I’m listening to Maggie Gyllenhaal’s excellent reading of Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, a first-person semi-autobiographical narrative about a writer sliding into mental illness, severe depression. I’m looking back at an old story of my own and am wanting to fill it out, to add detail and interest. Like Plath’s Bell Jar, my little narrative is told in the first person, and Ms. Gyllenhal’s helping me give a kind of approach with her annunciation and dramatic reading of Plath’s flawless diction. Some recent work I’ve been doing concerns mental illness. It’s a challenging subject, even if you have some firsthand experience. I liberally apply here the Wordsworth quote my Romantic poets professor often used back in the day: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
Have a great day.—Margaret