A spiritual journey

For a long time, many prose writers have been writing about the hardships and poverty of local farming, and some people have reveled in symbolic representations such as cattle, horses, donkeys, mules, farm tools from their hometowns, and crooked rivers. Zhou Penghua has won awards such as the Taishan Literature Award, and recently, his prose collection "Hometown Near Mountains and Rivers" met with readers.

Today, the old countryside is rapidly disappearing and disintegrating, and the differences and confrontations between urban and rural areas have been diluted year by year. The emotional memory of the writer also transforms from sympathy, compassion, sentimentality and apprehension for his hometown into a nostalgic emotion. Zhou Penghua believes: "In fact, people can't get the peace and relaxation of the soul from square dance and urban artificial landscapes, but instead go to their hometown to find comfort, eager to breathe fresh air." Don't you know that the hometown is disappearing in the vigorous urbanization movement and becoming a pile of ruins and rubble? "In those things that have disappeared, people's emotional and taste memories, such as all the joys of childhood, come from a game of hide-and-seek in a haystack, an experience of picking in the woods at the head of the village - the hometown complex will linger in a person's life.

For the current prose creation, Zhou Penghua loves deeply and is responsible.

"Looking at the current prose writing, there is no lack of vitriol and sharpness, but constructive construction is more important, and the voice of enlightenment and wisdom is particularly urgent." Zhou Penghua believes that for essayists, "what we lack is an open-minded person with a broad sense of compassion and non-prejudice, and a lack of writing with a philosopher's tolerance and arrogance —in other words, we need to get out of the narrow concept of hometown, let the soul integrate into a more open earth, live up to time and mission, do what you want to do, and love everything you can love." The essay collection "Hometown Near the Mountains and Rivers" is a little effort he tried to bid farewell to the "little me" and let the soul go to the open.

Looking at Zhou Penghua's creative process, if "Returning Home Along the River" is a retrospective of life, then "Hometown Near Mountains and Rivers" is a spiritual journey. The former focuses on the past events that took place in shahe town in the Rusi Plain, and the scope of writing focuses on the place of birth. A person's place of birth is a place that everyone cannot choose, and it is also the starting point of life, but it is especially important to the writer. Zhou Penghua once said in an interview: "I know that there are many writers in the world who have spent their whole lives writing about their hometown and childhood, which is like a farmer digging a deep well and watering a piece of land for himself." But as I walked, I involuntarily had a very strong desire to break through, wanted to break free from the barriers of my hometown as soon as possible, and began to flee to the earth, so I came to the forest and wilderness, saw a wider blue sky, endless forests and grasslands, and all kinds of birds and beasts, the magnificence and power of the natural world are shocking, so that the body and mind are baptized and adjusted, and I have gained another growth after middle age, and I have realized the limitations and smallness of human beings. Through the experience of roaming in the wilderness, Zhou Penghua felt that he had once again expanded and vertically improved his soul, and since then he has had the feeling of compassion for all things, which is much better than walking in the study for a long time. This is exactly the case: the process of a person's writing is actually a process of self-cultivation.

Life is the people, and the people are life. A writer must receive a large number of information resources every day, obtain materials, knowledge and news from afar through multiple channels, and not miss any inspiration and information useful for literature. For Zhou Penghua, he obtains information through at least three channels: one is reading; the other is walking, which is indispensable for traveling every year to recharge; the third is experience, the experience is the most complex, including transforming the experience into a new experience, there are memories, discoveries, introspection, feelings, enlightenment, epiphanies, enlightenment, enlightenment, lessons, etc., all of which can be transformed into rampage writing impulses.

Writers should be skilled workers and generalists of writing, and writers who write only one genre will unconsciously fall into the narrow door of thinking. Especially in the current multimedia era, you must write anything and pick it up. Literature is anthropology, especially prose. However, after writing down for a long time, the writer will unconsciously form his own model, which will be reflected in the work or emit spicy or sweet literary interest, which will limit the potential development of the writer and form a thinking inertia.

Zhou Penghua has such a point of view: "For a writer, in the final analysis, it is still necessary to write new ideas and open up the brain, and seeking change is the first meaning." Pursue difficult writing, beat rotten words into the cold, and discard habits and skilled subjects. Only in this way can we avoid homogenization and singularization and avoid repeating ourselves. "Pack up, with the attitude of accepting all things, go deep into the land, really familiarize yourself with and understand the living conditions of the creatures in the mountains, and listen to the voices of the most basic level of society." Writers who have a good reputation must break through the inherent interests, listen to the barbaric language of foreigners, go to the wider wilderness to find new ore, touch the newly turned soil, reshape a new self and a soul that dares to accept new things - to find new sources on the earth. Go and see the moonlight of the mountains, listen to a few wild dog barks, and then broaden the inner pattern, and form empathy and empathy with the natural world and all living beings. In the face of time, realize the insignificance of individual life, and there is a warm light in the humble. With the steaming raw materials of life, and then integrated into the individual's independent thinking about the world, with an artistic eye to deal with, neither amplify the power of literature, nor inferiority. Then, the work written will usher in a new world. (Reported by Liu Lanhui, client reporter of Dazhong Daily)