Today in Friday Writers one of my longtime (on and on I could go) students put into words what so much of this writing together is all about. In our first round of writing, she mentioned something difficult she was going through and during our "response write" another student wrote about something similar that a friend of hers was going through and all the success and support they had found further along the story than the first student. After that round, H thanked her for her story, adding, more or less that "this is why I tell this story to as many people as I can... in hopes of getting stories in return."
Exactly that. Stories are the human currency we need to survive. You would never know it from it’s glossy and inviting surface, but the business of writing misses the point and has done a disservice to writers everywhere, creating a narrative that only "writerly writers, capital W writers, so-and-so writers " are worthy of having their stories bound and heard, that being heard is a privilege, something one must earn before going public (publishing), only to be edited, cut short, polished the life out of before being a good enough story to put out there for the world to criticize (what we’ve grown to expect in the narrative created by paid and polished critics). I could at length argue the benefit of critics and publishing and all the good it has done—it’s more of a both/and—but the industry has come at the cost of missing out on countless of the stories we humans need to hear. The truth is, stories of any kind told in any way (written, danced, told, sang, painted, etc) by anywhom, detached from the commodities they all too often aspire to become, are the best gifts we can give each other, whole heart offerings etched in pen (etc) to lay on humanity's altar.
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