What’s All This About?
The Life Literary is my workshop for word play and use. It’s also where I note ways to live literarily. Here I write, record, comment, list. And play. Walk around a workshop. Find sawdust piles, half-finished objects , split wood, bent nails and maybe a rare, lovely find.
The Life Literary’s point is getting it out there. Its point is writing regularly. Its point is working to write excellently. On this blank sheet I will make a good faith effort to set words down nicely and interestingly. I’m amazed at a sentence or paragraph that I think is pretty doggone good can later look, after a few hours or days, pretty doggone average or worse. But I won’t know till it’s out there, and The Life Literary gives me the forum to make it public, to stop putting off publishing until it’s perfect, but to make it as good as I can at the moment, maybe sometimes very good, maybe sometimes less so, but always putting the pen on the paper and moving on from there. This is my chance not to care about or use as an excuse what real or imagined critics might say, but simply to write what I want. And maybe some of them will nudge or kick me to improve what needs it.
It finally started coming together…
Over the last few years, I started doing some things I now realize fit a lifelong pattern. A couple years ago I started memorizing poems and am up to about 55 now. Over nearly seventeen years, my family created unique, literary, word and theme-playing Christmas cards received by family and friends with puzzlement and delight, consternation and anticipation. I also collect epitaphs. These things and many others, add depth and fun to my life. I call it living literarily. Doing these things and more, I’ve made my life a little more ennobling and used literary ways to stay a tad above the fray. And I’ve had and still have a great time living this way.
I’m looking for another word besides literary. That handsome, proud word has a forbidding ring to it, as if things literary were mostly in the realm of the writer, the teacher, the book critic; the professional literary person. I’ve read books all my life, written letters and essays about exotic places I’ve lived, but I never would have called myself literary, at least professionally, nor do I yet. I dearly want to be that, want to write, publish a novel, a collection of essays, or a smaller piece in The New Yorker. Being literary was a goal I hadn’t reached and I had a sneaking suspicion I never would.
…the goal is the journey.
Then I realized that life isn’t just about arriving but also about getting there. So what that I’m not a professional literary person? I can still act literarily, can’t I? Even more, I started to realize that many of the things I do for fun, or in my spare time have to do with living life with a literary approach. In fact, I would say that I think and act and do many different things literarily. And it’s dawned on me that being this way in different ways every day lifts me up, boosts my flagging spirit, and sometimes even makes me laugh out loud.
Take ‘er out for a spin?
I was reading a blog about meaning and religion and was struck by the author’s point (that includes a Herman Melville quote) that ”the meaning that one finds in a life dedicated to ‘the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country,’” is basic and fundamental. I am finding that living these actions literarily sets them in a context that infuses such basic survival tasks with a spice, a flavor, a delight.
Thus, this blog. I’m going to write about things I do and see and think. Gonna share some ideas for ways to live literarily, road-tested ideas that are worth taking out for a spin yourself. I intend to play with words, develop my voice, my ear, and promote pausing, thinking a bit more deeply, writing a bit more thoughtfully.
Help Yourself
I’ll be serving new wine with aged (and use what’s turned to vinegar for salad dressing). Be my guest! Pour yourself a glass and take a drink.
