snowflake, day 6
Jan. 7th, 2014 03:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
traintracksGoing to try to catch up and do day 7 a little later!
Day Six
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.
The obvious choice is Harry Potter, but others have already said about it what I would want to say and very elegantly and beautifully.
I'm going to go way back to my senior year in high school, 1992, to a book that came out and changed my life, because before I'd read the first paragraph of that book, I had never considered that I might want to be a writer or that I might be any good at it. But after I read the first paragraph, I had a new love of my life.
The book was Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
These are the words that made me KNOW I had to write like this someday:
Why is the measure of love loss?
It hasn't rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat.
The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered. Not this year the pleasure of rolling blue grapes between finger and thumb juicing my palm with musk. Even the wasps avoid the thin brown dribble. Even the wasps this year. It was not always so.
...juicing my palm with musk is what did it for me. (Now I can't get enough of ...resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth... -- GOD!) I ached with wanting to have written that. And I knew I wouldn't stop until I'd played with words and found that sort of ecstasy and sadness within them.
What follows in the book is a love story in which the gender and name of the narrator is never revealed. Winterson is a lesbian, so this was also one of my first examples of positivity regarding my own sexuality. It was like a writing and sexuality double punch!
I'm so grateful to this book for helping me find pieces of myself left unloved, and for having read it, I'm now here. <3
Day Six
In your own space, share a book/song/movie/tv show/fanwork/etc that changed your life. Something that impacted on your consciousness in a way that left its mark on your soul.
The obvious choice is Harry Potter, but others have already said about it what I would want to say and very elegantly and beautifully.
I'm going to go way back to my senior year in high school, 1992, to a book that came out and changed my life, because before I'd read the first paragraph of that book, I had never considered that I might want to be a writer or that I might be any good at it. But after I read the first paragraph, I had a new love of my life.
The book was Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
These are the words that made me KNOW I had to write like this someday:
Why is the measure of love loss?
It hasn't rained for three months. The trees are prospecting underground, sending reserves of roots into the dry ground, roots like razors to open any artery water-fat.
The grapes have withered on the vine. What should be plump and firm, resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth, is spongy and blistered. Not this year the pleasure of rolling blue grapes between finger and thumb juicing my palm with musk. Even the wasps avoid the thin brown dribble. Even the wasps this year. It was not always so.
...juicing my palm with musk is what did it for me. (Now I can't get enough of ...resisting the touch to give itself in the mouth... -- GOD!) I ached with wanting to have written that. And I knew I wouldn't stop until I'd played with words and found that sort of ecstasy and sadness within them.
What follows in the book is a love story in which the gender and name of the narrator is never revealed. Winterson is a lesbian, so this was also one of my first examples of positivity regarding my own sexuality. It was like a writing and sexuality double punch!
I'm so grateful to this book for helping me find pieces of myself left unloved, and for having read it, I'm now here. <3
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-01-07 11:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-08 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-08 03:12 am (UTC)She does write beautifully.
... I find there is so little "lesbian literature". I loved everything by Marguerite Yourcenar, even with the genders reversed.
I think I'll reread Written on the Body now. :)
no subject
Date: 2014-01-09 02:09 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-01-16 12:55 am (UTC)