On Aspirations

Like most self-described authors and writers, I read. I have my favorite authors, my inspirations, those who walk me down roads into new adventures with strange characters - real or imagined. But there are very few whom I say when I read their work, "I want to do that. I want to be that. I want to move my readers like that." My list is short, really. Michael Cunningham - especially his writing in The Hours. Virginia Woolf. Margaret Atwood - especially in works like Cat's Eye. And Sherman Alexie.

White. Indian. Black. Martian. It doesn't matter. Alexie's words reach across all races and boundaries and leave us with a view of ourselves as tortured, haunted, honest, failed, scared, beings. It is not a sentimental view of the world, but one that is plain and honest and demands as much thought to read it as it feels he put into writing it. When he puts pen to paper (or finger to keyboard) and blesses us mere mortals with something to read, he is inviting us into his world, his universe, his center, and to appreciate the truly awesome gift he has given us, we must do more than detach ourselves from the multi-tasking life that surrounds in ever spirling intensity and give our selves over to the written word. Even a short passage, a twitter-length sentence if you will, is an entire world in and of itself.

But the masterpiece of Alexie's style is not that he is able to create such magic and mystery with mere words on a screen (or page) but that he is able to make you laugh, even while you cry. He has captured the truest of all human emotions. And even while you are laughing, you are crying, and he is twisting that knife in, deeper and deeper and when you least expect it, he pulls and you bleed - laughing then at yourself and your own imperfections as a mere, bleeding human.

I dream of that skill. I work for it daily, but still feel I have yet to master the pure humanism I am reaching for, that unsentimental connection between us and our universe, that world that is far more emotional than any Hallmark movie or flash in the pan publicity concept would ever allow for. Emotion does not lie in Lifetime Network heartbreak but in how we, every day, look at our world and chose to live in it.

And so I write. And read. And aspire ...