Tess Williams
Writing is an enigmatic activity. It takes a lot of time in a life already full of demands, it is easy to criticise and hard to do, most of the work involved is usually invisible and it is very rarely financially justified. Women often do it well.
Some years ago, someone asked me quite spitefully if I ever wrote about anything apart from pregnancies and children. I often gratefully reflect on this comment. Without intending to, that critic revealed to me one of the central metaphors of my work and helped me to connect to my deepest motivations in writing.
For me, writing is remarkably similar to parenting. Our pieces are our offspring. They are our small opportunities for revision and change. We invest energy in them, we try and imbue them with a sense of morality and meaning that will make us proud, and in the end they fail or succeed on their own merits.
No body and no art is unflawed; however, all bodies and all art represent extraordinary intersections of culture, history and spirit. This is what makes both people and stories eternally fascinating and why writing makes the same kind of sense to me as parenting. |
