[Written to a  prompt I offered in a Women Writing for (a) Change circle, and originally suggested in WHAT IF? by Anne Bernays and Pamela Painter: “write 26 sentences, each starting with the next consecutive letter of the alphabet; include one 100-word sentence”] .

Always written, Been driven to write. Create. Delve. Explore. Fanatic, even, about writing things down, writing into things, writing things out, writing myself into greater clarity. Greater clarity: yes, that’s the core of it all. How to connect with the who and why, to unravel the mystery and put it back together in some semblance of coherence. I love words, actually. Juxtaposing sound, meaning, rhythm; playing with words and their placement on the page; listening to the meaning beneath the obvious. Knowing that it’s a safe place and free, breaking out of the known into new territory or retracing steps of history, it’s beautiful and challenging and joyful and hard. Like anything worth doing in life. Mother would have loved that observation, as she often said ‘life is real and earnest.’ Not that there wasn’t some truth to her grim take on reality. Only that it lacked originality, optimism. Personal passion. Quixotic leanings that are more resonant with me. Resonance – another aspect of writing that I love, the AHA! and YES! that come from reading another’s work, especially published authors whose words either reflect or clarify my own inmost experience or perhaps reveal something new to me, or show or teach me something completely unexpected which might be scary or fascinating by nonetheless wakes me up and sharpens my senses, sometimes even to the extent of encouraging me to try something out of the ordinary myself, something that pushes me into new internal or external territory; or just to try something for the sheer joy and sound of it. Sound. That’s a lot of what writing is for me. Undulating rhythms, staccato notes, pregnant pauses, trills and flow. Variety. Whimsy. Xylophone epiphanies. You get the picture. Zealot that I am, I love words.