Word & Beauty

An Introduction to Word & Beauty

If the test of being a writer is to consistently get words on paper, I have often failed. Dreamscapes have always been my home since I was a child. I’ve loved telling stories, analyzing stories, and writing them in my head. But have I ever completed one on paper? Never. I have always been a thinker and I’ve always loved grappling with new concepts, testing and contextualizing them. But have I in my personal scholarly or academic career written an essay I was proud of? Nope. I’ve written over a hundred poems throughout my young life but have I ever gotten one poem through the process of writing, revision, and then to publication? Natta. I’ve kept a personal journal since my tweens but has this running narrative ever been maintained for a consecutive week? Very rarely. The same is true for the seemingly innumerable little blogs and social media accounts I’ve made over the years. I always tinkered with the looks and branding of the sites and had big ideas for what I’d write or talk about but nothing ever stuck.

So here I am again at 26 without any other goal or purpose in my life except to make something stick, to sprawl my name in red spray paint on the over-vandalized underpass that is the internet. Not for fame, nor notoriety, no I expect none. But to see my words come together, to have a little project going on in my head at all times that makes me feel like I exist. And maybe if someone comes along that learns something or is momentarily entertained by what I have written on the wall, well, maybe I will have done some good.

I call myself a writer for the same reason I call myself a good person. Not that I am especially either but the nagging sense of where I must return to when I am finished wandering. If habit comes from the self-discipline to sit down and do the work maybe calling is the subtle intuition of which direction home is. Calling is what you return to. When I’m tired and my head is spinning more often than not I open a notebook and jot something down. Not that this is when I am having my most cogent thoughts but it is in those times of mental fragility that I need the comfort and serenity of setting one word down after another. There is peace in the act of writing for your own sake. And doggonit I’m going to write.

I will write book reviews, investigations of poetry, poetics, and literary criticism. (Bored you already?) Not just on literature proper but also on science fiction, fantasy and other forms of speculative fiction that I am most fond of. Add to this movies and other kinds of creative media and you’ll begin to see how wide I cast the net of “literary studies”. You’ll find here my reflections on philosophy and religion as I try to break into the closed casket that is academic philosophy as well as playing Operation on the Frankenstein that is modern religious identity. Political and cultural commentary are always relevant and not off-limits here but wont be the mainstay. And undergirding all of this will be a search for wonder, questions, and inspiration in the mundane, the local, the personal, the everyday.

I am still writing poetry and I hope to soon start writing fiction, as well as scholarly articles and essays but most of these I will seek to be published elsewhere. But don’t worry I’ll advertise them here and give hints as where to find more to read if you so wish. Another hope is to start a parallel podcast along with this blog where I interview thinkers and creatives from a variety of fields and walks of life. But we’ll for now start with this. Stick around please. More soon to come.