Writing Matters

UPDATE. YOUR. BLOG!!! he whispered loudly, intimately in my ear.

We were at a drag queen bar on Church Street. I was tired, achey, and exhilarated. I’d just escaped the dusty realm of my mind (we’re talkin marking season, folks). I had attended a performance of spoken word poets, two of whom are my friends.

I had listened, clapped, chatted, and even hauled myself over to this bar. But it was time to go home. I hugged my friends goodbye, and this young man joined in the hug, giving me his secret yet voluble message. IT’S. BEEN. SIX. MONTHS! he added, and gave me an extra hug, just him and me.

I had to smile as I walked to the streetcar in the thickening autumn chill.

Writing matters.

It mattered to me as I listened to Sheri-D Wilson’s incantatory poems about the life of an artist, about micro-fame, and menopause. It mattered as I drank in The Zorras music and poetry with my ears: hard-scrabble politics, and love, and joy. I could feel the poetry regenerating the molecules of my body.

It mattered to the gender-queer dude in the bar. The Zorras told me later he’s been loving my blog for years. He’s a chef. ‘Ingredients queerly political’ (the original mandate of my blog), matter to him.

Words matter to folks like us. Words – poetry, novels, manifestos, chants, rants, stories and more stories – have defended us, revived us, consoled us, fed us.

Thank you, chef.

I’m back, ever-so-hesitantly, not knowing to whom and to what end these words walk across the page.

I might not always write about food. There might not always be photographs. The words might land in the novel I’m writing, or the lectures I’m giving, instead of this blog. But words, oh, yes, words, scaling walls and borders and binaries, always, always, words.