Have you ever paused to define your aesthetic? I recently interviewed K-Ming Chang for Write-minded, and I was taken by the way she discussed how she followed language to find her story. “I’m interested in the language serving itself, and reveling in the language and sound as their own form of meaning and beauty,” she said.
You pose hard questions. I think that my aesthetic leans toward the poetic and the lyrical, toward trying to make more "beautiful" life's realities, whether mundane or dramatic. Someone said recently in a podcast, it might have been K-MIng Chang in Write-Minded, that there is danger in the poetic aesthetic, in that you might end up making too beautiful something inherently horrific and traumatic. More specifically, I think my writerly aesthetic can be described as "soothing" in that I want, ultimately, to have a flowing, imagistically and thematically integrated piece of writing.
You pose hard questions. I think that my aesthetic leans toward the poetic and the lyrical, toward trying to make more "beautiful" life's realities, whether mundane or dramatic. Someone said recently in a podcast, it might have been K-MIng Chang in Write-Minded, that there is danger in the poetic aesthetic, in that you might end up making too beautiful something inherently horrific and traumatic. More specifically, I think my writerly aesthetic can be described as "soothing" in that I want, ultimately, to have a flowing, imagistically and thematically integrated piece of writing.
Thank you not only for the insights, but also for the extras you include -- questions and prompts and quotes.
Love this, Grant. The whole conversation about aesthetic was very inspiring and enlightening. So glad you had more to say about it!