The men in the group were telling stories, stories through which they could see themselves-not very different from what I did with my poems. It was my introduction to psychotherapy and I was immediately smitten. My ex-con supervisor invited me to sit in on a group he ran. Hungry for time away from the manicured lawns of my college, I signed up for a tutoring job at a nearby prison. But it was also the era of the glamorous suicidal poetesses-Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton-and with my consciousness so porous and my family having taken a turn into chaos, not a good time for me to spend countless hours alone, tapping out iambic pentameter and laboring in the basement recesses of an art library on the tenth draft of a poem. We were given assignments to write in various classic forms, and for the first time I received feedback on my writing. The workshop was all that I really cared about. My first year of college, I took a dazzling array of impractical classes: Buddhist philosophy, modern dance, a poetry workshop. The idea of an occupation was not on my mind-though I always assumed that I had to support myself and my taste for adventure.īy the time I turned eighteen, I’d worked as a cashier at Dunkin Donuts, as a research assistant for a guy with a stash of Victorian pornography and some shady financial dealings that landed him in federal prison, as the graveyard shift waitress at a diner renowned for occasional gunfire. What mattered was that work have meaning. LKG: I grew up in an intellectual family, where no one talked about work being lucrative. How did you not put your writing aside during the early stages of development, when most people stop in favor of more lucrative or immediately rewarding occupations? I was deeply attracted to mysticism and altered states of consciousness and wrote in a version of an ecstatic state, in the middle of the night. I didn’t have the idea that I wanted to be a writer until after college, when I found I was too shy to apply for anything but very unassuming jobs. Many artists speak of making the leap from never me to why not me-I did too, eventually. In college I stopped writing, believing that people like me weren’t real writers. (Later, The Dancing Wu-Li Masters was another favorite, mind-blowing book.) I vibed to stories of astrophysicists seeking contact with intelligences in outer space. I wanted to connect with something outside of myself through writing. As a teen I got more serious about it, and wrote lots of poems, and position papers for the school paper. I copied the ideas of books I loved-my first fan fiction-and wrote illustrated novels about wise talking bears and big families having adventures. I wanted to capture the feeling that books gave me, and that had to do with making a book as much as it did with reading one. There was the deadening blandness of suburban middle school-lockers and worksheets and jarring bells-and then the momentary glimpses of a midsummer’s night enchantment in the flickering light of a forbidden cigarette under a magnolia tree of the buried desires of a friend’s father as he ate his five o’clock dinner in his shirtsleeves and tie.Ĭan you tell me how and when you developed the desire to be a writer?Īlice Elliott Dark: I did start as a child. The world, I sensed, had many levels: there were the events skating over the surface and then the connections you might discover beneath. I still recall the awareness of something magical afoot in those early efforts to transform what was confusing and murky or painful or dull into something crafted and streaked with light. Lisa Gornick: Alice, we were both passionate child readers and, not long after, child writers-the two entwined as the inhalation and exhalation of breath. They wondered what it had meant to the other to have lived for decades with reading and writing so central to their days. Lisa Gornick and Alice Elliott Dark met a dozen years ago through the Montclair Writers Group, a group of women writers who have gathered regularly over the past quarter century to support one another’s work.Īs is the case with many writers, Lisa and Alice grew up with the practice of writing as a central part of their identities. Recently they began to email back and forth about how their writing practices had developed over time.
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