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 has been making magic with food and words for more than 20 years, incorporating folklore from her Ukrainian heritage with practices that honor the Earth. She’s a writer, content developer, instructor, and mother of three teenagers. Valya is the author of MOTHER CHRISTMAS, THE SILENCE OF TREES, and the founding editor of CONCLAVE: A Journal of Character. Along with Stephen H. Segal, she is the co-author of FORKING GOOD: An Unofficial Cookbook for Fans of The Good Place and GEEK PARENTING: What Joffrey, Jor-El, Maleficent, and the McFlys Teach Us about Raising a Family (Quirk Books), and co-founder of the Wyrd Words storytelling laboratory. Valya earned her MFA in Writing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her poetry and prose have been published in anthologies and magazines that include, The Year's Best Dark Fantasy & Horror, Kenyon Review, Culture, Gargoyle Magazine, Gone Lawn, Strange Horizons, Mythic Delirium. You can find her on Twitter @valya and on Mastodon.social @valya

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