Communication? What do you mean?

John Nyman
Arts Editor
When we look at works of creative writing, we see letters, words and sentences – devices whose purpose is to communicate clearly.

But if you read this supplement alongside anything else in Excalibur, you’ll realize that creative writing doesn’t make a lot of sense. What does a poet mean when they string together a long column of lines from Beatles’ songs, or when they present the text of their poem to us a second time, but backwards? Even when you can follow what a writer’s talking about, you have to keep in mind that everything being described is, at least partially, fiction – a lie.
Creative writing isn’t so noticeably un-communicative just to be “stylized,” “abstract” or “creative”; this quality is fundamental to creative writing itself. All creative writing, in at least some sense, favours playfulness, anarchy and deceit over the straightforwardness of non-fiction. It doesn’t want to communicate; it’s purpose is to be the broken, rotting and sometimes completely fucked-up-beyond- all-recognition remains of communication. It surprises us, setting up expectations and then bringing them to ruins before we can realize what’s happening. It reminds us that nothing is as clear as we think it is.
At the same time, by simply existing instead of trying to say something, creative writing shows us more about ourselves and the way we think and feel than we could otherwise talk about. Many writers are actually some of the bravest communicators. With language and nothing more, they try to say things that words can’t: the feeling of something lost in Devin P. L. Edwards’ “Faded,” the odd details of fleeting love in Andrew Ramos’ “Nuances” or Jack Hostrawser’s “All That Sentimental Nonsense” – or, as in Ekraz Singh’s “The Unsaid,” something that hasn’t even been spoken into the world.
Without the uncanny incompleteness of fictional prose or the brevity and free play of poetry, we would have few ways of understanding the things in our lives which, regardless of seeming indescribable, we know to be true. Creative writing is the phoenix of language. When words fail to show us the things we most want to know and understand, writers melt them down to their most integral, meaningless components.
The object that arises – the egg – may be strange, hard and secretive. But it’s also something solid and whole. You can touch it. You can feel the warm of life coming through.