Five Writers on One Reason They Write …

Like a good workout, there are perks to writing, but like a good workout, it’s exhausting once you really get into it. I’m not the first writer to occasionally ponder why I’m even doing this. George Orwell once likened writing to a curse, an addiction he tried to fight against. One of the reasons I keep at it came up in Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new book. Lorri is a former Haligonian Poet Laureate. Her new book, entitled, Threading Light: Reflections on Loss and Poetry, contained a quote I thought I’d bounce off a handful of writers.

In Lorri Neilsen Glenn’s new book, Threading Light, she says, ‘Language is a hinge that connects us to the flesh of our experience.’ Much of my own writing is a conversation with myself, on a topic I’ve steeped in the guise of a story. At the end of the day, what is it that compels you to write? What percentage of the urge is an attempt to better understand the world?”

Kathleen Winter (Annabel, BoYs)

“There’s an underground stream running through my body, underneath the contact my body makes with life and the earth, and that underground stream contains inchoate material from two sources, like estuary waters: inchoate material or silt from within myself, my inner life, and inchoate material from the world that appears to be outside myself. These two kinds of silt or stardust swish around together and form incoherent messages which grow more and more insistent. What are they saying? What do they mean? Before they ignite and blow me to pieces, I try to catch them and join them in a delicate line which, if I’m lucky, become words, become some sort of message, become my writing …”

Chris Benjamin (Drive-by Saviours, Eco-Innovators)

“There is a push and a pull factor at work. The push is a love for reading and stories that is either innate or developed at a very young age in me. I wrote my first story when I was six. It was about a dinosaur, and it was essentially a ripoff of Danny and the Dinosaur, a children’s book about a dinosaur and boy who paint the town red together. Within a few years I was more creative but still aping, writing stories about the age-old person-monster war. I loved a good yarn, and was equally adept at telling my friends tall tales on the playground. And in high school I discovered poetry and realized how you could play with form and the words themselves, twist them and make them mean different things than even you intended, bring them alive. When I sit down with a pen and blank paper the thrill is the same, the excitement that there is something in my head and heart and eventually something will be on the page, possibly similar but only writing it down will tell. It’s fun.

The push factor is that stories are everything. They are what we think and feel, and how we understand the world. They are our passions and beliefs. We think ourselves rational but that’s just a story – we’re making 99 percent of our decisions based on stories we’ve learned and thus values we’ve internalized, memories we have of what felt right. If I’m not part of that conversation, who is? Whoever they are they’re really fucking things up. My stories are my way to study that question and understand not only the way things are, but how they got this way, and how we fix them. And it’s also my wee little attempt steer this vessel away from the monsters. ”

Russell Wangersky (The Hour of Bad Decisions, Burning Down the House, The Glass Harmonica)

“I don’t know that I write to try and better understand the world – I think it’s more that I’m trying to explain. Explain what I see, explain why I behave the way I do, explain myself – and I think I need to do it because I’m remarkably unable to explain myself in spoken words, especially to the people I care about. If language is a hinge, it’s a hinge on a door that I otherwise keep closed, simply because I find it really hard to let people open it and look inside at me in any sort of real time.”

Leslie Vryenhoek (Scrabble Lessons, Gulf)

“Not so much an attempt to understand the world–more an attempt to understand what the hell it is I really believe. That’s close to 90% of the impulse, anyway. Most of the rest, of course, is an attempt to convert others to my way of thinking once that way has revealed itself to me. Either that, or it’s to ask forgiveness for thinking such things.”

Lorri Neilsen Glenn (Combustion, Lost Gospels, Threading Light, and many more)

“What compels me to write?

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