Safety First
Like many writers, Dori Ostermiller taught writing while publishing short stories and finishing her first novel (Outside the Ordinary World). Unlike a lot of writers, she decided that instead of taking a position as an associate professor somewhere she would start her own writing school, Writers in Progress, located in Western Massachusetts. We talked about how one taught writing during our interview, and she stressed the importance of giving students the permission to write what was most important to them. I pressed her on this, because this sounded nice in theory but tricky in practice. Dori said the key was providing a safe working environment.
Of course. I read somewhere that a bizarrely high percentage of women believed that if they ever spoke what was really on their minds they would be killed. I’m sure the percentage is a bit lower for men, but probably not as low as you would think. Somewhere in all of us is a wary tribesman/tribeswoman keenly aware just how full of lions the savannah/mountain/jungle is. To avoid death by banishment we have all held our tongue at the dinner party, the water cooler, even in the bedroom. I am as guilty as anyone. At times, I have become a kind of chameleon, shaping all sorts of half-truths so I would be liked by whatever company I found myself keeping.
Isn’t it possible that somewhere in us there is also someone or something that wishes to die, that even must die? The face we turn to the world that isn’t ours. To ever know freedom we must first kill that which we built to keep us safe. Where better than on the page? Alone at your desk you can feel the lightness that comes from allowing through what you most want to say. Feel it for yourself and no one else; seek it every time you write. Wear the face again if you must when you leave the desk, but put it aside when you return to your work. Eventually, page-by-page, word-by-word, you will know that lightness better and better, and one day you will discover you have no choice but to let through in public what you have allowed through in private, that the pain of withholding finally seems worse than the fear of shame.
If you like the ideas and perspectives expressed here, feel free to contact me about individual and group conferencing.
