Snippets * from * *

In junior high, I found it fitting to deliver an assignment on Guy Fawkes day in verse. In college, I turned my biweekly Humanities seminar papers into creative writing exercises: my assignment on the di Medici family gardens became an attempt to evoke the sensory experience of a walk in a labyrinth comprised of rosemary trellises.

*
*

A short story, I've found, is fashioned from many things I love: the strategic juxtapositions of poetry, the sedulousness of academic writing, the character exploration of playwriting and acting; and yet, beautifully, it is its own medium too. When I am the reader, a short story leaves me with a haunting uneasiness, an ineffable longing - some vestige - more immediately than does just about any other art form.

*
*

And I loved thinking about how to cleverly use words and arrangements of words to do these things. I began to read more, and for new reasons: to figure out how the author had constructed her work - When does she introduce an anecdote about her parents and why? Why does she use dialogue here but not there? - and to determine which choices, detailed or integral, made a piece powerful.

***

I recently re-read Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body. What I find to be most remarkable about the book is that each of its sentences is as deliberate and well-crafted as the line of a poem. The arrangement of passages is strategic, enhancing the reader’s emotive experience. The narrative flow yields to lonely meditations on the body in the middle chapters, enabling the reader to more perfectly empathize with the reflective and solitary narrator, estranged from her love interest at that point. The narrative voice is witty, searching, wise, alive, human.

*jem*