I have questions for you that I’ve forgotten to ask and while my job is that of interrogation, yours is that of the collector, with all dramatic and venerated respect fully intended.

You see that one half of me is the incomprehensible angel that sits, crumpled and broken, buried in ashen, wrinkled and rough fabric of a garment called a dress. This dress is so celestial and even its drab gray captures the light in the recesses of this interrogation. I ask it for answers in the morning and it hands them to me at night, where I capture it into you, always when I wish I could just sleep in the depths of this pen and tell her that she should wait for the sun.

My job as the interrogator is that of art. It delves into secrets, and buries into the unknown. It crumples and defines weakness of the most secure hands, burdens the most creative minds, confounds the most intelligent. My job is the art of communicating to you the secrets of this angel’s drained power and beauty and how it whimpers and cries for its home, which which is never fully divulged in the misery held in the firm envelope of its eyes.

It occurs to me that perhaps these practices have become dark and malevolent, but not so dark as your house is silent and pallid white, a broken potential that is also half of me, screaming at me when the other half does not. These handprints on the front steps are mine, and I thought that if I could touch this place or feel it, this brokenness inside me might start healing. (Lambert, Home) How can I delve into your secrets, interrogate you when you indeed belong to me, when you are just as much the magical ink that seeps into you as I am a forger of make-believe?


- My Writing

My writing boils down to this: I live life daily not captured by a piece of paper, but living in the envelope of stress. It’s as if, when I write, I swallow an acerbic and acidic sun, and it’s liquid on my lips, thick and surreal. Some days, when my thoughts don’t stop and my mind is like a camera, or a pen in itself, I get lost in the depths of a wall, angry at this unwritten opportunity, willing the sheetrock to dust, as I try, sometimes unsuccessfully to commit it to memory. I need a paintbrush to write it so people can actually see it, but lately the horsehairs are glue and I’m painted blue instead of gold. It’s a nostalgic thing, really, my writing and often reflects my view on the world as if I stare out the window of a moving car – it buries so close to soft glasses and trees and sky and bitter, cold days. Often, it turns me into a time traveler as my mind slams time together, lost in too many memories at once. On the days that it dulls the edges of my vision and clouds my thoughts so darkly, it is as if I see the world not for its beauty, but the washed out canvas of a painter’s easel, and I’m slipping through the cracks, edged dull and insipid, burying myself in blankets, for hope that maybe dreams can liberate me if this ugly writer’s block can’t. But that’s not even it. Writer’s block, for me is not something I wish to divest. I cherish it, and build upon it, treasure it even, because one must always falter in anything to get back up stronger again. I’m always reminded of John Ruskin’s quote on work when I think of writer’s block:

“In order that people may be happy in their work, these three things are needed: They need to be fit for it: They must not do too much of it: And they must have a sense of success in it.”
John Ruskin

Writer’s block is just as much a part of my writing as imagery, or beauty or warmth or civil liberties is. I write what feels good, and if a blank piece of paper is what feels good, I delve into it deeper and draw my hand, and an empty, lonely notebook. Writing is a process, and while this drawing that isn’t considered something to read, if I define it as any piece of writing at all, well that’s up to me to decide, and it’s your way to interpret it.
My writing amounts to a considerably large use of bizarre ideas at times, and is in itself, a series of metaphorical pieces. Earlier in the year, Ms. Jackson commented on my work, and how it was metaphorical and she wanted to draw me away from that. I remember writing later on that I was afraid she’d break me as a person, by doing that. Things just are how they are to me, and I couldn’t fathom my writing being any less different than what it was. I work hard with each piece I write, often proofreading it over and over so that the most complex and abstract ideas have become just as clear to me as brushing your teeth in the morning. Perhaps that’s a bad analogy, but I am often very stand-offish about my work, worried that some of the ideas conveyed won’t be recognized, or that my intended use of no punctuation or crude line breaks highlights the traits of a character or state of mind that I weave into the piece to make it visually elicited, as well as plainly written.

One book that I read that changed my view on writing was Jodi Piccoult’s and Samantha van Leer’s Between the Lines. The queer idea that characters of a book actually live outside it’s pages was depicted in this story, as well as that strange attachment to one certain book in particular. I try to convey this art of truly bringing a character to life by weaving a bit of myself into each one, so that they have a chance to be daring enough and evolve into something greater as its being read. I think that as a writer, you want your ideas to have open spaces so that readers themselves can feel in the blanks with their own interpretations. So, that’s another think my writing has. Open spaces. Spaces where thought is inevitable, spaces where wrapping your head around one sentence can be so confounding that you can’t help but ask me about it, or rather, tell me that you really don’t understand what I mean.