- Hopkins
And out of the llama notebook where I make my psychological observations, since Brian sent me off in the footsteps of the poet and of Piaget, here are some notes from the Taproot Talk:
5/20
Then again Sharma Shields the writer laying bare her imperfections in search of deeper understanding of who she is, and in the belief that this Spokane community’s mutual support for the arts will continue to grow and will benefit from the knowledge. She touched on the video game--King’s Quest--that inspired her to read Greek myths and start writing her own books, from reading them upside down in the crib, how her Grandma’s South Hill farm where she would play outside became the Target, how her parents’ cabin on Kilroy Bay became the turning point in her depression, the place where she kept her promise to herself to write. And she has seen counselors, beginning with a mostly deaf one who told her to enunciate very clearly her passionate emotions, group therapy, spoken in front of more groups than our little gathering at Spark about her work and her drunk driving that cost her the Lilac crown and didn’t stop there, these lies she told and now this truth, knowing it was wrong and trying to make it right, but which gave her the drama, the story, which surely every writer and everyone must sometimes wish to make real, and not only in telling the story--she touched on the ineffability topos the Dante lecturer mentions, praising her own imagination, whatever else she might be dissatisfied with about herself, she is proud of that, and even if it doesn’t always make it to the page, it’s great up here. She had her images of family pictures and favorite books, and wanted sch a collage from each of her friends present, but of course another side of the ineffability topos is the impossibility of doing everything we might want, even such a small project as that, much less reading everything there is to read once it were done, like plumbing the self to complete knowledge in stories; whereas though she did not speak about it, that very silence at the end of all efforts, the mystical mystery of religious prayer or meditation practice, might be able. I held my question about story-telling or only -inspiring in video games, since it seemed like it was time to close, but maybe I’ll send her an email as well; Steph wanted to ask her about working on her publications. She also reminded me about her answer to one good question about the possibility of prevention or mitigation of others making her mistakes--what could someone have said? Not to say, Don’t do this, because they’re going to want to experiment, but to tell true stories, a la Pullman, of what she has experienced.
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