Thursday, March 14, 2019

writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun

--- Poet James Valvis, in the biographical statement below his poem The Distracted (2019 winner of the Neil Postman Award for Metaphor) in Rattle  #61, Fall 2018.

Quote in context - the biographical statement:

James Valvis: “I don’t know why I write. Or why I ever started. It feels a bit like asking a penguin why he eats fish. It’s just what penguins do. Still, I’m an unlikely writer, to say the least, a ghetto kid who preferred baseball to Baudelaire, chess to Chesterton, Whitman’s chocolates to Whitman’s poems. I think I simply had too many stories inside not to let some out—and not enough friends to tell them to. I have this theory writing was invented by introverts who didn’t want extroverts having all the story-telling fun.” (web)