by Erica Bennett

I’m not sure I ever mentioned but writing these blog posts are torturous for me. Am I being honest… No. I am not trying to suggest I don’t (secretly) enjoy writing them, as well, but my stage fright can grow extreme to the point that I am compelled to expel. Is that true? Well, only when I was an actor… But really, who cares what I have to say? And why should they? I mean to write, sure, every once in a while I may hit upon some bit of truth, but more often I am flailing around, trying to understand, reaching out blindly to a population of readers I may never meet. And does that matter?…

How does one write for an audience? I used to worry about that a lot. How will I make the reader like me and want to do my play?… But with Bloodletting and Poe, I wrote from absolute grief with an eye toward art. Apparently, there was something about me writing that poem because it reached several people who are important to me. In it there was no time to play life’s victim, I just got the illustrative words out there and keep on hitting my larger message.

That is my mantra to myself this eve before the purging of my garage. Through my tears and protestations tomorrow, my lifetime will be sorted and much of it discarded. That I may be able to hang on to some memories by writing about them is my shred of hope for the weekend. Have laptop, will travel. Sigh.