Writing is for me an act of faith.  In order to have faith enough to write, I must become as I was as a child. When I was a child, I had the very great good fortune to grow up on a farm where I could spend, sometimes, hours just looking at the sky, smelling the wind, feeling the damp earth under my spine, thinking small and large thoughts, wondering.  This looking, smelling, feeling, wondering trained me in what turned out to be the very heart of my creative work, though for the longest time I did not trust the slow dreamy quiet of the process enough. 

As an adult, I was glad to find that Brenda Ueland affirmed my childhood habit of being in her wonderful book, If You Want to Write: 

“This quiet looking and thinking is the imagination; it is letting in ideas.  Willing is doing something you know already, something you have been told by somebody else; there is no new imaginative understanding in it.”  (Ueland, 29)  

Though I come to the desk, day after day, and I write articles and book reviews and letters of recommendation aplenty, I cannot will myself into the place where the most important writing (the essays or poetry) happens, for that writing is driven by what I do not know.

Over and over I find Ueland echoed by poets, like Louise Glück who said in her essay, “Education of the Poet,” “The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden world is not inscribed by will;” or Robert Frost in his essay “Education by Poetry,” who says we write “believing the thing into existence, saying as you go more than you even hoped you were going to be able to say, and coming with surprise to an end that you foreknew only with some sort of emotion.”

My task is to keep finding my way back to a state of unknowing, even as I devour all the books and articles and stray facts or quotes that seem suddenly important to whatever I am working on.  I need a different kind of curiosity, one that leaves my assertive, ambitious self aside and becomes “like a child stringing beads in kindergarten—happy, absorbed and quietly putting one bead on after another.” (Ueland, 50)  It sounds easy, but those of us who write or paint or compose in this way know how hard it really is – how impossible it feels sometimes, which is why we need places to go off and be still. 

I had a terrible time learning to ride a bike.  All those things to think about at once!  And that was the problem:  too much thinking.  Of course, I want to know all I possibly can before I start to write, but once I begin, I can only take off flying down the road by forgetting what I’ve learned about pedals and brakes and balance-- and just have faith in a deeper knowing, lodged in my body, my heart, and the universe.  The reward for this kind of faith is the wind whistling in your ears, the flash of the world rushing to meet you.

Leatha Kendrick has been awarded an Al Smith Fellowship in recognition of artistic excellence for professional artists in Kentucky through the Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, which is supported by state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.