May 12, 2015 by Amy
The power of words
I think the thing that amazes me most this week, besides learning that the Latin root of “graduation” means “to step off,” is that the ancient art of writing can still be so fresh and new and creative that it blows my mind. It also gives me a huge inferiority complex, but that’s a whole ‘nother blog post.
There’s a hashtag trending on Twitter (okay, not trending for the general population maybe but mostly for word nerds like me) that involves fiction. It’s #twitterfiction. (That’s not the super-creative and awesomely fresh part. Just to be clear.) It involves lots of writers using Twitter to share new work. It’s an online Festival of Fiction, which is cool in and of itself. Yesterday, I was completely blown away by the posts of Celeste Ng (@pronounced_ing). She Storified them all so you can read through them quickly and easily, with the photos. I’m gonna do you a favor and just give you the link right here, so you don’t have to log into Twitter and find Celeste and scroll through her tweets, or go digging through the now thousands of #twitterfiction tweets. You’re welcome.
https://storify.com/pronounced_ing/twitter-fiction-2015
Cool, right? Wicked awesome.
And then today, I found an interview that involves questions answered by eBay posts:
I read an article the other day about how writing about your past can help you reshape your own future. Some smart guys did research that shows when people are given the opportunity to write their autobiographies, and then edit their words, they can effectively change how they move through the rest of their lives. When the study involved college students, those who wrote showed improved grades and a much lower propensity to drop out. When the study involved people fighting obesity or illness, those who wrote tended to have much healthier lives.
Someone from the St. Louis Writers Guild (of which I am a proud member) posted on our Facebook page the other day that there is a program here in town that involves writing therapy for military veterans. My cousin in Cincy (hi, Clare!) shared one of her outreach programs that brings people together for a Community of Stories. She shared a video of a reading last year that affects me to this day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTFjYgCNswU
I am humbled in the face of all this. And challenged to continue trying to share all the jumbled mess that is inside my head.
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