A bit more about why I'm doing this

“And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.” — George Orwell

"I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” — Joan Didion

Both of these statements are true (or largely so) about the act of writing, although I agree more with Orwell’s point about clear, clean prose than the one about effacing one’s personality.

The kind of writing I’m experimenting with here—poems and short personal essays mostly, I expect — is new to me, at least in terms of sharing it publicly. For years, I’ve written poems for close family members or shared them, occasionally, with a few close friends. But the personal essay idea is new for me.

Decades as a journalist taught me — drilled into me, really — that I shouldn’t interject myself or my opinions, much less my emotions, into my work.

Consequently, during my long stretch as a “professional” writer I learned to rope off much of my life and emotions from my journalism — probably to the detriment of my writing, and certainly to the detriment of my understanding of my self.

When I write now, mostly for myself and for a small community of people who may sometimes read what I write, it’s more like I’m writing to see what I’m feeling — or have felt, and buried, or forgot, or neglected.

That’s probably why so many of the poems that pop into my head when I sit down at my laptop connect to my early life, my parents, their parents, and the strange interconnections, secrets and mysteries that surround my family — like all families, and like all people, I think.

I imagine that to some people that seems narcissistic.

I certainly spend more time exploring what’s inside my head and heart these days than what’s happening in the broad world outside my doors, a bit like Frodo Baggins in “Lord of the Rings,” before the outside world came knocking.

At my advanced age and less-than-heroic state, however, I’m hardly expecting any world-shaking adventures to come my way. It would be cool, though, to see a dragon fly by in the night sky.

So far, the poems come more easily and cleanly — Orwell’s clear window pane — than fiction, except for a few stories I’ve written for my two older grandchildren in Scotland. They’ve enjoyed them, I think, although it’s a challenge to get the right tone and context for children who live so far away and are rarely in the same time zone as I am.

So for now, at least, I’m focusing on poems and occasional musings like this one.