“When I feel like my identity as a writer is threatened by my flaws, failures, and limitations of health, I can become overwhelmed by fear so profound, I
cannot face it alone. I recently wrote a journal entry describing what it feels like to read a book and fall in love with it. I focused on a time in my life when I was fully awake to my love for books but ignorant of what it meant to produce them. I recalled how it felt in my body to read a book I was in love with. Sometimes I am so totally stuck I cannot write a single word of my own, not even to describe another’s work, so I have taken to picking up a book from my past that I have been hungering to reread and typing it out word for word, at a speed slow enough to feel the words relating to each other and hear new things in their music that I had not heard before. I will retype another’s book until I feel love and not despair. In doing these things, I feel fiercely for others’ work what I cannot always feel for my own, and this is ultimately the truest path I know of that leads back to my own work. At its most difficult, being stuck is an experience I cannot dissolve through gestures of production or consumption. Instead, I try to undergo a most beautiful and mundane adaptation, from someone who craves to be a writer to someone who knows she is a reader.”
—Lo Kwa Mei-en, author of The Bees Make Money in the Lion (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2016)
Photo credit: Elia Burkhart