{i miss paper letters}

For this piece, “the Struggle”, I came upon an essay by Minnie Bruce Pratt, a poet whom I have relatively little in common with, but whom I admire nonetheless.  She had written this seemingly-semi-autobiographical essay about her writer-life, and as I was reading it I wondered if it would be possible for me to be able to cull from it an essay that was, for me, seemingly-semi-autobiographical, and in a way that felt convincing.  So this led me to not some striking details (the mention of the year I was born-1979-as a pivotal point in time, the mention of reading, writing, poetry and falling in love, of a collective kind of consciousness and a desire to act as an agent for change) which coincided with my own history in a way that I felt connected to in a very positive way.  So I set to crossing out what was strictly hers from what was ours and was left with what was my own.