Danger Zones

“If you avoid what is dangerous, you avoid life.  If you throw yourself into a dangerous place without preparation, you devalue life.  Writing is one the crossroads where what is most disturbing can be explored and investigated without destroying yourself or others.  This is one of the highest purposes of the arts.” ~Bonnie Goldberg

            The above quote comes from the author of a writing companion book, Room to Write.  The page that I read today is something that a friend of mine and I spoke about a couple weeks ago—avoidance of imagination because I might fall off an emotional cliff in my imaginings.  I am afraid of what I might write.  

            I am working toward a Creative Writing certificate thought the MTSU Writers’ Loft.  Each trimester, I have a mentor whom I send three packets of original work, a book essay, and a letter specifying what I am having trouble with or want to know more about.  Charlotte is a wonderfully supportive mentor.  Sometimes, honestly, I think she meaningfully sandwiches her critiques between two good strong reinforcing statements so that I read you are a good writer/you need to ramp up the conflict/you are a good writer.  My last letter to Charlotte was after the conversation I had with one of my writing friends, so I asked my mentor to speak about overcoming fear.  She offered that writing feelings and images is a good way to get something of myself and into another “container.”

            I know where this fear of writing my feelings and images comes from.  After my father’s suicide, I wanted to write a story about a devil in a septic tank and how it enticed my dad to kill himself.  That was really how my mind reacted to his death.  I couldn’t believe that he would have made such a choice, even in the sickness of his depression.  So I invented the idea that a devil made him do it.  Then as I rubbed that story idea over the folds of my mind, imagining the whisperings and fear that my father must have heard and felt, I grew to think that the devil must have followed me home and had started whispering ungodly things to me. I thought I was going crazy.  So if I could scare myself with those thoughts, which even now makes my spine shiver, my stomach tighten-up, and my lips quiver, how will I ever not scare myself insane writing a book of fiction where my imagination is free to make up anything?

            This book suggests preparing myself with “some deep breathing or other centering activity [and] when [I’ve] finished draw a box or circle around the words to contain them.”  The above paragraph is my sincere but contained fear that I might go crazy writing.   So there! The next time I am afraid of writing conflict and tension, I will put it in a box.  I will contain it.

Karen Phillips