This Is The Reason Being Specific Encourages Emotion with guest @christinastriga

Translating Emotion to Writing

When someone asks me about writing, I tend to shy away. I don’t know what the truth is. I don’t know when a lie becomes a fact. I merely write.

I write my stories from a place inside me that aches to open up. It feels as if there is a storm, and a multitude of clouds with diverse characters whispering secrets and emotion I must spill on their behalf.

These characters are in my mind, in my body, in my psyche; from the Greek, “soul.”

Being Greek has taught me how to think a certain way. Being a Greek-Canadian has made my path slightly easier, but being from Montreal, has been a constant battle with languages and culture. This has been a part of my writing. It is inside me.

My mind is too quick for me. The words are too flowing. I don’t know what having writer’s block even means. All I need, as Hemingway says, is a typewriter and I can bleed. Oh, can I bleed. I become the characters, I become the words. We melt like wax paintings.

We become one. My ego takes over. I can do no wrong. Then reality hits me when I start to edit, and I delete, rewrite, change the dialogue, rewrite the descriptions, add gestures, emotions, and so on and so forth to make my paintings come alive.

In effect, my words are a landscape. I don’t want you to stand in front of my paintings confused. I don’t want you to stare at them and say, “I don’t understand what she is trying to do in this scene.” I want you to jump into my works, “cross your legs”, as one of my publishers said, “and light a bonfire.”

Poetry vs. Books

When someone asks me about my poetry, I feel shy. I feel embarrassed. If they have actually read my work, and compliment me, I say to myself, phew I don’t have to be awkward now. I don’t have to explain my writing.

The honest truth is I am more of a deconstructionist. Hence my quote that many writers can relate to, “Understand the poem, not the poet.” I don’t want people to ask me, did that really happen to you? What do you mean by that poem? Where did you go to school? Did you live in Paris when you wrote that piece? And on and on.

No, cut the poet out of the picture. Cut me out of the picture. I don’t owe you an explanation.

Take the poem and read it as it relates to your life, not theirs, or mine. What emotion do you feel? My experience is mine. I can write a poem and retell it, fantasize it, recreate it, embellish it, add dialogue to it. I can make it so far from the truth, you, the reader, would not know what really happened.

In the end, you relate to my poem, according to your own emotion and life experience, and if my memory becomes a part of your life, then that is something rare that I have done. If you want to know if I actually lived in Corfu when I wrote my story, then how will the truth affect the story?

Living in my own head, yes, my character is living in Corfu, whether I, the author, never even visited Corfu, is not at all important. I am making you feel Greece on your fingertips, and reality is not important in this context. I write fiction, I write some facts.

I blur lines.

When someone asks me if I prefer writing novels to poems I don’t hesitate.

Poems.

It’s as if my heart is aching when I start writing a poem, exploding with emotion while I am writing, and taking a final gasp at the final word.

When I once tweeted, “If writing hurts, you’re doing it right.” I did not expect so many people to understand. It seriously hurts. I can cry during, and after writing. Writing dark poetry is my therapy.

I feel my insides pulling me apart when the poem erupts.

I feel my fingers have no control or my thoughts, it’s as if someone else has entered my body and setting my mind on fire.

My mind is a forest fire.

It’s true.

It’s uncontrollable. One word, creates another, and then another and suddenly the sentences become line breaks, poems after poems of raw emotion and streams of consciousness of events that I don’t even know if they took place or not, but on the page, they are real.

So real, it scares me.

It makes me feel vulnerable.

This is the best way I know how to write.

I feel strong in my vulnerability. It makes me feel as if I am a better writer for it.

It may take me a couple of minutes to write a poem.

It may take me days to edit it.

It may take me years to write a novel.

It may take me years to edit.

I like the quick fix of a poem. I’m a word addict. From my first journals at fourteen years old to the one I started yesterday, writing is my one and only true love. The love affair I can never give up.

Emotion Reveals Me and The Reader As Well

When someone asks me, what am I working on now, and I reply, a novel, two poetry books, and a collaborative poetry book, they look at me as if I am crazy.

I feel sometimes as if I very well may be with all these Word documents, but that is how my mind thrives and my emotion and creativity blends together.

I wrote my first novel at thirty-nine. I am fifty-two. I have written five novels, three poetry books, and one self-help book, based on my tweets.

I know that writing has healed me in ways only a writer can understand.

There is never an off switch. The good news is I fall asleep the minute my head hits my pillow.

The good news is I keep learning and evolving as a poet and an author every day.

***

Christina Strigas, raised by Greek immigrants, born in Montreal, Canada, has been featured by CBC Books in “Your ultimate Canadian poetry list: 68 poetry collections recommended by you.”

Her latest poetry book is LOVE & METAXA, to be published on March 23, 2021, with another book coming in Fall, 2021.

Christina Strigas is an author of five novels, three poetry books, and one self-help/poetry book based on her popular quotes that went viral on Twitter. She writes romantic love poetry in a stream of consciousness narrative prose. Her influences are Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Mary Oliver, the Romantics, and Pablo Neruda.

Christina Strigas holds a BA in English Literature from Concordia University and a Teaching Certificate from Universite de Montreal. She teaches English and French in an elementary school, and at McGill University. She created the popular @ArielPoets along with Alexandra Meehan, where they inspire writers and poets to believe in the power of poetry.

You can find her on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, Website, Wattpad

Excerpt from Love & Metaxa

CORINTH 

Is it okay to be
rude for no reason?
The reason I love you is
not the right one

that comes to mind. I spread love of words
dressed in imaginary
half-ass wings, on a little Greek girl fragile,
watch me breathe in and out Greek—
Crying in ancient Corinth

where centuries pass without trace
where my parents were born
in a small Greek village in the mountains
named: Stimaga—
where my roots are.

A city
of survival or travel,
Jason settled there with Medea,
where Pegasus became a symbol,
the myth of Arion,
how love of monuments’ more graceful
than building walls of torment—
While awake—while asleep,
I am perfectly free of evilness,

the restless dream of sleep paralysis,
falling wings deglorifying,
the past is buried now
where my father finished high school
where my mother finished elementary

but even reason
has a way of changing,
turning to outright wild lies;
this is where you were rude to me
laughed at my homemade history lessons

Go down to the village, wake up the family
or sleep in,
and shout out
the morning for coffee—I can’t hear you now.

I’m on the tip of the village
where I first met my grandmother Yiayia Xristina.

These walls await a new language you can never learn.

~ First published in Thimble Lit Magazine

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Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available in print everywhere!