The Triad

There are three writers I return to again and again — not because I want to write like them, but because they taught me how to stay with writing when it felt unbearable, confusing, or necessary in ways I didn’t yet have language for.

Sylvia Plath. Virginia Woolf. Emily Dickinson.

Each of them showed me, in different ways, that interior life is not something to minimize or apologize for. That attention itself is a form of courage. That writing can be both a refuge and a reckoning.

This page isn’t about influence in the traditional sense. It’s about lineage — how I learned to love writing by watching how these women trusted it.

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath taught me that intensity does not need permission.

Her work gave me language for the moments when emotions feel too large for the body that holds them — when thought, feeling, and memory collide without warning. What struck me most wasn’t her darkness, but her precision: the way she could articulate internal chaos with startling clarity.

Through Plath, I learned that writing doesn’t have to soften experience to make it legible. It can be sharp. It can be exacting. It can hold anger, longing, and contradiction all at once without resolving them neatly.

She showed me that writing can be a place where nothing is diluted — where the truth is allowed to arrive fully formed, even when it’s uncomfortable.

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf taught me how to listen to my own mind.

Her work made me aware of the subtle, shifting nature of thought — the way memory, perception, and time fold into one another. Reading Woolf felt like being given permission to follow a sentence wherever it wanted to go, trusting that meaning would emerge through attention rather than force.

She taught me that silence matters. That what’s left unsaid often carries as much weight as what’s spoken. That interior movement — the quiet turns of awareness — is not secondary to action, but central to understanding human connection.

Through Woolf, I learned to value rhythm, pacing, and restraint. To let writing breathe. To trust that stillness can be as revelatory as confession.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson taught me how to stay.

Her poems showed me that you don’t need scale to have impact — that a few carefully chosen words can carry an entire emotional universe. She wrote inwardly, deliberately, and without spectacle, and in doing so created work that continues to feel astonishingly alive.

Dickinson’s attention to slant truth shaped the way I think about honesty in writing. Not everything needs to be declared outright. Sometimes the most faithful way to tell the truth is indirectly — through implication, compression, and quiet insistence.

She taught me that writing can be private and exacting at the same time. That restraint is not a lack of courage, but a form of discipline.

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”

— Emily Dickinson

Why They Matter Together

Taken together, these three writers shaped my relationship with writing in lasting ways.

Plath taught me to face intensity.
Woolf taught me to follow thought.
Dickinson taught me to trust precision.

From them, I learned that writing doesn’t have to perform in order to be meaningful — that it can be a sustained act of attention toward the interior and the relational. That loving writing sometimes means returning to it even when it asks more than it gives.

This triad didn’t teach me how to become a writer.
They taught me how to remain one.

Contact

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