Author and Inspired Writer

I have a guilty little secret: I love So You Think You Can Dance.  I’ve been watching it for several years, but some of the routines in the past two seasons have left me badly shaken and, more often than not, in tears.  Although the lighthearted dances showcase the unbelievable talent of these young people, it is the power of dance to tell a story, particularly a sad story or a dark story, that has taken me by surprise.

Last night, this season’s front-runner, Kent, a fresh-faced farm boy from Wapakoneta, danced a jazz routine about a couple with a seemingly perfect marriage that in reality is falling to pieces.  Kent’s perpetual smile was missing  after the dance and he seemed to struggle to keep from crying.  He said he became so invested in the story that there came a moment when the steps didn’t matter – he just wanted to dance.

I understand.

There have been times when I have been so deep in a story, I had one thought only – to give it language, breath, birth, even though I knew there could be no happy ending, knew some would be offended by it and me.  In holy cards: dead women talking I had several opportunities to crack my funny-bone in some of the more absurd stories about the she-saints, but it was the dark stories…Valentina and Thea clinging to each other, trying to comfort each other as they burned alive, Agatha raging against St. Peter’s ridiculous offer to restore her breasts the day before she’s martyred, Ebba and her sisters choosing self-mutilation to avoid rape, Edith Stein wondering what the proper response should be to finding one’s self standing in a gas chamber beneath a hissing spigot…these stories moved me, transported me to another place where the whole world fell away and the only thing left was the story.  Consequences be damned.  Write!

Like all artists, writers are the sin-eaters of society, swallowing the darkness in our words and leaving our readers the pure absolution of emotional release.  And while there is a price to pay to accomplish this, we have no alternative but to pay it.

I am currently reading two books on the subject of writers and writing.  Joe Rosenblatt’s The Lunatic Muse, a book I believe should be on every Canadian Literature reading list, speaks to  how the poet is driven to kick open the doors of polite convention that they might admit and commune with their own demons and lay bare the dark side of the human condition, though it cost them their own sanity.  He says, “The lunatic muse can be perceived as a unique greenhouse for cultivating that dark side, with its habitues and other congruent twisted images.”

Madeleine L’Engle, in her book, A Circle of Quiet, acknowledges the inherent dangers of embarking on this mad vocation but says with a certain resignation, “We each have to say it, to say it our own way.  Not of our own will, but as it comes out through us.  Good or bad, great or little; that isn’t what human creation is about.  It is that we have to try; to put it down in pigment, or words, or musical notations, or we die.”

I went years without writing, and they were the darkest years of my life.  I agree – the honesty and self-confrontation writing demands can be dangerous to one’s mental health.  But not writing is death.

Mary Ann Mulhern and I are working on plans for a joint reading here in Amherstburg sometime around Halloween.  Mary Ann’s new book (her fourth!) is entitled Sleeping with Satan, Salem Witch-hunt 1692, and since Halloween is the time we traditionally think of “witches” as well as being the Eve of All Saints, we thought a reading at this time of year would serve both our books very well.  I’ll publish more details when our plans become finalized.