Why I Write

Why I Write

Written in 1998 and included in the PhilWP Invitational Summer Institute I archives

by Leslie Rutkowsky Pratt

Why I write.

I stole this title from George Orwell, liking the way the three long vowels roll off the tongue. Yet, my purpose in writing is very different than his. I write to get grants and fellowships. I write to win arguments. I write to earn praise from professors. In short, I write to express ideas. But within the act of writing, there is a more grandiose purpose. I really write because writing is a way of making sense of the world, a way of negotiating meaning. This is the real reason why I write academic papers, the real reason why I write letters and essays. This, I suspect is the reason why I am here.

Yet there is something more to the process of writing than I have let on. Writing can also be dangerous. The pen can be an unwieldy sword, forcing you to reduce your life to some concrete sign, a sign continually reinterpreted, possibly misinterpreted.

Writing can also be dangerous.

The writer becomes an adventurer. Each attempt I make to pen words about Frank and Lynn and Jill make me feel as I am betraying some trust. And as I write these stories, I hope Lisa does not feel this way when she reads poems about her mom. I feel a complicated mix of joy and sorrow as I write letters to Chris’ unborn child on the back of Ricky’s funeral elegy. I hope no one will ask to read it; I hope desperately that someone will demand to read it, demand for me to expose myself. That’s the danger. I leave myself open like an adventurer caught in a chasm. Do I fight my way up the sides of the mountain to face my enemy or do I wait at the bottom for the flood of memory to roll over me? Do I confront the reader and allow them to take what they will from the writing or do I not write and possibly loose the memory to the dangers of time?

The act of writing now becomes something else, becomes even more complicated. It is not an act of conquest, not an act of giving; it is an act of surrender, of giving yourself to the words. I write to revisit what I no longer own. My fiction and poetry and essays are personal experiences slipping away from me quickly every day – disappearing dangerously fast. My memory works like dry sand running through my fingertips. The more tightly I attempt to hold, to clutch, to grasp, and to retain, the more I lose. And so I won’t lose all of it, I write down what I can and I give it to Frank and Lisa and Michelle. I hope they take it.

It is not an act of conquest,

not an act of giving;

it is an act of surrender,

of giving yourself to the words.

All the things I have no more – childhood, bicycle, my championship swimming meet, my first kiss at the eight grade Snowball dance, the guy with the motorcycle I dated in high school, the party at Shawn’s when I got drunk, the night Frank and I danced in the rain – become my gift, a gift I must leave with clean hands, so the scholar, the translator, the adventurer, the hero, the martyr can write her experiences and offer up her past, all the while hoping the work never becomes too dangerous.

Leslie Rutkowsky Pratt teaches twelfth grade English at Lower Merion High School. Leslie joined the Philadelphia Writing Project in 1998 as a teacher consultant.

Leslie’s piece was originally written in 1998 and was included in PhilWP Summer Institute I archives.