What inspires me to write? I don’t have to think about. I can’t remember a time when my brain wasn’t constantly massaging a poem or writing a story forming the lines from ironic happenstance or complex, realtime events. For example, while watching the sunset in California a few years back I got a text that a family member had just passed. (yep, a text, that’s how we do it these days…) At that moment an entire farewell poem launched in my head. I jotted it down in my iPhone and locked the sunset in time, with a photo of the sky to remember what inspired me to write “My Uncle’s Final Sunset.” It’s not sad, or morbid, it’s that part of life you can’t avoid and like all things that go down on this wild journey between the cosmos and soil, I like to record it. (I thought of him here because he’s the guy who started this music lovin’, beltin’, singin’ jam session lifestyle)
From positive to negative things, we all do it in some way, don’t we? Years ago I heard an interview with a comedian who answered the question “where do you get your inspiration?” This comedian had just shared the hardships she’d survived and said (paraphrased) “most of us who laugh the loudest have the deepest pain.. we use laughter as an outlet” I think that sums it up. We use talents and tools to express the show in our head, whether it’s the latest “love story”, “soap opera”, or an absolute “$h!t show”, it’s usable material. That’s my answer…in a nutshell.
So, I’m just gonna keep on writing…