What we don't talk about when we talk about writing.

(Apologies to Raymond Carver, for paraphrasing his title.)

There are many things we don't talk about, when we talk about something; whether because we agree not to, or disagree and therefore don't.

I was once asked in a survey-of-sorts, "What do people not talk enough about?" And I had answered: the female, and how her biology does her in. I, at that time, was dealing with my own body and its little failures, specifically, and with feminism and its own failures, generally. Another person would have a completely different answer, I'm sure. (One male, at least, might think that all females talk about are their bodies.) But my point is, there are a multitude of things we don't talk about. There are things we dislike to talk about. There are some things we are embarrassed about. There are things we don't know. There are things we don't know we don't know. There are things we fear.

So we choose our battles, right? Yes. We arm ourselves with as much information as we can, and we talk about what is important to us, we fight for our positions; we say what we want to say.

This is not the case when we write.

Oh, there have been many talks on this. How the written work is like a child you let go into the world or something. How the author is dead. Formalism. The workshop setup. The inevitable. My own favorite is Resil Mojares' take on the written work as "artifact". Where the author is not just dead, but a million years ago. Artifact you happened to because you were looking, or you stumbled upon it. And working with what is in front of you because there might be nothing else, or digging further when you want it to tell you something. Or imagining the rest, because that's all it affords you.

I wrote a bad prayer-poem some time ago, where I remember hoping for "my life its own story, and my poems a life of their own." Despite the many failures of that particular work, this is my fervent hope, still. The word artifact, in itself, already contains this hope, this prayer, as in its original Latin arte factum, it means "made with skill." This is all the talk we are afforded when we write: Here is something I made with all the skills I possess. That's it . We cannot plead to its readers, Be kind, nor can we simply instruct it to get up on its feet once it has been trodded on. We have to gather the words, put them back together. Learn what we have to, hope for the best. Here is something I made with all the skills I possess. Over and over. Again and again.

There is another side to that hope, too: That once I let a piece of writing go, that I let it go absolutely. The letting go of a child analogy is perhaps too kind; it is rather a disowning. That poem or story, once let go, has no more to do with you except for the byline. That's all your relation to that work: that name. "The I is a dramatic I," according to Sterling Brown, and Adrienne Rich adds that "so, unless otherwise indicated, is the You." I is not I, and You is not You. Simple enough, yes? And yes, we talk about this. And in the disowning, there is no pleading or instructing You have nothing more to do with me, You are alone now. We know this.

Not enough, I say. Not enough like we talk about the author, not enough like we insist the I has to be Her, no other way. Not enough like we like our dose of chismis, of intriga. We know this, too.

I once read a poem about sex to group of writers where, after I had finished, some people started to chant, "Non-fiction! Non-fiction!" They were not clamoring for a non-fiction piece. At least, not in the way that indicated how they would've preferred the latter to my poetry. They were wanting more, along the lines of stories on sex, provided of course, that it was no longer "disguised" into poetry, or fiction. As if this is what we do: take apart, tear, mince up events in our lives sufficiently for "anonimity" and throw them together in a buket, like so much fodder. For the pigs. And these are the writers, I think to myself.

So yes, we talk about our works, our poetics, what we write about. We talk about why we write. There are a lot of things we talk about, when we talk about writing. Isn't it time we let our writing talk for itself?