Reading & Writing for Humans by Patresa Hartman
I love a heroine with spinach in her teeth and a bunch of weird, crummy crap in her closet. I love a villain who sleeps in footy pajamas and loves his mother. I love a full and juicy character who is every bit as misunderstood as I imagine myself to be. And I love to flip the coin and feel as if only I have the wherewithal to get it.
I am a cheap and self-absorbed reader: I want to read my own humanity in characters. I will follow any plot across any landscape as long as the beings who people it agree to mirror me. The concept is simple—no protagonist or antagonist may be any more kind or nasty than I am at my best or worst.
I am a cheap and self-absorbed writer: I want readers to come open and honest, ready to accept every ugly nuance as their own and commiserate. I want them to root for my achievement as if it were their own.
My favorite literary power is self-exploration. My reactions to characters and their sticky situations become a spell-out of how I’ve prioritized my world. The things that fall out of me when I open a blank document to write are surprising (sometimes alarming) discoveries of the oddities I’ve collected and stored in the underneath of my consciousness.
In this spirit, the stories we share and the voices we use to share them become ambassadors for unity. In my opinion, an author cannot write what she has not herself felt or observed; and so when she says that thing, reveals that idiosyncrasy, labels that unnamed muddle—and I feel it, too—I know I am not solitary. We are never as obscure as we think we are, and I suppose there’s some comfort in that.
And so I want to see myself in the stories I read, expose my own contradictions in the stories I write because I want to connect. Not one of us is pure. We are products of evolving circumstance and with every experience, grow layers like trees build rings. These human representatives must be complex and clumsy pie charts, pieces shifting and resizing, taking pushing-shoving turns as compassionate do-gooding, vindictive drama queening, bold-meek self-effacing dominatrix librarians.
Patresa Hartman is Prose Editor for Rose & Thorn Journal.
I knew this was you before I saw it was you who wrote this - you have such a unique and strong voice, Patresa - I loved this post.
Reply to this
thanks, kat!
Reply to this
thank you for this entry. it says--in language that i could not--why i write poetry. for me, it's a form of ministry: to help someone know she/he is not alone in an ucomfortable feeling, to help someone understand another person, to help us be one.
Reply to this
thank you, marilyn! i love the idea of poetry as ministry. beautiful.
Reply to this
I want the space! How much does it cost?
Reply to this