Slice O' Life X: My Motivations For Writing, Revisited

reflections from the creator and curator of slice o' life

In the early months of 2018, as spry 22-year-old less than one year removed from college life, I abruptly underwent a writerly renaissance. After spending four years of undergrad distancing myself from a writing practice and detaching writing from my identity, a mix of brief romantic encounters, indie movies, and life in New Orleans as a young, working adult trying to find her way in the world brought writing back into my life in a way that made me feel alive and excited and overwhelmed all at once.  

Through both happenstance and the functionality of search engines, I joined a writers workshop at the very beginning of this renaissance, enrolling in an eight-week-long creative nonfiction section with the New Orleans Writers Workshop. 

During the first session, which took place on Wednesday, February 28, 2018, the facilitator, a New Orleans writer and academic who goes by CW, asked all five participants to state their motivations for joining the workshop, their motivations for writing. While a seemingly obvious and innocuous question — surely a writer has thought about why she writes — the question sent me spiraling. Later that night I dug into what my motivations for writing were, resulting in an open letter to my workshop cohort that I later named My Motivations For Writing: A Letter to My Writing Workshop. 

I submitted the essay to the workshop for feedback, edits, and critiques, as one does in a workshop, and once the workshop ended, submitted the essay to literary journals for publication consideration. Nobody remotely bit until I came across the digital outlet Fiction Southeast and its nonfiction column “Why I Write,” drawing inspiration from George Orwell’s essay of the same name. Over a year after the letter-essay had been written, it finally found a home, but it wouldn’t be published for another year thereafter, on April 13, 2020. Unbeknownst to the journal’s editor, April 13, 2020 was my 25th birthday. 

Over two years had passed since I wrote My Motivations For Writing, so I was at once excited to be published and curious to see if those motivations remained true, from almost 23-year-old Allie to newly 25-year-old Allie. In those swift twenty-four months I could sense a shift in voice. 2018 Allie was bursting. She was overwhelmed with love for those around her, the city where she lived, and was also afraid that at seemingly any moment she could be gone from this earth for no explicable reason. She was at once insightful and ever so slightly immature, still coming into herself while at the same time feeling grounded in her identity. You could sense the youthful twinkle in her eyes, how dramatic and extreme everything around her was, not in a negative sense, just in the way a 22-year-old experiences life. 

As a 25-year-old, these youthful sensibilities were starting to shift. The crushing, bleak, and uncertain reality fostered by the early days of the global coronavirus pandemic could have accelerated this, but perhaps I was simply going through the natural cycle of personal growth and evolution. I still resonated with much of the piece, it just sounded like a younger me wrote it, which of course was and still is the case. 

Now, as I approach my 27th birthday, two years after publication of My Motivations and four years after writing it, it appears that my motivations for writing have changed, reflecting new priorities and values (at least, in the writerly context).

A week and a half ago I started Slice O’ Life because I sent a little blurb I wrote on my iPhone to my friend possessing the most minimal literary qualities, to which he replied, “omg, that was intensely relatable.” Then I was truly reminded of why I love both reading and writing: they build community. To me, there is no greater achievement in this world than writing something that brings people together, that makes someone feel seen, or conversely, increases empathy and opens one’s eyes to a set of circumstances they’ve never experienced before, all while recognizing the writer’s humanity. While it can be a solitary endeavor, writing is all about community, as evidenced by the existence of organizations like the New Orleans Writers Workshop and the modest following amassed for a platform like Slice O’ Life. I didn’t realize it in 2018, but when I joined NOWW it was community that I was seeking, and thankfully, it was community that I found. 

Going into my 27th year, my number one priority is to continue to build community — in my still relatively new home of Denver, online through Slice O’ Life, and whatever other physical and digital spaces can facilitate togetherness, unity, and empathy. I hope that writing will enable me to find community wherever I go, but even as my writing practice ebbs and flows, my commitment to building community through writing, and more broadly, art, will remain steadfast.