process of writing — blog

Walking with Cephalophores

I’m inspired by the cephalophores, those saints who go along carrying their heads in their arms, cradled somewhere in the location of their hearts, necessarily. Historically, they carry their heads to indicate that they were beheaded physically. But I want to carry my head close to my heart so that I can hear the murmurings of my heart so strongly that I must resist all else and respond to the deepest desires of my heart.

Anne BenvenutiMay 22, 2016cephalophores, philosophy, evolutionary continuity, Iain Thomas, process of writing, beautyComment

"I Loaf and Invite My Soul"

Doing nothing often leads to something.

Indeed, I am gestating something and will unveil it in due time, perhaps in August or September, if I understand the due date correctly. Meanwhile I loaf as the proper accompaniment to gestation, and I share a few notes on the process of loafing, beginning with a stage theory of loafing. The stages of doing nothing, according to Dr. Benvenuti, are:

Denial: in this stage the person can often be heard saying things like, "You can sleep when you die!" and "I want it all!"

Anne BenvenutiApril 14, 2016Walt Whitman, process of writing, process of loafing, doing nothingComment

Discovery of the Higgs Boson Element in Writing

I have found it! The search was difficult, not because the Higgs Boson of writing wasn't right under my nose, but layers of operant conditioning prevented my perception of it. Finally one day I felt its force, indubitably. The Higgs field potentiates an act of will in the writer by which she says no to everything else, allowing for the presence of the Higgs Boson field to be perceived even as the element rapidly decays into other elements, some of them sentences, which may congregate in fields of attraction into whole paragraphs.

Anne BenvenutiJuly 15, 2012process of writing, Higgs fieldComment

My Writing Life

I read Annie Dillard's The Writing Life many years ago and was so impressed with how she nailed it, "A writer is someone who writes." So simple, so elemental. Tap the keyboard, or put pen to paper, and—voila!—you are a writer. It's truly the definitive thing. But did she mention what it takes to get to your desk? Or mention that, after you have written, and you’ve read, and you’ve written again, you have to read and write some more. It’s such a. . . process.

First, you need time and space for writing, however you make it or find it.