daigle
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