My writing process is a
quilt, a series of wet leaves pasted together, scrap metal that has been welded
together and polished smooth.
It starts with a fragment; an
image, a scene, or a line.
“As the jazz man played.”
Sometimes questions rise up,
erupting like bubbles from a boiling pot.
Who is he? Who’s listening?
And bit by bit the story grows.
Other times the piece stands
alone, a boy walking down an old street, illuminated by lamp posts. Simple. So
I tuck it away, for safe keeping.
And then, a day, or a year
later, another image comes, someone looking down from a lamp post, crouched on
it like a spider. And I realize they belong together, so together they go.
Like eggs in a basket, I
harvest them, alone or as many as I can, until I can see what goes between,
connect the dots.
But my favorites are born of
need. I need a place where the lights are dim, the music is slow but happy, but
I don’t know of such a place, so I make it.
I need to talk to someone not
easily offended, someone who doesn’t want to fix you or your problems,
he just wants you to let it
all go. Let it all fade away.
So I write, to go there, to
meet them. (I know they’re waiting for me.)
