Vi Khi Nao

photo credit: Uyen Nguyen

Literary Fabric

Writing should be a cinematic moment. The function of a writer is to convert word in such a fashion that its etymological beauty moves from frame to frame. In this state, anything is possible. Including the possibility of levitating, descending, dancing—a cinematic place filled with balletic gestures of human pain, sorrow, and bliss.

Writing should attempt to confuse its own form. Like how theater sometimes pretends to be a walking manuscript of dialogue and landscape. How does writing go about doing it: to be less of itself, it gazes half-vainly in the mirror occasionally—but not for too long. When there is a pool of text—spilling between the narrator + the writer, between the protagonist + its landscape—its reflection does seem to represent another art form, say performance art or a cloud. Say a piece of writing attempts to be the mother of deception, the father of untimelessness, or the pedophile of ruins: in this writing field of exertion, writing should try to eat its own primordial flesh, at least once. I think the best writing is the one that after you write it, it slaps you in the face. It wakes you up from a literary, contemplative daze of continuity and perfection and denouement. It pinches its own shape and it asks if it could experience another bout of diarrhea. Happy diarrhea. Flexible diarrhea.

At one point in my friendship with poet, Andrew Colarusso, over cinnamon tea and baked apples, Mr. Colarusso depicted an emotional fragment which he paraphrased as "temporal solitude." I want to discuss this temporal solitude in its ontological relationship to writing. There is something about temporal solitude in the act of writing and writing itself that has me by the cardiovascular limbs. I view it almost as a landscape of infinity pausing for itself. I think when writing pauses for itself, a word bending as to bow to another word, in its courteous acknowledgement, language becomes an art of cordiality and gallantry and butt bending. I like it when a word bows to another word in a sentence or bows to another paragraph above it or below it. There is something about this kind of literary socialization and connection that is very attractive and fulfilling and elegiac.

Writing should attempt to be ecological. I am an eco-writer. I recycle every word, every sentence, every fragment, and every juxtaposition. Because I recycle everything, I view writing as a large, long fabric in which I measure the lengths, widths, and dimensions of the sentences to make a dress or a shirt. These I turn into short stories or novellas, and the smaller pieces or end pieces of the fabric that can't be used for a blouse, I turn them into small poems.

The landscape of a piece becomes gracious and almost bountiful.