Made from Concentrate

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking. I don’t know what I think about certain subjects, even today, until I sit down and try to write about them.

• Don DeLillo, winner of the National Book Award for “White Noise”

DeLillo is on to something.

The word think has Old English meanings: to imagine, conceive in the mind, consider, meditate, remember. The word think originally meant to “cause to appear to oneself.”

Thinking is a form of gratitude. To go from “think” to “thank,” you only have to change one letter, and it’s a vowel!

To write is to think, to ponder and explore a subject, a conundrum, or a character.

As a poet, I will write about a single word in order to learn about it: “density,” “denial,” or “resilience.”

I’ll start with a morning coffee cup hunch, and hunt it down, skin it and preserve it with salt, via my thinking process before lunch.

I will express what I disover as simply, compellingly and eloquently as I can. Sometimes that’s in a poem, and other times that’s an essay or a short story. One day, it might be an entire novel.

Neuroscience research is showing that our complex and evolved human brain (our social organ) is highly plastic and underutilized.

Maybe writing is the way to tap some of that unused capacity of the phenomenal human brain.

This essay originally appeared in Laying Low: Essays