WHAT THIS STRUGGLE IS ABOUT
Thursday Nov. 20, 2014
Truths, distortions:
- If we are all trapped, we must survive.
- If we only think we are trapped, we must find the way out.
- If we know there is a way out and choose to stay, what does that make us?
Writing, if we examine great writing that ‘withstood tests of time writing’ , if we examine words, measure authors by their power to move people to action, to move massive change in society – or pivotal change in just one person – must squeeze something out of something or what’s the point of all that squeezing?
Is the writer supposed to try to connect with that reader?
Or is it readers’ job to struggle with it all to ‘get’ that writer?
One book I brought, The Orenda, I’ve been struggling to start.
Early pages prove its writer’s skill with image-painting, but seems jungle-path-like. Not sure I have the machete for it.
Maybe it’s my mood, maybe it’s this place. Maybe the writer is the cause.
Which gets me wondering – whether I connect with my audience, and how that happens.
Do I work at it, or do they?
And, should it be work?
Seems to me, most writers worth reading don’t write from the perspective of easy, or comfortable, or from some place of privilege or power.
They write from pain, from difficulty, from struggle – they write of oppression, pain and pleasure, but not so much about leisure.
What am I about?
What is my life about?
Is, as I maintain when asked, my writing about my life and my life about my writing or, do I just wish that it is?
Mark Kolke
column written/ published from the Maui Kamaole, Kihei, Maui, HI
morning walk: 22C(will be 29C by noon)/72F, perfect start – empty beach, stars, moon-sliver; then a few walkers, one dog, a few more walkers and daylight arrived
