Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
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Writing Although it's usually just a Letter-to-the-Editor, or a quick magazine article, I feel lucky to have had some writing published in various places (especially considering my education consists of a business degreee!). Anyway, as time permits I'll post some of my published stuff for review by that small, intimate group of critical readers known as the Internet... |
- Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon
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| V.S. Pritchett once said that a writer stops living at twenty-five, then devotes the rest of his years to writing about that first twenty-five... |
"It is an author's most solemn obligation to honor truth. If the free and independent writer does not speak truth to power, who will?"Note to my fellow American writers: What a gutless pack of invertebrates you mostly are. What a fawning groveling writhing genteel array of courtiers (male courtesans) - gutless temporizing trimming poetical-rhapsodical fence-straddling castrated gelded neutered craven equivocating tepid vapid insipid timorous timid high-minded low-bellied spineless cool hip crafty cowardly moral jellyfish you are! Banana slugs of literature! A living slime-mold on our intellectual life! (from Journal XX, Confessions of a Barbarian, p 343)
- Ed Abbey
"... let me say a word or two in favor of the habit of keeping a journal of one's thoughts and days. To a country man, especially of a meditative turn, who likes to preserve the flavor of the passing moment, or to a person of leisure anywhere, who wants to make the most of life, a journal will be found a great help. It is sort of deposit account wherein one saves up bits and fragments of his life that would otherwise be lost to him."
- John Burroughs Spring Jottings
"It should be easier, certainly shorter work to compose a memoir than an autobiography, and surely it is easier to sit and listen to the one than to the other. . . . In my [memoir] I find most of what I've got left are not memories of my own experience, but mainly the remembrance of other people's thoughts, things I've read or been told, metamemories. A surprising number of them turn out to be wishes rather than recollections . . . hankerings that the one thing leading to another had a direction of some kind, and a hope for a pattern from the jumble - an epiphany out of entropy."
Writing as Therapy!
"Since I couldn't sleep anyway, I decided to get up and write in my journal, a technique I often recommend to my therapy clients to get their feelings out. The idea is to write without lifting your pen, so you can write without editing anything. Just letting the words flow, tumbling from the gut, allowing the raw feelings to spill without thinking about how they're coming out of what they sound like - out from the bowels of your belly, where they're overpowering your ability to sleep, relax, think, talk, or behave reasonably - can do wonders for a troubled mind. I call it verbal vomit. Get those words out. They're toxic on the inside and totally benign on the outside - as long as you splat them down on paper and not onto another person. The idea is to detoxify yourself, not harm someone else with your poisonous words. So, you write, then you burn or tear up the paper, or tuck it away in a safe place where no one else will ever read it. Once the ripping, roaring, raw emotions are out and you've given yourself a little time to calm down, you're cleaned out a bit and free to think rationally. Now you can choose carefully how you want to discuss the real issues that are still left and important to resolve."
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I've always been concerned about the environment, biodiversity, and quality-of-life issues. In my late 20s, during the 1980s, I started the environmental organization Wilderness Defense! and kicked it off with a "huge" public relations campaign of letter writing, talk shows, and speeches (at schools, clubs and similar gatherings). This particular letter was an early attempt at gaining public awareness about population and sprawl issues in the Denver Metro area. Titled, "It's already too late for the Metro area," I jumped into a long laundry list of reasons why population growth and sprawl where ruining our lives along Colorado's "Front Range." Of course the Post's editors cut a large portion of my writing out in addition to injecting some typos (typographical errors) that I hadn't already created myself. So, I telephoned them, the next day, demanding that they publish my entire letter sans typos and editing. I remember them laughing in the phone and saying they don't even give that kind of consideration to their biggest advertisers! Ahhhh youth, it never hurts to try! |
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