Write With Me Club: July

The theme this month is writing essays

At the age of 47, having spent the last twenty nine years of my life making a living from words, I realised something this week that I am almost embarrassed to tell you (almost, but, you know me by now, I tend to just tell you anyway.)

It is this, and it is something I’m sure everyone else already knows, but forgive me for finally catching up: an essay is to try. It is, of course (OF COURSE!), from the french word essayer – literally to try.

Why has this only just dawned on me?

I knew the french, I spend my life writing essays, and yet what was so obviously staring me in the face was just not obvious to me at all. Yet when I think about it, isn’t that also why we write, to see more clearly that which is often so obviously staring us in the face, to put a name or other words to it, to create a container to hold those thoughts that wander without boundary?

Or at least that is how it feels to me.

I am writing a proposal for a book this weekend (or rather expanding on it), an essay collect…