LINDA H.Y. HEGLAND

The sub-pages of this page are my published works. But I feel I need to include a statement of why I write what I write . . . .

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                          "When you write, you always want to capture the cruel radiance of what is."

                                                                                       - Walker Evans (photographer & sharecropper)

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My writing practice is an inquiry into the landscape of the body, geographical landscape, place, memory, narrative, and meaning. My intent is that my writing will unearth truths and help me to taste, in retrospection, the essence of what it was to live that moment - that small story. I write to give voice to unspoken memories, to unspoken experience.

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Michael Ondaatje said, in The English Patient:

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                     "We die containing a richness of lovers and tribes, tastes we have swallowed, bodies we have

                      plunged into and swum up as if rivers of wisdom, characters we have climbed into as if trees,

                     fears we have hidden as if caves. I wish for all this to be marked on my body when I am dead. I

                    believe in such cartography - to be marked by nature . . ."

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These memories, physical and emotional, the communal history, the memories marked on our bodies - they tell stories. Some stark, some catastrophic, some just detours, footnotes. Some are our runes. 

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I am fascinated by the sound and taste of words; how they can be rolled on the tongue or bitten sharp and small. How the mouth can fill with the absolute succulence - of words - the sentences the ingredients, the paragraphs the recipe. The way words can elicit memories (I remember when . . . ).

 

Exploring the power and potential or words is what my writing is all about; the turning of word, wringing the emotion from them. In my writing practice I am not avant garde, I am not of meta text - I am, well, simply a story teller. 

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