Eleanor Wilner: Getting Out of the Way, or How Not to Stand in Your Own Light (January 2013)

Wilner’s lecture considers how and why we get in our own way as imaginative writers. She offers some models and a variety of strategies for getting out of the way and enabling the creative imagination—of which Lu Chi said in Wen Fu, his treatise on the art of writing: The truth of the thing lies inside us, but no power on earth can force it; and Louise Glück, writing 18 centuries later: The dream of art is not to assert what is already known but to illuminate what has been hidden, and the path to the hidden is not inscribed by will. How then to invoke what will not be commanded?