“To
essay is to attempt, to puzzle out, to look for the missing piece, to not necessarily find it, to carry on in putting back together what is looked for and maybe not found, to be the biographer of a thought or the cartographer of cognition, to associate things not normally associated. The essay’s plot is contrived of mapping the synapses firing in the brain to produce idea. The speaker is called a narrator, who, when wearing a disguise, is called a persona. The essayist is the ultimate mad scientist, abandoning hypothesis and thesis to collect and distill a drop of consciousness. In the end, all we can do is try to assemble pieces of a story, and tell it, bit by bit.”~ Kim Dana Kupperman, On “71 Fragments for a Chronology of Possibility”: An Eight-Fragment, Five-Paragraph Essay in Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction
Quotables: On the Importance of Story
“Why do we need the things in books? The poems, the essays, the stories? . . . . Why should we read them? Why should we care? . . . . Ideas–written ideas–are special. They are the way we transmit our stories and our thoughts from one generation to the next. If we lose them, we lose our shared history. We lose much of what makes us human. And fiction gives us empathy: it puts us inside the minds of other people, gives us the gift of seeing the world through their eyes. Fiction is a lie that tells us true things, over and over.” ~ Neil Gaiman
* Photo credit: Kamil PorembiĆski on Visual hunt / CC BY-SA
Put your pen to paper and your stories to the page this Sunday, December 2nd, during Study Hall: #AmWriting (Online, 3:30-5pm CST). There’s still time to register!
On Gratitude: #Listen, #Read, #Meditate
“Gratitude is renewable energy.” ~ Michael Perry
Listen to Michael Perry’s essay on Gratitude here. Or read it here. Either way, know that gratefulness is contagious. #gratefulforyou #gratefulforyourstories