I. At the begin­ning, all I find is an out-of-focus vis­ion. An incom­plete image, gradu­ally form­ing in my mind. It comes from nowhere, it’s a black and white slide. At times, the sem­inal image glides, as if it were a coat slip­ping off the chair, or a trol­ley which slowly runs on rails. There’s a screen within my brain walls; my head is a room where frag­ment­ary films are shown. Whether I want it or not. Wim Wenders says every photo is the first frame of a movie; in my small uni­verse, every photo is the foetus of a word. That’s how I start writ­ing every day: the primal image is the seed (or the germ, if we believe that “lan­guage is a virus”) of a word. Of one word. I ven­ture into the unknown to grab it. At the begin­ning, it is a word which is “word”; I must catch it to extract it. At the begin­ning, the image only con­tains its word, which is “word”, naked, raw, pure. Not by chance I know how to say “word” in far too many lan­guages: palabra, mot, szó, Wort, parola, слово, beseda, λόγος. Some­times, the image itself is a word; the pic­ture of a typo­graphic ker­nel. It quivers; and if I try to read it aloud, its lig­at­ures dis­solve. I must take the word for gran­ted, I must approach it — formal and cau­tious. I know I will find a sequence behind it. Words behind the word fol­low in a recur­rent pat­tern; that serial arrange­ment is the DNA of the story I’m try­ing to narrate.

II. Words haunt me; I do not need to be in front of a blank page to get imprisoned. Words I hear, words I see out of the corner of my eye; a mag­netic induc­tion hurls them against me. Some words hit me – an ima­gin­ary glossary-sling, throw­ing con­son­ants and vow­els; with cer­tain words, I fall in love des­per­ately. At times, they’re for­eign words, and if I trans­late them the spell is lost; that’s why I often exper­i­ment. My desk is full of hybrids, implants, inven­tions. Over and over the trib­ute to Samuel Beck­ett that appears in ‘Exer­cices d’admiration’ by the Romanian-born French philo­sopher Emil Cioran comes to mind. They met in Paris, both feel­ing exiled and rejec­ted. Both had chosen to repu­di­ate their mother tongue. The even­ing the two men spent in search of a French equi­val­ent for the Eng­lish “less­ness” is the per­fect example of the writ­ing obses­sions that turn into cre­ativ­ity: the word “sinéité” (a French Lat­in­ism; ‘sine’ means ‘without’) was brought into exist­ence. It’s not just a neo­lo­gism: when I stare at Beckett’s cal­li­graphy etch­ing it on paper I feel my world being richer, wider. At times I think that writers are some­how forced to dis­till, to invent new words: a trib­ute – or a toll – they pay to the muse. For sure, assem­bling new words by put­ting together frag­ments of dif­fer­ent lan­guages reveals the only truth we all should share when it comes to poetry and lit­er­at­ure: as Kafka said, writers do not belong to a nation, a race, or a gender. Writ­ing make us state­less, the free writ­ing cit­izens of Macondo.

Lore Stein eats words. Incon­sist­ently Buddhist, she keeps a messy scrap­book at Sam&Sara Motel, and lives with freaky cats and a broken Nikon.