To the Readers and Writers at Static Movement
I came late to writing, and not directly but rather by way of psychology and French literature. A circuitous route, some would say, but not really, not entirely.
Part of me always wanted to write but other things necessarily, it seemed, perpetually claimed my time. I was a voracious but superficial reader as a child and a teen. I loved the words and stopped to learn them, but didn't think I could ever write anything; it didn't really occur to me. And I wasn't schooled (or I missed it!) in textual analysis—not until I went back to university in my mid-forties to do French literature. But I did read through psychology,—Freudian, dynamic, cognitive— because I had those vocabularies, and they were my gateway into the poetry, the parabola of literature.
I did psychology in undergraduate school, then, after a stint in the Peace Corps, a degree in counseling, which I set aside to be a mother and a gardener. A few years into the stable home-life, kids gratifyingly launched into friendships and school achievement, I began to think about what else to do, what else to learn, what next?
After a bit of substitute teaching and a year as a part-time French teacher (I applaud all teachers everywhere), I took a graduate class in French literature, ostensibly to keep up my language skills. I was hooked immediately because I already read through the above-mentioned avenues of psychology. I knew little to nothing about poetry or linguistic analysis, however, so there were huge holes in my reading practice. And the stories, they touched me close to the bone. They made me want to write, made me think I might have something to say.
I knew I had to be a close reader before I could write anything of my own. I mastered analytical writing as a way of learning to tell myself how a text is constructed and what its components are, as a way of saying something in my own words through theirs as my vehicle for discussion. In the academic world it is an open secret that most professors of literature want to be writers but they need the day job to live. I was no exception.
I followed the path, wrote the articles, the book, published them and applied for academic jobs, which I did not get. I was too old in more than years it seemed, so I released myself from that ambition, worked out other arrangements for the financial issues, and let myself write. At first it was note-taking, journaling, and then it became obsessive re-writing. I wanted to get better at it– I still want to get better at it. Writing is more than something to learn to do well; it is something that will always be.
I've been writing things I consider to be stories for a year or so and, thanks to Zoetrope Virtual Studio, I've been able to get comments and invaluable help in learning to write by writing, and by reading other people's work. These collaborators and critics have come into my writing life as in a story I read on Zoetrope by Mary Lynn Read, like “Flares on the Highway” and I am deeply grateful.
I am pleased and proud to be published in and reading for Static Movement, The title image of this Zine was an immediate hook for me; its seemingly contradictory notion contains both stasis and motion, two things that when taken together, like the tenor and vehicle of a metaphor, make life (and story) possible; they are shelter and journey, stillness and action, Nirvana and Karma.
—Margot Miller