I want to build a park

An update on where this is going.

Low Tide at Pourville, near Dieppe (1882) by Claude Monet

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Dear friend,

I’ve been scheming ways to maintain a writing practice that is consistent and easeful. The types and volume of work I do continue to expand, and my writing practice has been living a thin life slipped in wherever small holes of time appear. More recently, I’ve tried carving out blocks of writing time each week, but what I crave, or perhaps miss, is a more intimate daily practice. 

My engagement with writing has petered out over the last few years. One reason is that what I wish to do with writing has become increasingly ambitious, which has elicited a proportionate amount of fear. Another is that my anxieties about being in the world amongst people have faded considerably, allowing my mind to fall into silence more often, and making it possible for me to share my thoughts in speech with less obstruction. Writing is no longer a matter of survival for me, which is fucking weird. It’s been fucking weird for a few years.

Writing is still a place where I aspire to do transformative work for the world. Despite growing all kinds of other muscles, I know that my deepest allegiance is to the act of writing and its resultant traces. Between the two, the traces that emerge from the act, such as the written word, feel less vital that the act itself. Two questions in my artistic practice have been: How can the private act of writing be shared with other people? Are the traces it leaves the only possible transmission? 

I’ve been feeling a growing hunger to go outward with my writing, to write beyond myself to represent and reimagine the external world. Writing as inner excavation is second nature to me. And there is incredible power in sharing that, in inviting someone into your bedroom and letting them see how you live. But I’ve spent so much time repainting walls and rearranging furniture. I want to learn how to build a void deck, a train station, a park. I wish to stretch personal inquiry toward social inquiry. I hope to directly address themes that resonate with other people, and to do so in dialogue with other texts in the world.

I’m going to try writing more rigorously with this newsletter, even if still irregularly. I’m going to try to converse more with other texts, while hopefully avoiding anything too dense and academic. I’m also loosening the newsletter’s focus on deep time and love to an open-ended interest in living, loving, writing, reading, making, and being together. I want to give my writing the room to move beyond what I want or think I will write about. 

That’s all I wanted to say this time, I think. I hope you’re taking care and resting well as we reach the middle of February. I wish you mischief, healing, and lots of glee in the months ahead. 

Thank you for reading! & I’m hopeful that I’ll be with you again soon.

Love,

Kia Yee