What matters most
These are not my words, but please read on. Links (in red) are quoted text.
To write what matters most is to accept an invitation, an opportunity to return to scenes from our life to ask questions and find some answers. But what happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then? What happens if I live in a quiet novel and the novel is about a woman who is even more intimately acquainted with grief than I am? The [novel’s] last line should strike like a lover’s complaint.
This pocket-sized post is the first in a regular Sunday series on commatology: commbistories. My new word riffs off Albert Einstein’s notion of combinatory play, which I learned about last week in Nicole Breit’s fabulous video invitation to her self-paced “Spark Your Story” courses. As Nicole explained it, the idea is to take two unrelated things, bump them together, smush them around, stand back and see what happens. Play with that.
I wondered what kind of magic could happen with five unrelated things.
Image by Daniele Levis Pelusi
Today’s commbistory combines one sentence each from five unrelated articles I read online this week. Each article is thought provoking and poignant, and inviting you to read them is the point of this word play. The authors of these five intriguing sentences, in order of placement, are:
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- Ellen Blum Barish in her blog post Just a Song Before I Go
- Devin Kelly in Out There: On Not Finishing, featured in Longreads
- Theresa Kishkan in her blog post Green Grapes and Late Summer Coyotes
- Jesmyn Ward in On Witness and Respair, published in Vanity Fair
- Suzanne Buffam in “On Last Lines,” found on a blog of tweet-sized poems linked to the Twitter account @poemtoday.
The images in this post are from Unsplash: a treasure box of freely usable photographs. The feature image of an open heart on the homepage is by Cyrus Gomez of Columbus, Ohio. The image above, which I found when I searched on “fusion,” was created by Daniele Levis Pelusi, an Italian photographer who plays with texture and colour using mostly Fuji cameras. See more of his work here.
I have some qualms about my concept.
First, the extra m in commbistories. My inner stickler wants to insist on combistories—one m—because the word comes from “combine” (from Late Latin combinare “to unite, yoke together,” from Latin com “with, together” + bini “two by two”). But my damn-the-rules creative self likes how the double m echoes commatology. These two parts of me are constantly duking it out. When I created this blog, I didn’t hesitate to take liberties with words. And that won’t change.
But taking liberties with other people’s words can be … theft. That’s why I credited the authors three different ways and stated clearly at the top: These are not my words.
I like the sweet little story that resulted from my combinatory play.
Still, I’m undecided.
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- Are commbistories intertextuality or plagiarism?
- One m or two?
Tell me your thoughts.
10 Responses to “What matters most”
Here’s a great reply to question 1 that came by email:
1. I think intertextuality… that drawing from another writer’s work, juxtaposing, deconstructing, building something new is useful and valuable to the literary community and not plagiarism. I think of plagiarism as rooted in selfish gain, fraudulent, cheating. What you’re up to is exploratory, creative, sharing with community…
I, too, am torn between the öne m or two.” I think I prefer the single m, but it’s such a slim margin that I may be imagining it.
Thanks, Karen. I love the idea of a margin so slim it might be imagined. I think I’ve decided on one m. Thanks for weighing in!
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