Dear Lxxxx, In a previous letter,
you also ask how can short stories address serious issues
without losing significance.
One of the ways would be in the themes that convey choice
and calling--
can we get some light?
I can't hardly see it.
Oh, there we go, all right--
choice and calling and suggested in one
of your letters because of our society's fundamental belief
in a free society.
The reason I say this is because some people choices have
been geared toward suppressing other people's
choices and voices.
Check Marxism.
So to choose a unique path in life or literature
is revolutionary in our mimetic society.
Each person, including you or I, has to be his own protagonist
and yes, I am echoing Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man.
Remember how the protagonist moved to other people's choices
before making his own.
Failure doesn't mean we are not capable narrators
of life's journey.
And failure resides, future triumph, yours and mine,
bottom line, we have been writing,
acting our stories all our lives.
And we conjure those stories through memory.
However, that cannot be enough for the writer.
Application develops imagination.
Lxxxx, the best advice I ever received from another writer
was fall in love with someone else's writing
before you fall in love with your own.
And since you mentioned Isabel Allende and her writing class,
let us turn to Flagellants by Carlene Hatcher Polite
to further explore this writing life.
This book can be viewed as a microcosm of the Black Arts
Movement in so much as Polite deconstructs male and female
assumed roles according to the unofficial doctrine
of the '60s.
Jimson is a virile Black man, a poet and idealist but fallible,
which comes out in his interactions with Ideal,
a woman who refuses to subscribe to the tenets
around the movement because she believes them to be oppressive.
Jimson's flaws reside in his inability
to see this woman's equal, oppressing her
while he battles the oppressor through revolutionary rhetoric.
Here I want to use the analogy of music for writing
and the discipline needed for both.
Ideal re-tells the story of Booker Shad,
an aspirant musician who thought he
was ready to play jazz until he sat in one night
with Charlie Bird Parker.
Bird tells him you could develop into a real beautiful cat,
but man, you got to study if you really want to play.
To become a pro you will have to step on out, man,
and take that step, which will not leave you hung up in a room
somewhere listen to yourself blow.
Now if I had to translate this in a way
to correspond to the writing journey,
it would begin with one can be a stunning writer
but one must understand the lineage.
Those who came before, know their work in your sleep,
and write every day.
Step past that which makes you comfortable.
Don't fall in love with yourself reciting words into a mirror.
See, there is really no difference
between life and language.
Miles and Coltrane knew how to intersect
both into neoteric ways of looking in
to get that feel hollowed out.
Sometimes with china white and tap water,
flame in the bottle top, and soaked up
with a cigarette filter.
Then a syringe, the solution redistributed
into the bloodstream bringing you forward
to the body, which is why Miles and Coltrane slow
brown the melody saturated sound into a new kind of blue.
Lxxxx, in order to begin, you have to reach an end point.
It is not a matter of being smart enough, as you say.
The bottom tip of the rope is where
you have to dangle perhaps your last bit of hope.
So you have no choice but to climb back
through the hole in which you fallen.
This is what I had to accomplish because I did not
want to let go.
I desire to live as I know you do.
If nothing else, for your son.
Solitary time would force you to know yourself, as I was forced.
There are no easy answers or solutions
to difficult problems, especially the ones
you face with this court system.
Lxxxx, today, the sun is echoing last summer's heat, presenting
a future soon to come.
A cluster of sparrows outside my window sill sing of spring.
The trees are decorated green.
Although the sky hints at blue, it is more gray, reminding us
that this world is not a monotone drone.
There has been a silence in your life, which is really
the universe way of saying I am preparing you
for the noise you will make.
Linger in the silence and use that
to be baptized into the living.