by Cherie Nelson

Speculation allows me to move beyond acknowledging the shifting and slippery nature of this self to enacting the experience of being this self.

“I am large, I contain multitudes.” I haven’t ever been quite able to shake this idea from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: that our selves are not as singular as we would like to believe. As an essayist, the most frequent subject of my writing is my self, in all its varied, multitudinous, and contradictory forms. Speculation allows me to move beyond acknowledging the shifting and slippery nature of this self to enacting the experience of being this self. Through the use of speculation, I am able to assert “this may be true of me” and “this also may be true of me” and “even this may be true of me” something that resists our desire to confine the self to one specific location, set of desires or questions, a singular, easily-won meaning. In this piece, I use erasure in order to represent the different layers (and truths) of my experience of faith and language. Just as my self is complex and multitudinous, yet true, each text (the original and the subsequent redacted versions) tells a whole truth about this experience even when they seem fragmented, or worse, contradictory.

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Cherie Nelson earned her MA in Literature and MFA in Creative Writing from Colorado State University where she currently teaches undergraduate writing and literature classes. She is the editor of The Waking: Ruminate Magazine Online and her work is forthcoming in The Florida Review.