[Audio Transcript] Hello, this is Dheepa Maturi, and welcome to Pieces of Light!
In my last note, I mentioned re-reading a book from childhood in order to break through my writer's block. As I pored over the story again after so many years, I thought about the sheer pleasure of reading as a child, of just getting lost in a different setting, meeting characters that felt like my own friends, and feeling I was part of all the action.
Of course, growing up, attending school, I learned the important skill of reading fiction more analytically—figuring out the messages an author was trying to get across, identifying larger themes, understanding tools like metaphor and symbolism and point of view.
Many years later, when I wanted to write fiction, I had to learn to break stories down much further, into acts, arcs, scenes, beats, timelines, dialogue. And if I wasn't careful, I could lose the beauty of a book, what it means, its role and function in the world. I could lose its wholeness.
I wrote this poem to remind myself not to lose that wholeness. In it, you'll hear the references to Richard Scarry's picture book character Lowly the Worm, as well as Madeleine L'Engle's Meg Murry from the young adult novel, A Wrinkle in Time.
And you'll also hear about a professor I encountered in college, one who really wanted us to break writing down to the most elemental parts . . . with results that disturbed me.
This poem, entitled “Licking the Page,” was published a few years ago in the journal Defenestration.
A Poem about the Pleasure of Reading