The Writer’s Life: Marian English

This original essay from Marian English, is part of a series of essays from the writers of The Portland Fiction Project.  You can read more of Marian’s work here, and check out our interview with her here.

I Was a Reader Before I Was a Writer
an essay by Marian English

I am a hopeless bibliophile. Seriously, there should be a twelve step group for people like me. Leaving Powell’s empty-handed is, for me, a noteworthy achievement.

My husband, whose relationship with books is more pragmatic, is regularly horrified when he comes across my stashes of books—under the bed, behind, under and on chairs, in cabinets, in my car—that I’ve tucked away with the intention of reading eventually, because I am almost always reading between two and four books simultaneously and my book shelves overflowed long ago. It’s sick. I’m sick, which is why I write.

The pleasure of a story, whether telling it or hearing it, is basic to human existence. Traditions around storytelling (around a fire, tall tales, trickster tales, fables and ghost stories in the dark) exist in every culture worldwide, and they serve purposes that are as poetic as the most formal verse and more persuasive than instruction. We need stories like we need love and companionship and meaning, and that will never go out of fashion or become outdated no matter what the panicked publishers might fear.

Reading and writing are, at their base, about communication. Communication, communion, communing, community, common—they all come from the same root meaning fellowship, connection to others. Books, unlike movies or plays or concerts, are intimate.

One person writes down their thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. Maybe they tell a story, maybe they tell what they know to be true, or tweak our perspective in a telling way. They tell it with detail and depth—lingering in certain moments—that they would never venture face to face, because we get impatient with our short attention spans, and because such vulnerability under a direct gaze is more terrifying that most of can bear.

Then another person reads it and their own thoughts and ideas are responding simultaneously as they experience what the first person was thinking or feeling or imagining. Maybe they argue, maybe they learn, maybe it affirms some feeling or thought they have always harbored, but never spoke of. Our experiences and memories of individual books are characterized by both the telling and the response, and there is not much more personal an experience than one thought or feeling touching another.

It’s an intimacy that crosses not only space but time. I have as much a relationship with William Shakespeare as I do with Neil Gaiman. That’s why we love them—the books, their authors. Why we keep combing the shelves, looking for a connection, another deep and intimate communion across time and space that allows us to forget our petty daily routines and the way we fail to be ourselves with those we’re with, or listen to them and really pay attention to what they’re trying to say. We can open up more completely, and more deeply to a novel than most of the people we will know in our lives (and if there is a person in our lives that we see and open ourselves to, God help us if we don’t love them utterly).

The first time I picked up a pencil and wrote a story, I was trying to recapture a feeling from a book I’d read—I was trying to go there again. I still do that. I’ve written stories in response to things I’ve read by Neil Gaiman, and Ursula K. LeGuin. I’ve written stories in response to nonfiction, like James Hillman and Gary Snyder. They are my answering calls to the thoughts of theirs that have touched me.

Never mind that if any of these authors were to read any of them and respond, I will probably pass out. Sometimes, someone will read one of my stories and there’ll be a connection on some level . . . and really, what else is there?