Life Writing

LIFE-WRITING

Some people, not many mind you, plan, consciously or unconsciously, to write their life in the form of their diaries. As much as I can see the potential for doing this life-writing using the genre of diary, after nearly 22 years of episodic diary making, it looks like the genres of poetry and essay will result in more life-writing for me. This is because so much of what I write in these genres is quintessentially autobiographical. Virginia Woolf once wrote in a letter: “I sometimes think that only autobiography is literature.”1 I’d like to think that my writing in all of its autobiographical emphases is the pure expression of “a full-throated ease of inspired self-disclosure.”1 Sometimes there is ease; sometimes there is a full-throat; sometimes what I write is inspired. I’d also like to think there is something elusive, enigmatic and impersonal about what I write. Woolf said the very best writers, the ones who infuse the whole of themselves into their works, possess these qualities and yet, ironically, we know little about them. -1Brian Phillips, “Reality and Virginia Woolf,” The Hudson Review, Autumn 2003.

All autobiographical writing
gives some distortion in its
portrait of the writer. Habit,
style, tendency, inclination,
mood, pattern, judgement,
freedom, capacity, purpose,
motivation, perspective,
modesty—all contribute
to the writer’s evolving
perception of the subject.

After 40 years of give-and-take
in the real, hurly-burly, world1
it was not so much my thin-skin
or fear of the social that drove me
away, it was the whirlwind of this
distracted hour, a jangling mockery
of understanding: mine and others’,
the jingle-jangle of self and of ego,
fatigue, the ashes of my own frail
vulnerability and weakness,
the lance and parry techniques
of an archaic tournament, a certain
sorrow, a desire for quietness,
for isolation, for the ceaseless
challenge of my art as it plays
with the loose, drifting material
imaginative matrix of my life.

1 The age of 15 to 55, 1959-1999.

Ron Price
November 21st 2005
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I have a website at which some 50 volumes at 75,000 words/volume are found. The site URL is: http://www.ronpriceepoch.com