“Seeking meaning,” “inducing a questioning wonder,” “orienting the reader reflectively to a region of lived experience” What do such phrases evoke in you as a writer/reader? Do they induce a questioning wonder? Do they make your more interested in or excited about the prospect of writing?
This week’s readings really helped me articulate why life writing is such an attractive practice for me, both as a writer and as a reader. By collecting and truly touching elements and experiences in our lives, we can assemble them as a process of seeking meaning – less of finding it – and that process is as compelling and irresistible as it is frustration. I like thinking of “regions” of lived experience as maps of our lives, an archive of our thoughts but also geographic maps of the experiences lived in places that shape those places, not just our lives.
I’m not sure the phrase “inducing a questioning wonder” induces a questioning wonder itself (as the question suggests), but certainly having processual tools guide one along the experience of gazing at a life, touching a life, helps one mine the rich pools of experience that are we might want to externalize, and reconceptualize writing AS a fundamental human experience (not just writing ABOUT human experience). For what could be more magnetic about experience of being human than human experience itself?
