Wednesday, April 22, 2020

On letters and becoming a writer

"The mindset of the writer I can trace back to the mindset of wanting to control the narrative of my life, which never otherwise felt like something I could control. The fears I had, the things I wanted but couldn't get, I discovered and expressed through writing letters to pen pals. In those days you bought a teen magazine, and it had a list of addresses for young people living all around the world. At one point there were whole magazines devoted to pen pal addresses....There was no security about it - you just wrote to them, and they wrote back. It was like discovering something impossibly brilliant and wonderful, something delightful that was available at no cost - always available. I still have at least one pen pal from those days of my preteen years that I am in touch with.
"But what fascinated me was that...your role was to explain your world to the person you were sending the letter to at a time when they did not have access to other parts of the world. There was no internet. I was living in Jamaica. If something happened for news to go around the world, it would have to be monumental; it wouldn't be about everyday life. If you went to an encyclopedia, it would be twenty years out of date. So, in a sense, I became not just an authority on my life, but an authority on the culture of the country in which I lived - its landscape, climate, day-to-day rhythms, and even its language. If I had a pen pal, they'd be the authority on their space. We'd be the conduit for knowing our worlds. I got a thrill both from receiving those letters and for the thought that what I was saying was being consumed and was shaping their understanding of the world I knew intimately.

"...What I was doing was telling my life from my perspective, my point of view, which, as it happened, was my point of power. I was acutely aware that if something happened to me, if I got beat up in a fight, that my telling could be my revenge, that I could control that narrative. Even if the fact was that I lost that fight, in the retelling of it and the choice of what I could tell, I was very aware of constructing and controlling the narrative, and that I was, whether through the use of humor or exclusion or of irony, the hero in the telling. You can imagine that, if you're doing this regularly, to multiple people, that as incidents happen to you, you're thinking, "I can't wait to write about this." And the difference between a letter and a journal is that there is an audience, and someone is going to write back and say, 'I didn't understand this,' or, 'This made me laugh,' and I think that's the moment when the sensation of writing and the command, the control, the shaping, the texturing of writing began appealing to me, and drew me in.
"And if I were to be honest, and here I am being very honest, that impulse has not changed - it has merely grown. What I mean to say is that the closest thing that I can think of to a prototype for my fascination with being a writer was in my experience as a writer of letters to pen pals in my teen years. Any genuine study of writers of the past, and especially of the 19th and 20th century, will make this point clear. Most writers practiced their craft in letters. At the very least, their first experience of 'publication' would have been in letters. It is a shaping thing."

- Kwame Dawes
in interview in Rattle #65
As someone who also spent some of my formative years writing to friends I'd never met, I loved his explanation of what that process can bring, and it resonated profoundly.

5 comments:

  1. I just happened across this article a few moments before reading this entry and thought you might enjoy it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/17/t-magazine/literary-letter-collections.html

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    1. Oh, that looks intriguing. Thanks for mentioning it.

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  2. Replies
    1. <3 I think I sent this edition of Rattle to you, actually.

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  3. You did! It's in my present to-read pile <3

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