In her essay “Why I Write,” Terry Tempest Williams lays out a litany of reasons to sit herself down and participate in the wondrous and maddening activity of writing. Those that make the rabbit in my ribcage thump: “. . . because it allows me to confront that which I do not know. . . . to remember, and to forget. . . . to listen.”
What Williams says that resounds loudest and clearest for me is that she writes to meet her ghosts, to become less fearful of death, to create a path in the wilderness. I’ve spent a lot of time in real physical wildernesses, backpacking the Rockies, rafting the Colorado through the Grand Canyon, floating in the haunted world a hundred feet down in the sea. Living in the middle of a large city now, surrounded by humans of every age and race and social strata, I still try to write that path through the wilds, though it is not the one with giant spruce or sleek barracuda or sheer walls of bright angel shale and kaibab limestone. The city, with its dearth of natural grandeur, brings me face to face with ordinary people like and unlike myself, each of us rambling through our own interior wilderness. It is to those itinerant hearts that I write. I write—and read—to experience worlds and people that might otherwise be alien to me, and not necessarily because they are of a different race or different gender. I’ve come to realize that any middle-aged, white, American-born and -bred woman is, at the level of her private wilderness, as alien to me as the twenty-two-year-old immigrant son of the bodega owner a block from my house.
The vast and seemingly impassable spaces between us become more bridgeable by the imagining of lives different from our own. While my physical clan is a large network of Kentucky relations, my broader community consists of characters, real and imagined, with whose gene pool I share little. The most nearly divine experiences I have had, after all, have come through literature and art. Whether with peasants struggling home in a snowy Brueghel painting, with Native American reservation kids dealing with alcoholic relatives in Sherman Alexie’s fiction, with Degas’s prostitute stepping into her bath, with the young Mary Karr in her memoirs, even with Grendel in John Gardner’s hands—those moments of connection make the case for Marilynne Robinson’s claim that fiction is an “exercise in the capacity for imaginative love.” Words lend an antidote to the transience and vulnerability that can so easily strip our shared humanity of meaning. That has to be the why of it, why I persist in this wondrous and maddening thing.