NON-FICTION
and accepts the story experience into her consciousness. At
that moment the reader is engaged in a relationship with
the writer, mediated by story. The writer has guided the
parameters of the relationship, but she never has absolute
control. The reader always has the power to terminate the
relationship at any time by closing the book. The reader is
not a blank slate of appreciation. The reader brings with
her her own experiences of the world she lives in and this
mediates her understanding and appreciation of the text.
Finally, when the story has been read and integrated
into the reader’s understanding, she carries that experience
and learning back into her own experiential world, a little
changed, perhaps, and it may affect her own interactions
with people in her life.
Imagine this happening one hundred times. A thousand
times. Ten thousand times. A hundred thousand times….
Stories are powerful engagements.
If you are writing stories with the intention of dispersing
them to a wider public how great is the responsibility that
is placed upon your shoulders? No one has enlisted you to
take up this responsibility. In the moment when the writer
decides she will share her story with others she has willingly engaged in an action that sets off vectors of expanding
relations that move both forward and backward into time.
For just as the writer has ties to lives, communities, history,
the future, so, too, do the story and the readers who will
interact with the representation.
This level of responsibility can be paralyzing. How can
we ever know enough, be mindful enough, to be able, at the
very least, to do no harm to others? How do we dare place
words in the mouths not our own? Who am I to embark
upon this engagement when what I know, what I have experienced, is such a tiny mark upon this planet?
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Silence. In the space where your voice would have rung
out with its distinct articulation. The moment you silence
yourself a gap opens up, and someone else who may have no
qualms in occupying that space, will leap in to speak out on
their own terms. If you’re a writer (a dreamer) from a people,
a community, a history that has been long-marginalized,
silenced, or misrepresented, we so desperately need to hear
your story in your voice, in your own grammar of perception and articulation…
When the seed of desire to write stories first began germinating inside my chest, I did not think about control,
representation, ideologies, power systems, colonialism. I
was a lonely child who was much confused by the workings of a hypocritical adult world, where adults said one
thing, then did the opposite. Where the people who said
they loved me were also the people who hurt me the most.
Where school was a blur of confusion, and uncertainty sat
with me at the kitchen table every single day. I was in grade
three or four when the confusing array of consonants and
vowels transformed from syllabic syncopation into the
English language. I could read. And, suddenly, I could fly…
Flight is a crucial survival technique. For all that we
imagine otherwise, without our weapons we are not
an apex predator. Our nails are soft. Our teeth blunt.
Our skin easily pierced. Children and women feel their
vulnerability most keenly. I was child growing up with
Christian parents who loved me, but they were also dysfunctional. The rod was not spared and we were not
spoiled. Any stability to be found was provided by my
grandmother. But she was also an older woman, living
in the home of my father. She was also a person of her
generation, and a part of the administration of punishments for bad behaviour.