The Writing Switch

Where is the writing switch in my brain?  It’s been tripped to the “on” position in the last few days.  I do keep up some level of writing, almost daily, as this blog proves, even if it is only 17 syllables matched to some visual image I’ve come across.  Sometimes, though less often, the haiku starts and I go looking for the image, though I have at least one reader who can tell when I’ve snagged a photograph off a google search, rather than taken the photo myself.

But the last few days the full-out, constant visual feed to language framing switch has been on.  I notice how the fields on the drive home this evening have only patches of snow left, as if some giant in the sky has been splattering down goopy white frosting on the dull brown grass.  The puddle in the dip of the road before I drive up to my mailbox has split in two, making two lungs of water across the broad chest of the road.  Yesterday morning the mist rising off the many small brooks and streams around my house, and those glops of snow still on the fields, had frozen into crystalline icing on every brush twig and branch, glinting in the sun, which was finally rising, in spite of our tinkering with the clocks.

This doesn’t stop, the writing channel on unending flow.  I see anything and I begin to fashion that image in language.  And then what is the meaning under that language, how do I translate this set of words, derived from this image, into a connection with the reader that will make something bigger happen.  “I explode inside my own brain, I want other brains to explode,” is part of a poem from my manuscript about the year of grief after Eric died. What I meant there, is that I want what I write to explode in the reader’s mind, I want whatever is churning out of that online-all-the-time channel of mine to get so big it infiltrates and creates its own set of meanings in the brain space of the reader.

Did validation turn on the writing switch?  I got an email on Sunday that my poetry manuscript, The Truth About Death, has been accepted by Turning Point Books, an imprint of WordTech Communications.  I have a publication date and a contract, from a very legitimate poetry publisher!

Let the words flow on.