Why do I write? It’s my job...sure, that’s part of it. But maybe I chose this job, this career, so that I could write. If that was actually a conscious decision, I don’t remember it. Dave Williams, my beloved teacher at the Academy, wrote a comment on one of my papers more than a half century ago that said, “Nice work. Some day you’re going to be a good writer.”
I keep hoping that day will come. I keep trying. Dave’s words echo in my mind even now, urging me never to surrender to the blank screen. Every day I create something that wasn’t there the day before. An expression for an experience. An explanation for a conundrum. An escape from enigma. I keep at it, seeking to be that good writer whom Dave Williams thought he saw in the dewy mist we call potential. Some day…
Brittany Perham ’99 Poet and Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University When I’m writing, I’m not thinking about little things like cleaning the bathroom or the fact that there’s no
photo by Lisa Beth Anderson
paragraph, and after a while some pages of manuscript. Relieved, I have lunch. Then I go back and spend the afternoon moving around the words I wrote in the morning. I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years. It never seems to get easier.
milk in the house and I better go buy it. And I’m not thinking about the big things like the fight I had with my beloved, or the election and the real fear I have for this country, or the fact that my poetry might not be helping anything in this world. When I’m writing, all that goes away. Somehow, I slip the mind I inhabit every day. I slip the spin of anxious thinking. When I’m writing, I’m out of my mind. Or it might be more accurate to say that I’m out of one mind and in another, the one that has a certain kind of patience, connectedness, clarity. It is the mind that makes order, that shapes, that distills. The one that remembers language has power. That one that isn’t afraid to speak. The one that is capable. The one that is sure. The one that will get things done. The one that knows. It is the superhero mind.
ever language we use, when we enter the superhero mind, something happens. For me, words happen. My superhero mind can see the story and can tell it. It is in complete control. My superhero mind is, well, a superhero. Of course, this is a kind of illusion, a kind of madness. In a few minutes, I will have to go buy milk. I will remember that I have little control over anything. But it is a necessary and productive illusion, the illusion from which art is made. I, for one, am addicted to it. And I write so I can enter the illusion again, so I can make the superhero appear.
Perry Eaton ’08 Boston Globe Reporter To me, writing can be both a form of entertainment or catharsis, or just an essential way to convey information. When I write for work, sometimes I’m able to uncover forgotten bits of history, or analyze the work of a band that I really enjoy. Other times, I report on things that I might not otherwise look into, and help keep readers up to speed with serious and not-so-serious bits of local culture. I enjoyed writing in my English and History classes at the Academy, and as a student at Governor’s, I began writing on my own, too. I used it as a way to
All of us find our superhero mind in different ways: we enter it when we are most attentive to the thing we love most. When we are most aware and alive in the world, and therefore most human. We’re built for this feeling. We need it. So we have many metaphors to talk about what it feels like when the superhero mind takes over: it is the lightning strike of inspiration, the moment we come in contact with god, the moment we ourselves become god-like. But what-
The Archon | Spring/Summer 2016
31