Stories trace their roots to impassioned human interactions with the world. I always sense a storyline as an emotional yearning embedded in a deep fissure waiting to erupt.

A writing tablet evidences the writer’s mind shadows, the dark twin that sketches the meandering of our conscious mind and taps into the hidden resources of our unconsciousness.

Human beings innate complexities resist reduction into simple sentences and neat paragraphs. The stories that come nearest to expressing the ambivalent nature of people are textured and occasionally inconsistent and express waves of inner uncertainty. A simile and a metaphor are not literally true. A figure of speech, symbols, and allegories are mere expressions that when interlinked with other text assist explain facts, ideas, and emotions. Useful facts are elusive; we must look for them, and then express them using whatever mechanism proves most authoritative. We can never directly describe emotions; we resort to metaphors to describe emotions and other illusive thoughts. Ideas by virtue of their untested nature are often untrue or at best rough approximations of truth. Lyrical writing is equivocal; it is never exactly true or precisely false. Lyrical language attempts to express and connect sentiments through extrapolation and misdirection. The writer’s task is to melt away durable facts, breakdown the symbolic depictions of solid reality, and discover the liquidity of a passionate inner life that provides the hot breath to our steamy humanness.

All forms of creative thinking involve a struggle to conquer or master something, and usually that specific something eludes us completely. A personal essayist struggles to construct paragraphs and sentences to comprehend their authenticity. The essayist also labors to choose the right words that provide the proper degree of nuance to the texturized material. Language, which creates the grainy surface and content of sentences, reveals the pinging of the essayist’s mind at work.

A person gathers all their resources to compose a foursquare philosophy for surviving each day, an engagement driving at a union of seemly inapposite associations to spotlight an androgyny of inspiration for living better. Combating self-alienation, roving after dusk without a map, unsure of the topography that lies ahead, a sincere pathfinder tentatively picks their way by using penetrating low beams and flashing wide-angle high beams. Only by continuing on the bewildering path, can we find what we seek. The writer peers into the encasement of gloom seeking out a deferential of lightness and darkness in the midst of the incongruous elements that foreshadow a person’s peripatetic quest to steer a meaningful life. By displaying the coexistence and intersection of blackened sequential realism overlaid on a snowy field of internalized temporal legend, the narrator assiduously lumbers to shed a ban of moonlight on the battered pages of their brash secular existence.

Storytelling gives form to the metal dialogue of the mind and in doing so, reveals our self-fiction. Memory and imagination fills part of the space and time dimensions that we live in. We use memory and imagination to write stories in order to bridge our fear of nothingness and offset our trepidation of paddling into the river of insanity. We write into the heart of darkness and flirt with oblivion in order to ascribe meaning to our lives and to immortalize the people who we love.