Reginald Gibbons, Peter Turchi, and Maps of the Imagination

Fever enshrined, bronchitis wracked, and client focused, I have not, this past week, been an honest bibliophile; the book stack has not diminished. Late this afternoon, however, I began to read Peter Turchi's Maps of the Imagination: The Writer as Cartographer, which has the distinct pleasure of making writing sound like something I might want to do someday or, at the very least, something I still need instruction in doing.

On page 16, I stopped, for there I came upon the voice of Reginald Gibbons, a poet/novelist/teacher/editor I'd met in Spoleto, Italy, in the early 1990s, during my first-ever encounter with other writers. Here, in Turchi's book, Gibbons was, as articulate and eloquent as ever. His quoted words:

"Writing delivers us into discoveries of what, till we had formed some way to articulate it in language, had remained unformed, had been unknown to us. The articulation becomes the knowing; the knowing comes out of the process, and it refuels a further effort at voyaging, comes to us in the exhilarating moments of being in-our-work-in-progress."