Reader, I [am overly romantic].

mlh responded to my first post (thank you mlh) and, in the grand spirit of April blogging, I wanted to (a) recognize that mlh is and always will be awesome, (b) wonder why I like lists so much, and (c) talk about what mlh said, because it gave me back a way of talking about writing that I had let go of during law school.

I read your pinterest quotes about writing and I think they point to something interesting that I've always suspected: you are a writer. It's what you are, not just what you do, although, of course, they are related, but mostly, it's just the way you interact with the world, the way you work through things. Maybe that's overly romantic, but that's what I think.

I always love a block quote.

This is probably stating the obvious, but I binged on Pinterest writing quotes the other night. A few of my favorites:

"You don't write because you want to say something. You write because you have something to say." F. Scott Fitzgerald

"This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy and that hard." Neil Gaiman

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann

I'm not going to lie--I don't think I've ever read anything by Thomas Mann. But he isn't wrong. And I trust F. Scott Fitzgerald and Neil Gaiman. They have both saved me at different times in my life. Neil Gaiman's books will always conjure up an old empty two-bedroom apartment in Chicago that was so cold and quiet. So quiet. Fitzgerald makes me think of K, even though I read him in high school.

This was supposed to be about writing, but writing is entangled with reading. It's impossible to separate the two, from the writers who inspire to the inevitable workshop when your professor reads your poem and asks if you've been reading Li-Young Lee again. (Answer: always.)

I have a list of "Writers Who I Read" at the top of this blog. I'm going to work on building it with quotes and works and links and whatever else I dig up. Because this is how I see the world, how I interact with the world--through language and text and the written word. It doesn't always matter if I'm the one who wrote it, as much as I love that feeling. Jay Hopler once said (he probably doesn't remember saying this, but I wrote it down and carried it with me to Chicago and back) he once said, "Language has to be beautiful in a way the world cannot be." I think that's right. But I also think that language makes the world beautiful in a way that we don't expect it to be beautiful. Even the language of the law (thought you weren't going to hear about that this time, didn't you?)

Pair with the "Writer Who I Read" the list of "April," a group of writers who mentored and defined me. You'll see that mlh is one. She's brilliant and aware and I never tell her how important she has been to me--from the first day she called me "scarf girl" at an Inscape meeting. Everyone should have a friend who helps them see the world. I've been lucky enough to have several. And, again, as I build this blog, I hope to feature those friendships. Including you, Reader.