FIRE DREAMS
Voices for Adventurer, Architect and Aphasiac
I have aphasia since 2006. I know it is ironic that my lack of language inspired my story. You do not want a good architect to divide his/her architecture and writing. I crave and craft every creation in a different way, but in way same way too. The writing is similar to the architectural drawings- collecting the diverse ideas and photographing the site. I used various sources: my letters to friends, my friends’ letters to me, my writings: my play, my middle school autobiography, my speeches, my short stories, my teen journal, my travel journals ,and a myriad of photographs/ postcards, my drawings. I thought about how to create an enjoyable and meaningful voice during my daily walks, before most people blogged. Then, pause, I move to a dreaming process, pause, writing very painfully, slow with myriad of errors, and then pause, waiting the muse show the adventurousness of each life. Then, mixed up ideas or forms or voices until the stew done, the building of my story, the song, is a surprise for a creator. But the most important source is a mind; a voice.
So, the reader recognizes different voices, but they are all the same voice- mine. Now, my telegraphic thinking, writing, and voice is intimate, direct, flowing unconsciously, but often stammering, poetic, or even trite. I wrote my story alone with WordQ- a word prediction program. I asked a nonprofessional editor, Erica, to circle or to change the type color to red. She wrote concise reasons: misspelling, switching word order, wrong tense, no references of people and places, confusion/conflict/unclear and wrong syntax. But I demanded that she did not correct my mistakes. It was my therapy, my words, my voice, and my life. I found out a right word/ phrase or change, a similar word, or ignored it because I assumed a reader would understand. Or not.
You must read all stories, all biography and my story not as if it was intended to be literal but as an effort at persuasion. It is a story that I continue to review and tell myself as I go on living and awakening. I wrote 138,000 words in FIRE DREAMS and will forge an account about the ten years reintegration to the real world and my son’s using drugs for escaped after he saved me.
What are your fire dreams, what are meaningful for you, or meaningless to you? Fire is the most fundamental of classical elements since for creates our dreams. It is a story that I continue to review and tell myself as I go on living and dreaming. You should awaken the storyteller within you because creating and telling matter.