[LINK] "The Ecology of What We Write"

[rfmcdonald]

Savage Minds features Anand Pandian's essay arguing that writing is necessarily embedded in the dynamic environment of the writer.

One day last summer, a caterpillar dropped from the rim of my desktop monitor. A peculiar little creature—no more than an inch long, clothed in a jacket of wispy white, a jaunty pair of lashes suspended well behind a tiny black head.

The visitation was unexpected. It’s not as though I work in a natural wonderland. The walls of this office are made of painted cinderblock. The window is fixed firmly in place, completely sealed from the outside. Peculiar odors sometimes drift from the vent above my desk, possibly from the labs upstairs.

The caterpillar seemed unhappy with the windowsill, where I placed it for a closer look. So I scooped up the errant traveler and stepped outside the building, wondering, for a moment, whether there was anything more palatable in the turfgrass. Then I went back to writing, back to whatever I could forage for my monitor that day.

We tend to think of writing as a lonely task. “The life of the writer—such as it is—is colorless to the point of sensory deprivation,” Annie Dillard writes. “Many writers do little else but sit in small rooms recalling the real world.”

There is, no doubt, a limpid truth to so much of her prose. But this, though, how could it be? Whether Dillard’s Venetian blinds slatted against the vista of a graveled rooftop, or some other more porous and inviting space, writing always happens in a sensible world of sounds and textures, an atmosphere of tangible things and diaphanous beings.