I enjoyed the readings for this week, more Elbow than Summerfield and Summerfield. I felt a little like an intruder reading Summerfield and Summerfield. It seemed almost like being a lab rat reading about the experiment at hand. Perhaps those of you who are now teaching classes have a different perspective?
I like that word – cooking. Talk about a metaphor; this one fits. I cook often, always from scratch (it’s my all-organic upbringing). I generally cook intuitively, a process that requires I give myself the freedom to produce a pot of soup or two that fails. I never brow-beat myself for the batch that fails. Perhaps this is because I live alone and I am the only one to suffer when an inventive recipe fails. I do, however, have a tendency to be overly critical of myself when writing. I should be able to apply the same inhibitions of my cooking processes to my writings, but I often don’t. Elbow’s description of an external writing process gave me a new perspective, attitude, and practice for how to better cope with those days when the soup fails, so to speak.
I appreciate authors such as Elbow or William Stafford who are candid about their lives as writers. I feel less alone when I encounter someone, such as Elbow, who freely admits that he writes himself into corners or that he that he struggles to eliminate sentences that need to be eliminated because of a personal attachment he has formed either to his work or to the labor of his work. This evening as I read, I felt myself to be in community with Elbow. He gave me some great ideas for the next time I have writers block or find myself unable to work my way through the mess on the page.
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