All sorts of things can give my writing life a boost - a good conversation with a poet friend, my mother's lungs improving, an acceptance (more about that later), or a little dust storm swirl of synchronicity.
Last week, I was rambling on to a friend about my next chapter (another form of procrastinating) and how I wanted the main character to use skateboard mobility and what would that be like in the historical era of the chapter. She said that if there were wheelchairs then the character would use one.
I took a breath and went on a rant about how that wasn't true, that using a wheelchair was sometimes a choice made to make other people more comfortable, to be more at their eye level, how using a skateboard, or scooching, or setting up your home all at floor level could be the better choice.
The very next day, on the New Pages blog, I found a link to Kevin Connolly's photography. That is his image at the top of this post. He takes photos, from skateboard level, of people staring at him. The photos are wonderful, his experiences are often mine (I, too, have had people stuff money in my gaping-open backpack.), but what surprised me was how his art excited me about writing.
His images add yet another layer to the meaning of "point of view." We write from a particular angle that, along with everything else, includes our physical experience of the world. And, as his photos show so well, this writing, this point of view, hopefully, reflects against the reader in a way that offers a more complex picture of their own lives.
This has given me a renewed, still not quite all figured out, understanding of what my job is as a writer.
