As I am employed to “teach writing,” no, let’s scratch that and try again, “teach artists to write,” no that’s crap too, perhaps “work with art students on their writing”, yeah that’s probably more to the point, I thought I would post this talk/essay by the great (and hideously under-acknowledged) writer Gary Lutz, published in The Believer magazine awhile back. I mean what a great opening: “I came to language only late and only peculiarly. I grew up in a household where the only books were the telephone book and some coloring books….” He goes on to get into the really dense and confounding heart of matter, in a variety of eloquent and insightful ways: “The sentence, with its narrow typographical confines, is a lonely place, the loneliest place for a writer, and the temptation for the writer to get out of one sentence as soon as possible and get going on the next sentence is entirely understandable. In fact, the conditions in just about any sentence soon enough become (shall we admit it?) claustrophobic, inhospitable, even hellish. But too often our habitual and hasty breaking away from one sentence to another results in sentences that remain undeveloped parcels of literary real estate, sentences that do not feel fully inhabitated and settled in by language.” Whew! If you are up for it, do please give this remarkable essay a go…
