Braiding

A friend yesterday told me a story. She is a writer, my friend, an extraordinary one, the sort of person who can be gone for a very long time but emerges, is present, when you need her.

The story she told is her story, hers to tell. I want only to say that it is a narrative about what happens when one writer asks another for help, and help is given. We can't always peck our way out of our own fog, as writers. Sometimes we aren't given the time. Sometimes the only cure is another's voice in our head, provoking questions, a willingness to sit in some sort of communal silence until the haze of not knowing is lifted and replaced with knowing just slightly more than before. A willingness to help stave off the incomplete, the failed.

In-progress work is fragile work. Our job, when we are friends with writers, is to be gentle, always, and honest, always, to help the other crawl, swerve, leap, wonder her way back to her truest impulse.

Which is what my friend for many weeks was doing, and what I wish to honor here today.