Writing Against/Writing Toward (Last Workshop of the Summer-Tuesday 9/11/07)

Last night's final workshop wrapped up with a discussion of writing against or in opposition to other writing. Sparked by Masha's expressed discomfort with writing that seemed to offer her no place in its specific landscape and her written reaction to it, the conversation spanned techniques and strategies such as appropriation and collage and motivation writing against something else. Kevin suggested that no good writing or art came without being against something else.

As the conversation moved to specific discussions of what some members of the workshop wrote against, I found myself wondering what I wrote against or if I even wrote against anything. It seemed to me that my absent career and near complete non-publication argued for a strong anti-something aesthetic but against what exactly, success? Or did I write toward the past in a misguided study and pursuit of the elusive New Narrative?

And then in my pun to Stephen suggesting he inappropriate instead of appropriate I realized what it is I write against. I write against imposed limits on ideas, forms, content in writing. I write against the coy allegedly edgy experimenters who are oh so daring while risking nothing. It is the real risk, the danger suggested in New Narrative of putting the self, the body, biography into story without the safety of plausible deniability that drives me. It is this impulse that I write toward and the writing that is safe, contained and otherwise un-bloody that I write against.