Jennifer Carroll is a 21 year old actor and writer. She first began writing for the Uxbridge Cosmos in 2007 when she had the opportunity to share her experiences as a Canadian ambassador for an international conference for women in Dubai. At the beginning of 2008, she moved to Ireland to pursue a career in theatre and film. Far From Home is her monthly account on living and working in Dublin.
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A writer's task
A writer is a great many things.
She is a beholder of her fellows, an eyewitness to the every day of human interaction. She stands beyond a crowd and watches the faces of her peers as they tread through their daily dreams and disappointments, penciling down their emotions as they flicker uncontrollably across a face.
She is surgeon of spirit, dissecting and pulling apart every piece of the spiritual labyrinth within a person. She holds her ink-filled scalpel and makes careful incisions into human emotions and psyches. She knows that if she cuts even a hair off her mark she'll spill blood, yet she delves into the complexities before her with precision.
She is a pastry chef of language, combining exacting ingredients, which when whisked together in exactly the right way, rise into a flourish of delicate sweetness that is neither expected nor easily duplicated. She is meticulous yet playful, a chemist and an artist.
At a recent lecture by leading Dublin theatre critic Fintan O'Toole, I was awakened to two more tasks a writer takes up in their bank of professions; an excavator and an explorer. O'Toole believes that each writer fits into one style or the other; some writers explore the great blanket of human issues throughout their career, dipping into different issues and styles as they find and seek new truths about themselves and life. Other writers know themselves and their subject matter, and spend their entire lives excavating that small ground, chipping slowly and burrowing deeper and into the same matter over the course of their entire body of work. As he spoke about an excavator's job, burrowing down into layers of the same subject, a subject that obsessively compels them, I saw myself pictured in my imagination with an explorer's cap placed atop my head. Oh, the things I would see as a literary explorer! Somewhere new and inspiring each day, places with new sensations, new smells and touches, new temperatures and buildings. I would explore the human condition, never settling on one facet of our fascinating nature, but driving forward through the never-ending complexities of men.
Because a writer's most important job is simple: she's a storyteller. She collects everything that inspires her, weaving it into fairy tale to lift that spirit she dissects so carefully. Storytelling concentrates the best of what man can be, distilling his morals, his choices and his soul into something that might raise us out of the mud when men start to flounder in our tragic flaws. But it can also slap us in the face with reality and truth, refusing to hide our indiscretions and holding up that dreaded mirror to ourselves, forcing our eyes to open and our chin to raise to view that ugliness that can exist, to suffering and politics, to cruelty and hatred. Writers do it with an exquisite veracity, one that refuses to compromise on the harshness of our reality. And sometimes a writer will pick you up, hold you close to their chest and take you to a new height, one of make believe. And they will remind you to melt away your cynicism, your limit of imagination, your grown up sense of realistic boundary, and they will fill you with joy.
Stories will far outlive any one of us individually. And the more I write and explore, the more stories I find I have to tell; the more stories I tell the more I reach out and explore, and the more I find to tell again. The cycle makes me dizzy with excitement.
