We finally caught up with David Helms, the famous blogger of In A Different Light, to ask him a few questions about himself and his writing. He travels extensively, sometimes as far as twenty or thirty miles away from home, holds down a job three days a week, has a wife and a family(who doesn't live anywhere near him). He volunteers at a hospital and he exercises three or four times a month. He's a very busy man.
Blogger Today: David, where did you get the title In a Different Light?
David: I would like to tell you that it's a combination of the expression "in a different light", meaning looking at something a different way, and the actual properties of light. Since light moves at 186,000 miles per second, anything you see, even if you're staring at it, is always in a different light.
Blogger Today: Then if that's not it, where did you get the name?
David: When my son helped me set up this blog, he said, "Dad, what do you want to call it?" And I said, "Let's call it 'In a Different Light' ". He said, "I like it".
Blogger Today: Why do you write?
David: I write because the cursor is blinking.
Blogger Today: What do you mean by that, "the cursor is blinking"?
David: What I mean is that the Blogspot cursor blinking on a blank screen compels me to write. The blank page looks very empty and lonely. It looks to me that it is asking for letters to keep it company.
Blogger Today: But if you didn't look at the page in the first place, you wouldn't see the blank screen.
David: You make an excellent point, but I look at it because it needs looking at. It needs someone to write on it.
Blogger Today: Are you being tongue-in-cheek about this?
David: Mostly, but not entirely.
Blogger Today: Where do you get your ideas? How do you decide on any given day what you want to say to your readers?
David: The short answer to your first question is that my ideas find me. As far as the second question is concerned, most of the time I've been batting around an idea for days. But sometimes I don't know what I'm going to write until I sit down to write. In that case, the idea finds me right then. Many times I find an idea while I'm looking for something else.
Blogger Today: Can you give an example of that?
David: I can give an example from as soon as today. My current music obsession is a song by Morten Lauridsen called Where Have the Actors Gone. I have actually corresponded with Lauridsen recently about this song. He explained why the song means so much to him and maybe why it means so much to me. This afternoon after listening to the song, YouTube cycled to the next song Prayer by Lauridsen. While listening I read about the text; it was the poem Prayer by Dana Gioia. In an interview with Gioia I learned that he wrote the poem after the death of his young son. I sensed that pathos in the music before I knew that story. That then made me think about my little brother who in 1963 was born, lived eight days and died. I say "made me think about it" when the truth is he is never that far from my thoughts. Although there is a world of thoughts and feelings around his life and death.I normally choose not to write about it.. But I thought of using part of Gioia's poem as a jumping off place to talk about it.
Blogger Today: So are you going to write this?
David: Not any time soon. What I think about writing and what I actually write are completely different things.
Blogger Today: But David you talk about deeply emotional things, why would you not talk about something as significant as your own brother's death?
David: This family saga is just too complicated. I don't write this story out of respect for the people involved, especially my mother, who took her unimaginable pain to her grave, The story also evokes much pain in me. That's something I have to be careful about.
Blogger Today: Then why do you talk about emotional issues at all?
David: Because I'm an emotional being before I'm anything else. And I can tell you by much experience that not all emotions feel good. And, certainly, not all emotions feel bad. So I write from that experience. People tell me that I think too much, and I do, but I feel much more deeply than I think. My feelings have taken me to the doors of hell and the gates of heaven, and everywhere in between. I now live in the middle ground, but I respect the fact that those gates are not far away.
Blogger Today: You say you feel more than you think, but according to you don't all human emotions originate from the brain? Don't we think them up?
David: All emotions originate from the nervous system, but hundreds of billions of those neurotransmitters are in the gut.
Blogger Today: So you're saying "a gut feeling" is real?
David: Yes, it's very real.
Blogger Today: Why are you writing this blog when you could be writing a book?
David: It's that blinking cursor thing. It is just too easy for me to push the cursor down the page. When I've pushed it as far as I want, I move my pointer to Publish and it's done. But, actually, I've written several books. Over the past twelve years I have published over 2,000 one thousand word essays. That's two million words. These could be published as a whole set of books.
Blogger Today: So when are you going to do this?
David: Not today.
Blogger Today: Do you have any idea how many people read your blog?
David: The Blogspot analytics suggest that about 100 people read my posts quite regularly, but a recent article I posted about how the closing of a local church affected me garnered nearly 900 views.
Blogger Today: Do 900 readers mean more to you than a 100 readers?
David: About nine times as much.
Blogger Today: Do you have any final thoughts you'd like to share with our readers?
David: The highest compliment anyone has ever given me about the things I write is what my friend Lori said to me several years ago, "When I read your posts", she told me, "I feel something." That matters to me. It matters to me that my words sometimes transfer to the reader what I feel as I write them. I find that to be quite remarkable and quite satisfying.
Blogger Today: David, I know you need to leave to go to Starbucks to drink coffee and read a book, so I won't keep you any longer. Thanks so much for carving this time out of your very busy day to talk with us at Blogger Today. You can find David on Facebook or at davidrhelms.blogspot.com.
David: You're very welcome. I enjoyed talking with you.
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