I’m teaching at the low residency graduate creative writing program at Pacific University and right now I’m listening to my friend Claire Davis give a craft talk on how to write necessary scenes of violence. Hearing her marvelous reading voice–a voice that’s soft and simultaneously tough I’m reminded of how central literary writing is to our growth. Even the violence remembered is the stuff of our psychic architectures, each of us has survived the tough, acrid, half smothering hours of dark childhood or impoverished marriages or a war zone too gruesome for a hundred thousand lives. Hearing a shrewd, tough minded writer talk about incorporating the necessary facts into narrative is hard but gratifying. If you don’t know Claire’s work I urge you to look her up.
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Planet of the Blind 