Read and write like your life depends on it
Words to live by from Adrienne Rich (where would we be without her?):
You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it (emphasis Rich’s). That is not generally taught in school. At most as if your livelihood depended on it: the next step, the next job, grant, scholarship, professional advancement fame; no questions asked as to further meanings. And let’s face it, the lesson of the schools for a vast number of children - hence, of readers - is This is not for you.
To read as if your life depended on it would mean to let into your reading your beliefs, the swirl of your dreamlife, the physical sensations of your ordinary carnal life; and simultaneously, to allow what you’re reading to pierce routines, safe and impermeable, in which ordinary carnal life is tracked, charted, channeled.
To write as if your life depended on it: to write across the chalkboard, putting up there in public words you have dredged, sieved up from dreams, from behind screen memories, out of silence - words you have dreaded and needed in order to know you exist.
- Adrienne Rich in What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics