Writing: Doing it Your Way

When in prison I decided to keep on with the writing I had started in pretrial detention. Having embarrassed myself publicly in a way I thought would be unendurable but which I did have to endure, I decided regardless of my lack of talent, regardless of having no chance at publication, I would write what I wanted as I wanted. Disgrace begat freedom.

Reading Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore on Writing on Your Own Terms since my release was a morale booster.

When we write on our own terms, with all the specificity, nuance, complication, messiness, contradiction, emotion, confusion, weirdness, devastation, wildness and intimacy, when we write against the demand for closure or explication, we write against the canonical imperative, and instead write toward the people who might actually appreciate our work on its own terms. I mean we write toward our selves. We also write toward change. A canon is a cannon is a canon. Wait, don’t shoot me.

Over and over again we are told that in order to make our work accessible, we have to speak to an imagined center where the terms are still basically straight, white, male, and Christian. When we write on our own terms, and by this I mean when we reject the gatekeepers who tell us we must diminish our work in order for it to matter, we may be kept out of the centers of power and attention, this is for sure. And yet, if writing is what keeps us alive—and I mean this literally—if writing is what allows us to dream, to engage with the world, to say everything that it feels like we cannot say, everything that makes us feel like we might die if we say it, and yet we say it, so we can go on living—if this is what writing means, then we need to write on our own terms, don’t we?

Or put another way:

Sch 4/26/22