Three days a week, I meet with other writers in Writing Room Prime on Zoom where we spend an hour focused on writing, plotting, or anything that advances our careers as writers. I've been asking the participants why they write. Here's one of the answers.
"Why do I write? I could give you the cliché answer: 'Because I must!' but that would be a lie. My muse and I are lazy and would just as soon travel the world, most days, without lifting a pen or tapping a keyboard. I write because writing is communication – a connection between my brain and the readers’ brains. The ability to convey not just useful, factual information, but to share whole, imaginary worlds, is endlessly fascinating to me. The ability to tap into universal themes and emotions, to make a reader half a world away feel something or realize that they’re not alone in feeling it, is amazing. There’s almost nothing I won’t write, from technical manuals to children’s books to short stories to poems. I wrote my first children’s book, Trockle, for my son, who was, at the time, just learning to read independently. And I suppose I also wrote it for Trockle, the little monster who lived under my son’s bed, who insisted on telling his side of the story. I didn’t set out to write a story about appreciating the differences in others, but that’s exactly what I did. I think the best children’s stories do have a message, but it should always come second to an entertaining tale. I hope Trockle is, first and foremost, fun to read. I don’t mind if young readers get the message, too."
~ Holly Jahangiri, poet and author of Trockle
Her work also appears in Dreams + Nightmares, Poets Northwest Anthology 2023
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