Kristin Posehn

I’ve always been rather slow and spare with words, going so far as to joke that my first language is art while I’m working on English. When I was 24 and mid-PhD in sculpture, I mourned that I’d never write a novel because I was too old, hadn’t been to school for writing, and had zero capacity to read Shakespeare (quadruple lol). After I was hit by a car in December of 2008—the more visible scar on my forehead—I gradually began to write, so completely did I need to be shaken before I could bring myself to fish for a page of words. And when a few years later the uncategorizable Geoff Dyer selected me for a writing residency, I was unabashedly the butt of good-natured ribbing by the group for being the writer who wrote the least. As usual the I Ching has guidance on the matter. Been thinking about this quote, to the best of my fallible abilities, since I first noted it a decade ago. It’s taken quite a time to see connections well enough to bring a few to consciousness, but how else would nature teach me that she so loves patient devotion.