Reply to comment

So I did write about Kate Bornstein's visit in the forum for that week in November, but I never got around to talking about Barry's talk and 2-day workshop which I attended. More than being incredibly generative, I thought her workshop was almost exceptionally accessible. To me, she really articulated the anxieties I felt as far as writing went about creating something that is "worthy" of being read. In other words, she treated writing as a biological function, as something everyone can do and absolutely should do because it is as imperative and simple (maybe even involuntary) as breathing. I loved that she made mistakes valuable, truly valuable. It wasn't at all an empty relativist approach in the vein of "everything has meaning and value to somebody or if you just look at it from a certain perspective." No. Hers was a point blank insistence on the fact that the act of creating something (especially through personal experience/memory and recollection) necessarily has intrinsic value. Like Anne, I was struck by her assertion that we do not have experiences and then write about them but rather WRITE TO HAVE AN EXPERIENCE. That was pretty mind-blowing. It valued the labor of writing (and thinking) in a way I'd never seen valued before. And that was particularly powerful.