We tried to offer our experience to one another. Not claiming something: offering something.

read. To provide the best: everyone agrees on that (even the people who vote against school levies). But we don’t and we can’t agree on what books are the best. And therefore what is vital is that we provide variety, abundance, plenty – not books that reflect one body of opinion or doctrine, not books that one group or sect thinks good, but the bro

Conrad’s “struggle” and Jo March/Lu Alcott’s “vortex” are descriptions of the same kind of all-out artistic work; and in both cases the artist is looked after by the family. But I feel an important difference in their perceptions. Where Alcott receives a gift, Conrad asserts a right; where she is taken into the vortex, the creative whirlwind, becom

To me the “female principle” is, or at least historically has been, basically anarchic. It values order without constraint, rule by custom not by force. It has been the male who enforces order, who constructs power structures, who makes, enforces and breaks laws.

Had he reached the Pole he would have said, “I have conquered, I have achieved,” in perfectly self-justified triumph. But, forced to retreat, he does not say, “I am defeated”; he blames it on that which is not himself, Nature. If Man wins the battle he starts, he takes the credit for winning, but if he doesn’t win, he doesn’t lose; “forces arrayed

So fiction writers are slow beginners. Few are worth much till they’re thirty or so. Not because they lack life experience, but because their imagination hasn’t had time to context it and compost it, to work on what they’ve done and felt, and realize its value is where it’s common to the human condition.

Maybe nobody can teach anybody how to write, but, just as techniques for attaining profit and prestige can be taught in the commercial and establishmentarian programs, so realistic expectations, useful habits, respect for the art, and respect for oneself as a writer can be

So seen, stupidity could be defined as a failure to make enough connections, and insanity as severe repeated error in making connections – in telling The Story of My Life.

What most participants need most is to learn to think of themselves as writers.