so-called confessional writing
A random reply to a comment from an unhappy reader on a writing message board (by another writer to a new writer there) one morning before the coffee had found my lips. I wouldn't normally respond but this one I can't leave unsaid. And I think, for inquiring minds, it explains some of the styles I've used myself when writing:
Poetry Message Board Date: 23 May 2o02 Re: Gypsies Tramps Whores and Thieves.

I just woke up. I haven't read the poem. But I have read this comment, "Good writing, if your intent was in making yourself look smug and foolish."

I'm not trying to critique the viewpoint so much, but it reminds me of something I've wanted to say before but never have (here) and since my eyes can't find the backspace yet, I will. I wish I could write this in fewer words, I've a feeling I'm about to ramble.

Something often overlooked is that writers don't always write to make themselves look like anything, it's not always a personal reflection verbatim. They write to move words and sounds and feelings and images around like colors coming from the end of a paintbrush, not always from the end of a technical pencil being written into a journal or diary.

It's not always about "me" or about "us," it's not always some sort of self-therapy, it's more about the reader and how they perceive it. It's about what it does to you when you read it, as in listening to music—what does it do to your emotions. Creativity, inventiveness—if it makes you think, if it moves your feelings around as art would make your eyes move about an image, then the words have been successful.

For me I don't care, and it doesn't surprise me, if someone doesn't get what I may have really meant when I write, as long as something about it worked for them, that works for me. I'm content if they related to the words, if even on a different level or space in time than what my intent had been. If I thought everyone believed every stray thread in a poem was a direct link to a snapshot of my soul, I might not write—not that parts of our personal lives don't come through, of course they do. But for example, if I write something sad it doesn't mean I'm sad today. It might mean I understand sadness, or bliss or whatever the feeling comes through as. What I want to say is I think it's important to write what you feel/know and not to invent from niches you can't understand or never lived. At the same time, If I write something whorish, it doesn't make me a whore. It makes me someone who uses what I know of whores, let's say an aura of whoreness, or prudishness or whatever the element in question is as just one of the colors to paint on a canvas of words.

Mia Moore
2002 May 03