Writing to Become Alive

ABSTRACT

I am questioning how one may be and become, create and experience themselves as alive through the multifold practice of writing. How is writing a practice of ontologically marking livingness? To explore the ontological “things” writing can be, I examine a few properties that define it, including writing … to become existent; to make many lives; itself as alive; to become with the land; as identification; as a vessel to dislodge tropes; to retrieve the past through our future; as transformation; to know; as a political act; to grieve and heal; to become an archive. Rather than taking flight from writing as an expression of living, I am hoping writing can be understood as the node from which life is made and experienced, not just how it can be expressed. One writes to make lives, not just to show or illustrate those lives, but force those lives as real, existent, fictions, possible, impossible, unruly at the end, alive—in whatever formation that alive may mean.

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No potential conflicts of interest are reported by the author(s).

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Notes on contributors

Kanishka Sikri

Kanishka Sikri, Ph.D, is a writer and scholar. They are a Ph.D candidate at York University. Their forthcoming dissertation, SomeThing, It, Violability, speculates on how certain lives are marked to the possibility of violence.