object ( a ) is a term coined by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. he uses it as a name for what is lost when we, as children, first learn to speak and enter into the world of language. it represents a primordial loss that haunts us throughout our lives, that perpetually drawing us towards the world lying beyond language in search of what we left there.

I am drawn to the sense of loss that Lacan equates with learning language, and especially that he positions this loss as the beginning of our desire. it suggests that the language our lives play out in falls short in some crucially important way, so much so that we are endlessly drawn to look beyond it for what waits for us in the world beyond our knowing.  

I am a writer, I work with and within language. but it is the possibility of something beyond language that motivates me to write. as I understand it, writing is a space within language in which we might challenge the limits language places on our understanding of the world. within writing, language loosens; it gives up its own form and it welcomes into itself what it otherwise could not admit. I see in this the possibility of broadening the scope of language and, in so doing, of opening up the possibility of new ways of understanding and being in the world.

the world can be remade in the moment that possibility opens up, and there is no telling what we might find in that now unfamiliar place. writing provides us the chance to step outside of ourselves and rediscover something of the wonder and mystery that lies both beyond our understanding of the world and lost somewhere within ourselves.