Dear Memory by Victoria Chang

Author:Victoria Chang [Chang, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Literary Figures, Literary Collections, Letters, Diaries & Journals
ISBN: 9781571313928
Google: TiYCzgEACAAJ
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2021-11-15T23:44:11.174915+00:00

• Maternal Great-Grandmother (middle), Mother (center top) •

Dear Teacher,

You were the most rigorous teacher I’ve ever had. I imagine this is something you’ve heard before. At the time, your intelligence seemed like an outpost, perhaps in a different century. Have you ever noticed that century and country share all the same letters but one?

Not being an English major or having native English-speaking parents, I was challenged by your words, your letters. I read and reread, underlined, circled, double underlined, starred, put question marks next to them. Your words seemed so much older than mine. So much bigger than mine. Could this be possible? Could the same words you use and I use be that different?

Once you told me that sometimes I was in danger of outsmarting my poems, that sometimes my poems were written to illustrate an understanding I already had.

Do you know that Susan Sontag said something similar? I think I am ready to learn to write. Think with words, not with ideas.

You might know that Gertrude Stein said the same thing:

You will write if you will write without thinking of the result in terms of a result, but think of the writing in terms of discovery, which is to say that creation must take place between the pen and the paper, not before in thought or afterwards in a recasting.xv

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