You Can’t Get to “Once Upon a Time” Without “What If?”

Photo credit: yewenyi on VisualHunt / CC BY-NC

Lately, I’ve been reading Thomas Merton’s Confessions of a Guilty Bystander (thank you, Ed!), which was first published in 1968 but remains as relevant as ever on the 50th anniversary of its publication. Here’s one of the first passages I underlined, from Merton’s introduction:

I do not have clear answers to current questions. I do have questions, and, as a matter of fact, I think a man is known better by his questions than by his answers. To make known one’s questions is, no doubt, to come out in the open oneself.

This quote came to mind as I recently read Danielle Lazarin’s essay in the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, Question Everything. She discuses her use of writing notebooks, where she tops and ends pages with questions. She writes:

At every stage of my work, questions are my most essential writing tools. I use them to move through to the other side of murky. It’s only by stepping into that unknown and uncomfortable space repeatedly during my process that I can become more deliberate in the story I’m telling.

Read the full essay.

Also this month from Glimmer Train:

• Writing Archival Fiction by Thomas Fox Averill
• On Rejection by Aline Ohanesian