Forums – General Chat about writing – Yet More Reflections On The Writing Process

Posted: Wed Nov 21, 2007 2:04 pm Post subject:

I’m not sure how much of a psychological necessity it has been for me to seek relief by setting down my autobiographical story. This work was no opiate, as Alexander Herzon’s autobiography(1) was to him, “against the appaulling loneliness of a life lived among uninterested strangers.” I was far from lonely and was surrounded by students and Baha’is who were far from “uninterested strangers.” Like this greatest of Russian autobiographers, though, much time was needed for the events in my life to settle into “a perspicuous thought,” a thought I could convey in both a meaningful and written form. Like Herzen, too, some of my thoughts were uncomfortable and melancholy, but in writing I was able to reconcile them, after several unsatisfactory attempts, with my rational faculty. Art--and for me the art of writing--is an outward integration inspired by a degree of inner disintegration. It is more than a little coincidental that my first published articles in the press and my first collected poems in my own files and occasionally in magazines came in the first years after lithium had stabilized by bipolar life; and an even greater literary enthusiasm and success came when luvox, sodium valproate and venlafaxine were in my bloodstream.(1)Alexander Herzen, My Past and Thoughts, Chatto & Windus, London,1974(1855), p.xxiv
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After years of trying to find the language to write and talk about the serious, from the late 1950s to the early 1970s, the ability came with increasing degrees of effectiveness and with more and more pleasure. Some seem to have this ability virtually at birth; with me it was a slowly acquired art and, partly for that reason, a much appreciated one. There were times when I felt this ability dried up and deserted me. This was especially the case in the nearly twenty years when this autobiography was in its first edition(1984-2003); in some of the courses I took by external studies my capacity to write what a supervisor wanted simply seemed beyond my ability(1978 to 1988); when yet another magazine declined to accept a poem or an article I had spent what seemed a lifetime composing(1979 to 1999); when I tried to write a novel, a sci-fi fantasy or a long quasi-historical-philosophical piece(1983-2005). But by the time I had completely left the world of full-time, part-time and volunteer/casual work—by degrees in the years 1999 to 2005—I knew where my abilities could be found and tapped and there I would stay, as far as the eye could see. At the age of sixty, in the earliest year of my late adulthood(60-61), I had finally found and was able to distinguish between the places of literary fertility and the places where only dry dog-biscuits existed.

For many years when I was a teacher I compiled reading material for my students around an eclectic mix of book chapters, journal articles, historical documents, extracts from literary texts, journalism, inter alia. Now, in this autobiographical work, I have followed a similar pattern but put a pot pourri of material into one work. I give to readers a single-authored, multidisciplinary sourcebook in the field of autobiography, an autobiography with several formal principles underpinning it, one principle of which is the necessity for digressions, parentheses, with wanderings from the point. To this multidisciplinary work I have added a medley of variegated products from a poetic inclination, an inclination that has led to a certan prolixity. Some may see this work as just another word for creative disorder. --Ron Price, George Town, Tasmania, Australia Cool

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married for 41 years, a teacher for 35 years and a Baha´i for 48 years.