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Each time I sit down to write a response to a prompt, I feel like a hospital janitor prompted to perform brain surgery. My scalpel qualifies me the same as these laptop keys I am plinking away at. This ‘janitor’ finds it particularly therapeutic to slice open the flesh and move around the organs a little from time to time instead of restocking the paper supplies. Unqualified, you say? Does that mean this writer is no literary composer? 

You asked me, “what is literature”? I retort with, “who is your favorite author?” I doubt you’d tell me is the author of First and Second Chronicles. And I sure know it isn’t Snizzle McNizzle who scrawled his layer of gibberish all over the freeway signs. (Incidentally, how have I never seen this occur? These spray-can armed guys seem to be as phantom and the scapegoat skunks which everyone announces every time a foul odor is present. I’m curious how often that smell really was a skunk…)

But I digress.

What written forms move us emotionally? Creatively? For me, it certainly isn’t reading lists of genealogy in Chronicles or unintelligible ‘scribbles’ on defaced surfaces. But just maybe for some thuggish guy whose name is written with numbers and dollar signs and probably includes ‘lil’ or ‘Biggie’ something-or-other, may be moved by what I see as squiggles. It is no doubt meaningful to him in some way and in his social circles. So for his personal reasons, it is literature to him because he is moved by it. For me, and probably you reading this jabber, this form of ‘literature’ is definitely not part of the definition.

Yet each of us educated or not, has a personal range of pieces that have had or could have an effect even in a minute way. This is true whether or not other readers share the same response. That is what literature is. Think for a moment what your favorite author or book is. What piece of what you call ‘literature’ has moved you more than all other pieces? You could probably graph every written work depending on its ability to move you, even if its impact could be small in significance.

Anytime a variation of this question is posed, I love observing the peppy responses as I mentally graph what their range of literature might look like. They are obviously so moved by a specific piece, that their excited response makes me feel as if I had just asked a first time parent to tell me all about how clever their 2 year old child is. I honestly don’t care too much about the potty training expert she is or that she picks out her own clothes – but I can’t help my entrancement at the ensuing enthusiasm. It makes me almost feel inspired to have children. I know how you readers are. You always become the protagonist in that moment. You glow proudly as you inform me that you read Great Expectations [or insert appropriate title] each year. With breezy melody you can quote the closing lines of some of your favorites and relive the scenes from your favorite pages. It is meaningful literature for you.

For this ‘author’, my response is quite different to the posed question of a favorite literary work. Peering off into space, my lips scrunched to one side of my face, forehead wrinkled (my thinking really hard face), my mind paws through some faded files, cluttered and quite dusty. I feel like a retired great painter, fumbling with a paintbrush as if a foreign object. Why did I quit reading? I muse to myself, as my brain searches through its archives. I read such a great selection in high school English. In fact, remember getting amazingly high scores on my response essays. But in all honesty the only things that come to mind in that moment is a hodge podge array of  Nancy Drew books, Eric Carle stories and Ramona and Beezus adventures. Why are the only things prominent in my mind about hungry caterpillars and teenage sleuths? I remember I was always most particular about selecting exclusively “gold” Newberry award books at book fairs.

I can not pretend I was moved by The Grapes of Wrath more than any other work. I read it. Appreciated it. And it is still very much within my range of what literature is. But I suppose it is shocking that a writer is not necessarily a reader and lover of what intellects call high literature. It is as if they discover that a surgeon has in fact not gone to medical school – or worse yet cleans the bathrooms and empties the cans. Extreme analogy perhaps, but it shows a narrow-minded view in what many say what literature may be and who may participate in being part of the definition.  I appreciate and am moved by ‘high literature’ in some respects, though not as personally affective as a Shel Silverstein collection I once read. Perhaps in time, my graphed range of literature my shift. My graphed range of ‘literature’ will no doubt look different than yours. No answer to what literature is can be wrong if a reader is moved or can be moved in small or great ways by a selection of written form.

In essence, no reader is required to be an educated person to appreciate what the intellects dub ‘literature’. That reader may not even understand it anyhow, so how could it move him? Whatever a reader’s response is, is personal. And each of us sharing it and experiencing new things in the literary world will expand our appreciation and understanding of what literature means to themselves and others.

Scalding my veins

A venom seeping through my body

Foreign in nature

It is braided with envy and disdain

Laced with evil intent

Eating my liver and kidneys

I am steeped in my own miring pool

I grapple with this intruder

Aching in my sleep

My own uninvited cardinal vice

Oh if I could vomit this toxin!

The catalyst of my poison flutters along

As I gnaw my own cheeks inside my smiling mouth

I taste my own blood

While her audience softly coos

A resentful older sister I have become

Under my ever thinning veneer

I know her murderous plot

Beneath her fresh skin

They’ll forgive her of course.

For she is the beauty I am not

Even her illicit intent

They applaud in shiny waves

The magnifying glass

I hold so close to my nose

To bitterly hate her

Is burning a hole in my own face

From a dime to a raceboat

You can’t see further

Than your narrow hall of delusion

You sop up brain soaked towels

With a leather pocketbook

Do you read each of my exhalations
From your tropical paradise?
You may even have a collection
Smugly adorning your wall.
 
Did they ever make it that far?
Perhaps this too may be drowned
As the others before
I’m sure I will never know

This is the last.
I have no more exhalations.

These screams and breaths of mine
Pierce the paper they are inscribed on.
I hope the seal is tight.
And the ink won’t smear.

I didn’t expect the moonlight
To tarnish so quickly in the fog
My feet sunk deep into the tide
Are well wrinkled by now.

They are swollen shut again

The right words demanded of me

Are strangled by the wrong ones

Each a backfire blazes my face

Searing my lips near closed

My nose only open to the air

I am scared paralyzed

I can not tell you how to help me

I wish I knew myself.

You walk away not knowing

My wooden heart is still in your pocket