Why Write

While teaching pre-college Creative Writing at Yale University this month, I had all my students start by writing a short manifesto, "Why Write." I joined them.

I write to think, to feel, to be with the real version of myself in real courtship with the world.

I write to understand better who I am, like who I really am, in relationship with everything else.

In my smaller moments, I write to have a task, a job, to feel busy, to appear productive.

In my larger moments, I write to transmit my rage, my confusion, my deep sense of gratitude and awe with this alive and burning world that burns also inside my chest and wishes to fly out like hungry bats through my fingers, because writing has always been a way for me to be made visible through sharing, through language, and language has always been a fascination, that writing isn’t the destination but a form of transmission of language, of relating, of relationship.

I know the quality and attention I carry through and with the world through writing. It’s sort of like externalizing my capacity to love, to attend, to be with. My devotion to the animate world, to the people and places I love, is best understood, captured, celebrated, and shared, by writing.

I write as an act of devotion, as a prayer to the living world, a promise that I’ll keep my eyes ratcheted open and my heart beating as full as I’m capable, and that by doing that, by writing into prayer, may the world further help my heart to grow, expand, pull away from a more egoic, small writer only interested in the optics of success and cleverness.

I write because I am obsessive and curious and don’t know how to focus on one thing for too long, that I’m in the whole tapestry of life too much to be siloed into one topic, one story, one beat, one way, and so explore myriad universes and people and lovers through my attention, and that defines a rich life, a life of imaginative fecundity, a way into the interior of experience, a hack to see the micro-brilliances that shine and sparkle and crackle and confuse and stir up a hornet’s nest in my mind and that I can still remain steady in my gaze because I am writing, because I am bearing witness just as I am being witnessed, a two-way gaze of a world perhaps seeing itself through my looking out, and that I can fall in deeper and deeper in love with the whole weird mysterious package of being alive through this simple practice of recording, of falling and falling in love with all that passes by, all that sings and dances and cries out, all who beg and demand and come and go, that only through writing am I able to feel all of this fully, which is all that my small little animal can ask for, really—to feel fully the animate world pulsing and guiding me deeper into its unfolding, homecoming midwifed through my every breath, every word, every observation, every beat.

I write because every letter is a choice, and every choice is an offering, and every offering is food for the future, which is a meal to be arranged right now, and so I write to do what I can to offer nutrition to the world I wish to eat and be eaten by, a world of artists liberated and willing to bleed, willing to work to help the world deepen into its full song. I write to find song.