Welcome to our new guest blogger series “Why Write?,” in which we harry some of GMR‘s contributors with that old question — damnably obtuse, damnably pointed — Why do you write?

Future guest bloggers will include Stephen Dunn, Norman Lock, Tony Magistrale, Laird Hunt, and many others.  For now, though, it feels perfect to kick things off with past GMR fiction contributor Daryl Scroggins (fall 2010) and this deft blowdart to the heart of things:

 

Daryl Scroggins

Why Write?

 

Add writing to the five senses; I could no more refrain from writing than I could avoid looking out windows. We make so much of what we see, and all while believing that we are only seeing, that we are simply registering what already lies before us. To write is to drive out to a place that should be there.

But what about readers? Are they just the net in the tennis match? Not if the game is well played—and they participate in making that possible. (Thanks, Robert; but not for all your love of limits.)

It’s raining.
I must be writing.
The blackbird sits
in the cedar limbs.

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