Compression: Emma Bolden
“I often tell my creative writing students that their job isn’t so much to learn how to write as it is to learn a different language, one characterized by metaphor, by concision, by compression. I say this first by way of explaining how I’m about to explain my compulsion towards compression (and that sentence alone will probably also show why I tend to limit myself linguistically in my writing):
“When I was five or six, my favorite toy was an egg which fit in the palm of my hand. I love the smallness of it, the comfort and feel of something which I could hold in its entirety. I also loved it for what it hid: the egg had a latch which, when pressed, split the egg into two halves. Inside was a fairy smaller than my fingernail, and the egg became the world she inhabited in its inexpressibly tiny greens, its suggestions of vines and leaves. It was a mystifying, all-absorbing paradox: this world which was contained in something which fit inside my palm, this world I could hold so easily, was a world I could never inhabit, I could only observe from the far-outside, as its one inhabitant was as small as my pupil which let her image in.” — Emma Bolden
