The Telling

The telling.

That's what I like best about anything: stories, essays, novels, plays, epics.  That's what I love.

How the makers create meaning sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word, and sometimes morpheme by morpheme.  There's a wonderfully erotic ee cummings poem about bodies that has the phrase "I like its hows" and I'd apply that to every story, every essay, ever offered up to its readers.

The hows.  The telling.

I only wish I'd figured out in grad school how to craft that focus into an appropriate project.

Some might find that a shallow approach to literature, but there's a world of interest in that surface interface between teller and told, between player and audience, between maker and you.  

If you want to dive deep, you have to start at the surface and return to the surface.  There's more there there than we are often taught to understand and appreciate.  (And, frankly, most misreadings arise from lack of attention to detail, to the foundation, to the surface interface I'm calling attention to, to the there.)

Luckily, teaching intro to literature and intro to non-fiction at a community college allows me to delve so much into the telling on a daily basis.