"I’m not writing to be included in the canon. I’m writing to save something precious. I’m writing to get my pencil dimensionally around my little idea and work it out. Waiting for somebody to invite me to belong to something or be included in something was never my idea of being a part of this thing amazing journey called life. I just want to continue being a creative thinker and doer. I want to keep saving things and making history more inclusive by way of my particular alphabets and word arrangements."

--Nikky Fenny

Reblogged from Sister Outsider

On writing:

Reblogged from Indie. Radiant.

I love writing academically.

People always roll their eyes at me when I say that, but it's the truth. I get EXCITED when I have a new project to research. I love the process of scouring the internet and libraries for the background information I need. I love wearing out all my highlighters, scribbling lots of notes in the margins, and marking the important things according to a star-rating system that is far from systemic. I love introductions, setting you up to play a specific part in this narrative I have created--the part of the believer. I love drawing you in and walking you through my argument step by step, with you trailing me faithfully, drinking in my every word and falling farther and farther into belief. I love MS Word's Readability Statistics, switching up sentence structure, thinking of fancier words when the mood strikes, and treating every sentence--no, every phrase--like a miniature work of art. You know those pictures that are made from lots and lots of smaller pictures, but as long as you're standing at a reasonable distance you can't tell anything but the overall picture? That's sort of how I treat writing a paper--I spend lots of time crafting every little part, but in the end I want you to miss the trees for the forest (though I will be very pleased if you stop to comment on particularly beautiful trees). I don't want to sound like a future lonely old academic when I say this, but I find the whole process of writing a paper to be incredibly comforting. It is predictable and familiar and somehow feels...safe. It feels a little like home. Perhaps it's just the safety of knowing it's something I do well.

She feels the same way I do, it seems:

"Most times when people talk about losing yourself, it has a negative connotation: the overworked girlfriend who lives at her job, the head over heels friend whose made her man her life. I consider those kinds of loss to be falling. To dwell in a state of calm in what you love, so much so that you disappear and there is only passion, that- is losing yourself. And after a week of not opening the file, my professor forced me to click on the file and I dwelled there. Any hesitation I had about the future was gone when I was writing. What I was putting together stopped being a paper or a grade, it became a refuge. And whenever I was in that place, I was putting together something that felt like it was more than my problems, insecurities and doubts." -- Leslie Pitterson, Clutch Magazine

2nd 30 Day Letter Challenge: Day 29--Letter to a Mythical Creature

Dear Kendra,

[Readers, before you go scouring the interwebz on a quest to find this Kendra of which I speak, relax. She doesn't exist on the internet. She exists only in the minds of me, S, and our other friend whom neither of us really speaks to anymore, M*****. She was a character in a book S and I spent most of 8th grade coming up with the storyline for.] 

You were just a baby. The daughter of a mermaid and a sorcerer, you had powers the likes of which your world had never seen. A blank slate, you weren't inherently good or evil; you would end the battle once and for all, but whose side you were on depended on how you were raised. And so, under the cover of night, evil stole you from good's protected castle and whisked you away to a fortress dug deep inside a mountain in a long-forgotten range. A team of students was assembled to rescue you. They never made it. 
I loved you so much. You and everything you stood for. Looking back now at how obsessed we were with you, your protectors/defenders, and the forces of evil who held you captive, I have to laugh. But it was all so real then. Your entire world was the greatest figment my imagination will ever know. Your parents' parents, we were the masterminds behind both the plot to steal you and the quest to get you back. We made every minor success and major pitfall along the way. The unexpected detours that threatened to be your would-be saviors' undoing were our doing. We spent hours on the phone and in the library with this every day, planning the most minute of details. Children in our world, we were the ultimate masters in yours. If the guy who wrote Eragon could do it when he was a young teenager, why couldn't we? [Oh how I miss the days when 'Why not?' was reason enough to do something. Though I suppose there's no reason it can't still be.]
Your story never ended though. Sometime around the beginning of high school I simply lost interest. I looked at the unfinished 68 page outline [yes we were that serious] and couldn't believe how naive we were. I had this cold hard world moment where I didn't think anyone else would ever take us or our story seriously and I gave up on you. And I hated myself for it, so I tried to make up some ridiculous story about how writing the outline was boring me and I wanted to spend some time writing actual chapters, but no matter how hard I tried to dedicate myself, I couldn't give you the attention and love and respect you deserved. I just wasn't into it anymore. Maybe it stemmed from not being as close to S once I wasn't seeing him every day, maybe my life just got in the way, maybe I just grew up...I told him I didn't like what I was writing and that I needed to pick up some better writing skills before I could keep going. That I was going to develop them in the Creative Writing class I was going to take sophomore year and then I would start back up again. I took the class...but I never started up again.
I lost all interest in fantasy [at least, the magic and dragons and quests kind of fantasy] at the same time that I gave up on you. I couldn't bring myself to have anything to do with the genre. I don't know which loss of feeling came first. It was so bad that I could barely even finish the last Harry Potter book--I had to know what happened, but I wanted nothing to do with wands and wizardry anymore. I couldn't. I don't know why, but I just couldn't. I couldn't take it seriously anymore.
I'm sorry. I wish I had done better by you. And now you're gone, extant only in our memories, because my mom threw away the computer everything that related to you was stored on without asking me if there was anything I needed on it. I just came back from Princeton one break and it was gone. You were gone. So I'm sorry I couldn't do right by you. And S, I'm sorry I couldn't tell you the truth. I couldn't explain it then, and I still can't. Something in me disappeared and took you with it, Kendra. That's all I can say.

Maya 

“Writing is a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia.” --E. L. Doctorow

^Love