Why I Write

Person-Centered Writing

The Cafe des Templiers in Collioure, France, where I wrote much of the first half of Wanting.

I write as a human, I write as a person.

A person is more than a body or a soul or the hylomorphic combination of the two. A person is an incommunicable being—one whose innermost thoughts and feelings will always be, at some level, unable to be fully communicated. And yet that doesn’t stop us from trying.

C.S. Lewis, in his masterpiece ‘Till We Have Faces (the book he thought was his most important, yet few people have read it), puts these words on the lips of the main character: “I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces?”

Writing is about finding my voice, finding my face.

I write to give expression to inexpressible groanings, I write so that I can figure out what it is I think, I write so that I may forget.

I write because,…