Writing in the Dark

For better, for worse, inspired by Alison Espach’s The Wedding People

“Writing in the Dark,” Beth Kephart, Turmeric Cyanotype

“She is energized by the thought of not knowing what she is even writing, of getting to decide it with every sentence.”  

Alison Espach’s words. The Wedding People.

Also: “Maybe this is the part of her life when she gets to start saying what she means, for better or worse.”

It is late September, pre-dawn, dark, the hour of getting to decide and saying what I mean, and if the rest of this day becomes itself—the shearing of the singed wildflower garden, the binding of books, the stirring above the steam of new corn soup, the shush of bristles across old, scratched floors—this right now is the one word imagining the next, the comma’s please continue, the period that I delete, for there is more.

Once I might have said (I said) that writing is medicinal (it is) and that writing is how we know and limn and shape our worlds (that, too) and that I cannot know who I am or what I think unless I write toward the questions (I abide by that assertion), but in this hour, at my age, as the first Paoli Local now rumbles down the distant tracks, and the winter-worried squirrels begin their banking of black walnuts, and the gray day coming makes, of the leaves of the Japanese maple, a kind of visual lace, I run my sentences as long as I please. For better. For worse. And for better.