Per Diem Archive: S. Chhoki Nov. 2014, The Difficult Thing
Writing the Difficut Thing --
Peter Benchley famously wrote “I hate writing. I love having written.” This is probably a familiar feeling to most of us. But it is only one of many malaises that affect us as writers.
Guest editor Sonam Chhoki explores another fraught area in this month’s Per Diem gallery. As she has written elsewhere: “. . . there is another kind of difficulty: that of writing about ‘harrowing’ and ‘dark’ subjects where words themselves break down. This is an instance where the diabolic appears to have entered into the human life.”
She goes on to quote Anaïs Nin: “The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.” Bringing perception to language is challenging enough, but to bring that which resists our formulation or our sense of propriety to our art is yet a further challenge, even in a genre so accustomed to the slipperiness of articulation as haiku.
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