Make to Know

Through the process of “making leadership,” I came to know what I wanted to do, both with the department and with this new aspect of my career.

In writing programs, they talk about finding your voice. I think what they’re really saying is find your audience.”

As Louis Pasteur famously put it, “chance favors the prepared mind.”

“I look back at the work and I say, okay, what did I do? I take my time, and I always find something revelatory in that process of taking it in.”

“The antecedent stages to Satori: quest, search, ripening and explosion. The

is, for her, a source of some of her deepest questions.

and you’re trying to really look for the ‘about-ness’…. And if you try too hard, then you will only write ‘the about.’ You won’t discover anything.”

That focus, for the novelist, is the filter through which certain very specific issues become relevant.

Watson compares her process in both life and work with dadaist experiments “where you take an image, cut it up, throw it on the floor and then make something of the chaos that has landed. There’s a system to it, but it allows for confusion and failure and all this other stuff to happen.” She and I grapple together to understand the nature of what t

The very act of finding one’s bearings as a writer, or exploring within the laws of a particular cosmology, can often unleash a sense of excitement and prolific creative output.