The trees have just begun bursting into green—less of a burst, more of a slow emergence—birches with small jewels of green emerging from their lacing limbs. Slowly each day they grow just a bit more, until you notice that there is actual green in the landscape, unmissable.
So many great points in here, I couldn’t grab the wonderful lines or I’d be reposting the whole post in the comments. (Also feeling seen with the concept that language is a spell to be treated carefully, as a writer of Under a Spell, lol.) Really love the question, who does language serve? And by that inquiry, how can we keep working to make it as wide as possible, to keep including and bringing back in…Those mountains out your window do feel like a she to me (ha) but that’s a beautiful point about the stream. “It’s life.” 💞💞
I've worked as a copy editor for over 20 years, and have been having more conversations about it (partly because even among my writer friends nobody seems to understand what I do for a living) in the last year than ever before. Today I got a long response back from someone I'm interviewing for an essay about copy editing -- whom I'd asked what *good*, collaborative copy editing would look like in contrast to a bad experience -- and am left wondering if I've been doing my job all wrong. Or wrong compared to others. I can't imagine *not* using it to better "hear" an author's voice, to explore the full universes contained within every word-shape, to see what can be done with language to widen stories and understanding, but in too many instances a writer's experience is one of being put into boxes and boilerplates.
Really loved this one today, Freya. Language is at the heart of so much of how each of us is taught to see the world, especially in that separation.
Robin Wall Kimmerer gets around the idea of he/she/it/they by calling more-than-human neighbours 'kin.' The plants, the animals - all are kin. She even came up with pronoun: 'ki'. See more here: https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/together-earth/2015/03/30/alternative-grammar-a-new-language-of-kinship
So many great points in here, I couldn’t grab the wonderful lines or I’d be reposting the whole post in the comments. (Also feeling seen with the concept that language is a spell to be treated carefully, as a writer of Under a Spell, lol.) Really love the question, who does language serve? And by that inquiry, how can we keep working to make it as wide as possible, to keep including and bringing back in…Those mountains out your window do feel like a she to me (ha) but that’s a beautiful point about the stream. “It’s life.” 💞💞
I've worked as a copy editor for over 20 years, and have been having more conversations about it (partly because even among my writer friends nobody seems to understand what I do for a living) in the last year than ever before. Today I got a long response back from someone I'm interviewing for an essay about copy editing -- whom I'd asked what *good*, collaborative copy editing would look like in contrast to a bad experience -- and am left wondering if I've been doing my job all wrong. Or wrong compared to others. I can't imagine *not* using it to better "hear" an author's voice, to explore the full universes contained within every word-shape, to see what can be done with language to widen stories and understanding, but in too many instances a writer's experience is one of being put into boxes and boilerplates.
Really loved this one today, Freya. Language is at the heart of so much of how each of us is taught to see the world, especially in that separation.