I’m changing the focus of this Tumblr a little - instead of mostly reblogging things of interest to literary sorts and linking to my other blogs, I want to focus more on writing. Since I’m not taking any classes at the moment, and am working in an administration/supervisory role, I need a place/project to do some writing other than my creative work. 

This will be a space to write posts of interest to writers in the grey area, acolytes on the path of the literary, those who know they are writers, want to write more than anything, who’ve studied writing, maybe even have a BA, MA, MFA in it, have honed their skills, read The Elements of Style twice, built a portfolio of painstakingly edited pieces, have been told by others “You can write”

…but feel slightly uncomfortable when telling people “I am a writer” because we haven’t quite got the credentials to back it up yet.

I listened to a radio interview on CBC’s The Sunday Edition last spring with theatre actress Martha Henry. I love her answers and ideas about the devotion that it takes to be an actor, how she feels about acting is very similar to how I feel about writing.

When she was asked as a young woman, trying to get into a theatre school, “Why do you do it?” She replied, “Well I have to do it, I can’t do anything else.”

This reminds me of similar thoughts I’ve read in writer’s journals, along the lines I have got to write and I must be a poet. 

I think it is the same for many writers.

We have to be writers because we can’t be anything else. We’ve tried becoming lawyers, accountants, teachers, computer techies, or artists instead, and really, if we could we would be those things much rather than go through all the trouble of being a writer, but it is hopeless. We have to do it, we can’t do anything else…

So this tumblr is for those who have to…and are in the process of doing so.