Words

I love language.

Some works are feasts for the senses, evoking and invoking so much with their lushness. Their authors have chosen precisely the right words. At this moment, I think of Shakespeare, W.B. Yeats, Lesya Ukrainka, Isabelle Allende, Jonathan Carroll, Neil Gaiman, James Joyce, J.R.R. Tolkien, Kazuo Ishiguro, and many others I admire.

“With writing, words are everything. A good may writers have said it and repeated it, a lot of them are saying it at this very moment, and I say it–words are everything in writing. When one cannot write, it is not, as we often say, that one cannot express one’s ideas. It is that one cannot find one’s words, a banal situation for writers. Words lie there to be used as raw material by a writer, just as clay is at the disposal of any sculptor. Words are, each of them, like the Trojan Horse. They are things, material things, and at the same time they mean something. And it is because they mean something that they are abstract. They are a condensate of abstraction and concreteness, and in this they are totally different from all other mediums used to create art.” (The Trojan Horse, Monique Wittig)

Words are so rich; and we, as writers, have to somehow choose the right ones to tell the story, to set the mood, to communicate dialogue, to invoke a setting, to establish rhythm, to evoke emotion.

I am grateful for the opportunity to share some of my words with you.

Published by Valya

Valya Dudycz Lupescu is the author of Mother Christmas, The Silence of Trees, Forking Good, and Geek Parenting. She is also the editor of Embroidered Worlds: Fantastic Fiction from Ukraine and the Diaspora, published in 2023 by Atthis Arts. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been published in The Year’s Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Ukrainian American Poets Respond, Kenyon Review, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium, and others. Valya has been making magic with words and food for 25 years, incorporating traditions from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *