My Story + The World's Words

On looking between words and seeing through them to the other side + the brutality of flowers + the magic and elasticity of language + strange constraints for recapturing wildness & wonder

Yesterday, a friend who is writing about fairy tales emailed me in response to my Assay essay about narrators and child narrators to say that in the world of fairy tales, children use language “to point in between, around, or beyond words. If as adults we use words to classify, young children still have only a tentative grasp on the mental act of categorization, and they can still see through words to the other side. The word ‘flower,’ for instance, must be quite brutal to a young child."

Isn’t that an utterly gorgeous concept? To use language to point between, around, or beyond words? And that the word flower could be brutal?

This is the kind of magic and elasticity I strive toward in my relationship with language, so that I might bring that expansive and wide-open door of possibility into my writing. This is just one of the reasons I find working with literary constraints so potent and effective. I cannot be a child again (and sometimes I’m wholly grateful for that, as childhood was p…