Friday Speak Out!: Unleashing My Tongue Through the Reader’s Vision and Not My Own, Guest Post by Alexandra Caselle

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

 

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive

 

Audra Lorde, “A Litany for Survival”

As a woman, I love to unleash my tongue through the vehicle of writing. What better place to relax, relate, and release the mental playground of characters, ideas, thoughts, and emotions and examine each one closely? When I sit at my laptop, I don the smock of the word artist. I keystroke textual graffiti across a canvas of white space. It spirals into an intricate architecture of syntactical patterns.

I have an overall vision for each piece that I craft from my mind to page. There is an underlying message or image that I want to impress upon my reader. Sometimes the reader interprets a different meaning, and I feel a little discouraged.

As a woman, I have been here before. I talk to my loved ones, and they are just not getting what I am saying. I want them to understand my point-of-view. I experience a situation with my family, and each person comes away from it with a perspective, and it does not always match mine.

I’m always right in my head, or maybe I probably need to accept the inevitable. My daily manipulation of my imagination may have me a little delusional. Women and writers can be control freaks, or maybe it’s just me.

Another thing women and writers share in common is the fear of not being understood. It can sometimes lead to silence. But silence is the antithesis of writing. It is why I spend hours tending to so many ideas that I now have accumulated like stray cats inside my mind.

I have to let them out before they overcrowd my space.

A recent comment on a poem that I wrote has helped me to make my peace with the disconnection of my vision from the reader’s. Demetria Foster Gray tossed around different interpretations of the poem’s last line. She finally came to the conclusion that, “each reader, multiple interpretations and all of them relevant because the writer gave us pause, made us think, made us feel.”

Her comment reminds me of Louise Rosenblatt and her theory of transactional reading, the belief in the reader using her own background knowledge and life experiences as an interpretive lens of her reading. My writing is a tapestry of text, waiting for a reader to transform it into her own masterpiece of meaning.

Instead of a sense of disconnect, my writing serves as a conduit of creation authored to impact change in my readers. Leaving an impact on this world through my writing is one of the many reasons why I write.

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Alexandra Caselle is an aspiring, native Floridian writer and poet and a former secondary and postsecondary English teacher. She maintains two blogs: Womanlution: Inside the Mind of Alexandra Caselle (http://womanlution.wordpress.com), a blog of young adult literature reviews, original YA and literary/reading concept stories, teaching memoirs, and a little something of everything and Rhet Effects (http://rheteffects.wordpress.com) , a blog about writing and writing conventions through the art of the story. She aims to change the literary and educational world, one story at a time. She is currently working on a novel and a book of poetry. She also is known to hang out on Twitter, Facebook, & SheWrites.

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Would you like to participate in Friday "Speak Out!"? Email your short posts (under 500 words) about women and writing to: marcia[at]wow-womenonwriting[dot]com for consideration. We look forward to hearing from you!

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