A Dirty Dozen Interview with me at OpenBook Ontario along with a roundup of above/ground authors and Stride Magazine reviews reviews Paige Ackerson-Kiely and rob mclennan.
From the 12 or 20 interview series: “Everybody’s a writer and something else[…] If we were spiders we’d spin webs. As humans, we spin language”. ~ D.A. Powell
We spin language. Some only spin language, well, apart from feeding and dressing and taking shelter and hopefully getting some loving in.
This idea that writers have some special relationship to communication seems weak to me but it seems rare to hear a writer say. Some people are gifted. Some work hard and eclipse the gifted and some just hobby along never really leaping and don’t care for leaping. That you must be in an upward spiral, just like the economy, human nature and the nation, and other constructed ideas seems a fiction too.
Brian ponders perfect practice makes perfect,
Not convinced that experience along makes no difference? Just look at the number of people with 25 years of experience in (name your chosen field), who haven’t grown in any significant way, and who are being eclipsed by newcomers. Not all newcomers, but it seems that the percentage of newcomers producing great work (say, 10%) is about the same as the number of people with 25 years experience producing great work.
People do what they must as long as they must. What’s coping strategy, what’s art, what’s purpose?
Becoming proficient at language, becoming articulate on retelling someone’s perceptions, manipulating a subset of data coming our way to the degree that serves ourselves and someone else.
The how and the why are muddy. Even the what can be hard to make out sometime. Yet all of it is interesting for the mind that looks for it.