Anne Truitt
“Genius is childhood recaptured at will.” Baudelaire.
I want to remember to put this on my syllabi, always, here on out. It’s the perfect epigraph for every course I teach. All the sorrow and all the joy, impossible to articulate, in childhood, are what feed the art. Anne Truitt, whose journals are great sources of mentoring for me, mothers-in-pages, has a great passage on this. It’s where I got the great Baudelaire mantra from. She talks about how for those who have to mother their parents in childhood, a place has to be created. A place to put all those enormous emotional expressions which have to be supressed. A room. A container. I think what she’s talking about is how the artist develops yearning as goal, engine, expression, faith, and truth.
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That quote is so wonderful, I’m using it on my syllabus for my picture book writing tutorial next summer. I will give you credit–easy to do because I tout your writing books in all my classes.