I have a very well-used, much-marked and dog-eared book that I have referred to over and over. It’s called Tell It Slant by Brenda Miller & Suzanne Paola. It opens with a quote from Wallace Stevens, “The word is the making of the world.”

I’m pretty sure Mr. Stevens was probably just messing with the old Bible verse, “In the beginning was the word.”

The upshot is, we make and morph and describe our world with every word we type or write or speak or think. To paraphrase a little, Words R Us. 

It’s when I write and am really trying to nail down a thought or experience or some fleeting moment, that I really find out what I think,and often, what I believe. It’s not always what I expected either.

Today for instance; I was writing in my journal, just like I do every morning, when Bam! suddenly, in the middle of describing the morning’s waves, I rememberd a snippet of an overheard conversation, and some other thought hooked to that sentence and sped me off into another place and time and there I found myself…adrift on a sea of an entirely different sort.

I had no idea these thoughts were even lurking in my brain. But, there they were. The evidence was scrawled across the pages, dusted with a little cinnamon that puffed off the top of my cappuccino and becoming darker and darker as I pushed that poor pen – hard –  into the paper.

And just like that, it took me, threw me on a new shore and I was left to stare at those sentences and feel their truth.

Later, I took that beat up journal, my laptop and Tell It Slant and sat in my Black Bean Cafe ‘office’ and wrote and read and edited and wrote some more.  This is necessary and good.

Here’s another quote from Tell It Slant. This one is from Stanley Elkin…

“Let men and women make good sentences. Let them learn to spell the sound of the waterfall and the noise of the bathwater. Let us get down the colors of the baseball gloves, the difference in shade between the centerfielder’s deep pocket and the discreet indentation of the catcher’s mitt…Let us enlist the Vocabulary, the Syntax, the high grammar of the mysterious world. “