Author, poet, novelist, and writing teacher, David Mura states: “Identifying what compels you to write, reveals the reason we are driven to write each or our works.”
To complicate things, I find that not only is the reason that I write multi-faceted, it also evolves and shifts at various intervals in my life.
I initially began to write because I wanted to read stories of characters with whom I could identify with by culture and race.
On a deeper level, I wanted to read about characters who shared not only my race and culture as an African American woman of the American South, but of a middle class background, who in many ways could appear quite Waspish, but was not.
Now fifteen years, and an additional child, later–I am the mother of three–I find myself writing to show the nature of married love–love and romance between wives and husbands.
And yes my characters are primarily peoples of color, African American, but what has also emerged is the importance I feel towards making a place for and showing men, married men, husbands, who thought imperfect, are vulnerable to their fears of life common to all humans, and the emotions that accompany our fears.
Though married, the women in my stories and novels, are not so much searching for love, rather they are struggling, fighting, yearning for the ability to open and receive the love that stands before them.
From romantic perspective I explore the forbidden love.
The taboo nature of love about which I write is not that which occurs outside of marriage. It occurs within marriage. It is the romance and love that occurs between wife and husband.
American culture tells us that love and romance between two married individuals does not and cannot exist. It also insinuates that any passion, which lives within this type of marriage will destroy, rather than strengthen the wife and husband of that union.
What compels us to write shifts and changes as the world around us evolves and devolves.
The revolution takes place in us. This is the radical nature of creating narrative, the making up of a story, about which Toni Morrison speaks that creates and recreates us in the moment we are writing.
A wife of 28 years, my marriage has undergone enormous changes. I find myself now a minority among women and men who for whatever reason are not married. And for those who are, a great many are not entirely happy.
My husband is my best friend. It has not always been easy.
Relationship is about seeing the other then those parts of us that reside in the other, the dimensions of her or him with which we identify and relate, hence the bridge of connection, what binds us to them, and vice versus.
If we are truly lucky we will reach a point wherein we see ourselves, or perhaps a reflection of us held in their eyes, looking back at us.
The question we must then answer is do we like what we see?
The answer that we give either shatters illusions and reveals mountains of truth that draw us nearer to them and our essential self, or leaves us wondering what we must do next to enhance the experience, become that, or a person we rush to embrace.
The road to reaching that is long and tedious. So often we want to close our eyes.
Sadly most of us in America, at least never reach the point of seeing our face in the eyes of another.
For reasons untold and too numerous to count we fear slowing down long enough to simply look up to see if anyone is present, and cares.
Writing is a thoroughly personal and intense process. For me, unless it is this way, then it is useless to write 🙂
Writing reaches into the depths of our soul. In a culture where we are increasingly feeling depersonalized to find a it is important and necessary that we find activities that allow us to connect with aspects of our life, living and personality that endow our lives with meaning.