At The Highest Level
In journalism school in Philadelphia, I was asked to write a column for the Bulletin after submitting a funny story to my teacher about my family. I said no thanks, my mother’s the writer, and I’m not funny, my dad is the funny one.
My mother was lonely in the chaos of a house filled with three children and our friends, pets and her aging mother and my father. In her loneliness, she often dragged me to knock on neighbors’ doors for conversation, neighbors who closed the curtains when they saw her walking up, my mother with a Pall Mall cigarette hanging out of her mouth in my father’s shorts, knocking on their door saying, Joan I know you’re in there!
She was eccentric, and often embarrassing, and when people asked me over the years are you going to be a writer like your mother, I cringed and turned away from my own passion for words and story. I didn’t realize for years I was hiding in her shadow.
Turns out I was hiding in my father’s shadow, too.
One of the most healing acts we can offer ourself and our parents, whether they are alive or not, is to reclaim our own story, while honoring their story and the gifts they gave us.
I stopped worrying about turning into my mother when I realized by writing my story I was turning my life into art…
…I have learned that I cannot write in anyone’s shadow.
— Laura Lentz
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The important thing to me is that I’m not driven by people’s praise and I’m not slowed down by people’s criticism. I’m just trying to work at the highest level I can.
— Russell Crowe
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That’s an interesting idea, that you can hide in the shadow of someone who raised you, who embarrassed you or repelled you somehow. I know I did this, because I refused to accept that I resembled my father, who was all about words and stories. I made an unconsidered decision when I was too young to know better that I would not be a writer. I still wonder if I was trying to hide from myself. If so, I learned a lot from doing it.
I did have sensitivities my father didn’t have for music and the visual arts, for example, but it took me a long time after he was gone from this world before I accepted the writer in me. And when it happened it was easy and natural. There was no choice really, after everything supporting that other life collapsed. I have to laugh at how determined the universe was that I would fulfill my fate.
We think we can direct and determine our destiny when we’re young, but we overestimate our powers. I didn’t become a visual artist solely because my father didn’t want me to but I have to admit it was a factor, especially in the beginning. Later on I found what I loved and was inspired by in that work and I’m glad I did it for what it gave me and for what I learned. It’s part of me now and I’m eternally inspired by visual artists and their work.
But language is where I live, not only my native language and its expressive powers, but other languages and their unique perspectives on things. It’s an endlessly fascinating subject. I love it when I come across someone who uses language at a higher vibration, who can create magic with words.
We need as much magic as we can get, I think, and when we happen upon the real thing we’ve just been blessed by the gods. We all need epiphanies, we all need inspiration, we all need something beyond the quotidian, beyond the daily round. Everyone has some kind of genius in them that rises above the norm. We don’t realize how we can refuse it, though, because of some unconscious prejudice.
Those who just get on with being who they are to the best of their abilities are a gift to the world. Anyone can do this but you do have to accept and appreciate yourself first.
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Here are three reviews of my writing:
David Price has become one of my favorite writers once I discovered his work on the Medium site a few years ago. I’m amazed at how he continually is able to spark my consciousness with thoughts, ideas and observations of our world and the range of possibilities in the human experience. The best way to sum it up might be to say that through his words and images, Mr Price has a knack for providing rich sustenance for the human soul.
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Insightful and eloquent musings on the human condition
A regular contributor on Medium, David Price’s articles caught my attention a couple of years ago. Combined with stunning artwork — some of which is his own — and often wonderful quotes from celebrated sources, his daily submissions became a fixture with my morning coffee. He combines an almost poetic prose with razor-sharp insights into the state of humanity and the world we’ve created. Time and again I’ve been thoroughly impressed by his views of the state of things, both the good and the bad, views that will often follow me around all day. This book is a collection of a number of his articles, and I highly recommend it.
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This book encourages in the true sense of that word as no other I have known the creative process in oneself as spiritual necessity. David Price’s writing is beautifully alive, articulate, kind. The form is prose; the feel is poetic, flowing, metaphoric. There is not a dry line in it. I heartily recommend it to anyone who longs to crack the shell around their own creativity, to become more sensitive, creative, and alive themselves.
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Plus this comment:
There is something about your writing, an ineffable quality I can’t quite place. It’s brilliant.
— Shain Thomas
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It is this version:
