I just spent a LOVELY afternoon with people that I have known my entire life; whom I consider family. Which got me to thinking about how the family structure can be such a peculiar dynamic. My grandparents would consider family to be those that we share a DNA bond. Nowadays family has such a different meaning. For me, I consider family to be those that I love and trust; people who have been significant in my life regardless of the fact that we don’t have any relation or share a genetic code. I also I find myself spending a lot of time working with the topic of family within my writing.
I’m currently working on revising a short story that I have been working on for quite sometime. I really need to move forward and send the thing out to a few literary journals for publication – but that would take another blog post to discuss the issue about publication. At any rate, the main focus of the piece involves a woman who is trying to work through her own purpose and identity. The narrator of the story is a seven year old girl. I’m not sure why I went with having the story told from this perspective but I like having the naïve narrator demonstrate a silent strength that we – as adults forget we possess.
I’ve also used vernacular as a central component of the character. It’s taken me a while to begin to understand my central theme as a writer and I think I’ve found it; family, vernacular, and identity. This is really starting to sound much like my own personal life. But I guess as a writer – we all write from our personal experiences one time or another.
How have you worked to find your voice as a writer? What is your central theme as a writer?
Triplicity 