pleasure and pain

The one-year anniversary of my first blog post came and went a couple of days ago, unblogged. That anniversary doesn't really feel like the anniversary of my blog though, because my first several posts were things I'd already written, and I posted them before I'd ever read a blog or really understood what a blog was. It was more than a month before I got any readers and started to get a sense of what blogging was all about.

It didn't take me long to discover with some dismay that there are A LOT of really fantastic writers out here. I'd always thought I was a delicate, unique snowflake. Which brings me to the topic of today's post: one of the many brilliant writers I have had the pleasure (and pain) of discovering over the past year - Beck.




It's perfect post time, and I had some great options this month. It was a tough call, but I nominate Beck's post, "Blood," for a perfect post award. I actually had a hard time deciding between that post and its follow-up because both generated a very high proportion of sharp intakes of breath in me at the beauty of Beck's language.

I can't even begin to paraphrase or deconstruct these posts; all I would end up doing is listing the brilliant turns of phrase that made me gasp... why don't you just go read both posts, if you haven't already.

Well, ok, just one quote, from the follow-up post:

"... worrying is my ancestral love language, the way that generations of women in my family have shown that they loved, love that manifests itself as warm sweaters and thermoses of soup and lectures..."

See? Beck really IS a delicate, unique snowflake, and she has the soul of a poet. She may not self-identify as a writer, but she sure as heck writes like one. And though she says that having children has derailed whatever creative process she might possess, I'm not buying it. The way she writes about motherhood is magic.

Check out more perfect posts at Suburban Turmoil and Petroville.