unknown territory

A couple weeks back, I wrote about my gravitation to prose in general.  Recently, with the exception of the ordinary planet series, everything I've been writing is in prose format, including two pieces more in a more lyric essay vein--the hunger palace and exquisite damage, both personal and memoirish. Others, like  beautiful sinister and taurus, that are more like stories or novellas in prose format. There is also unusual creatures, which is a mix of epistolary pieces and journal/diary entries that follows three generation of women in a single family  There seems to be all this murky territory between prose poem/flash fiction/fragment/lyric essay that I wallow in much of the time these days.

At some point I inadvertently stopped thinking of myself as a "poet" and more just as a "writer".  It wasn't a conscious decision, both terms feeling hard to claim in the early days.  I used to, and probably still, feel a little self-conscious about "poet" and what it evokes in people's minds when you say it out in the wilds. "Writer" is a little better, but people have less of a stereotype--you could be a novelist, or  a essay writer, or playwright or a journalist. And truthfully, my writing goes beyond mere verse and probably always has.  I was thinking about the length of this blog, how much content I have poured into these pages over the years, probably more words in count than actual poems.   Or now, when I am doing some library-related writing projects. Now, when I am tending toward prose more and more.

And truthfully, more and more, it comes to me how similar all these word oriented things things are and how skills in one translate to skills in others.  I was working on a library article and was sounding out a sentence am always attuned to cadence of words and syllables--even subconsciously.   Or when coming up with exhibit and focus week titles, what combination of words works. How to condense complex ideas into a cohesive sentence. We've been working on a new job description for my position and I had to spend time articulating an entirely new idea that we are still developing. But words are also how I think things out..how I develop ideas. In the early days of AofR, when we were trying to gain footing and figure out how to accurately describe what we were doing, I spent so much time writing out promotional material and getting the words just right. Ditto when I was pulling together the info and writing the ACRL application. So many of the things I've learned from my college/grad school experiences and as an artist are, to my amazement, sometimes totally applicable to other aspects of my professional life.

Thinking in terms of "writer" the past few years has opened up doors and creative possibilites for projects in all sorts of genres.  I'm still not sure I have the endurance for longer projects, but small parts can make really big things, as this year's page counts reveal.

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