Why I've been writing criticism
All to say that, to my mind, criticism is my own work, just as “my own work”—my original creative work—is also the work of the writers I’ve read and loved (and, in another way, read and resisted), of what has accrued in me.
Cara Blue • Why I've been writing criticism
Specifically, I’ve been thinking about what we’re doing and why when we document daily life, and how to make such documentation compelling.
Cara Blue • Why I've been writing criticism
Makes me think about what we do at FS and how to make documentation inspiring but also useful. USEFUL and INSPIRING. We think about it like a balancing act but we should actually think about each as fuel for the other. The more useful something is, the more inspiring it becomes. Because it suddenly has purpose. I tend to find things most inspiring when the usefulness is adjacent to the intended use case or focus at hand. Indirect inspiration is the most palpable because it’s unexpected. It’s the act of dot connecting, of pattern-making. It feels somewhat original, being able to take something from X and apply it’s meaning to Y
I took a course on the philosophical novel, taught by Maria Němcová Banerjee, an expert on Milan Kundera’s work, and began to think about how novels engage intellectual traditions, how they can make use of and even serve as a form of philosophy.
Cara Blue • Why I've been writing criticism
we both love Mavis Gallant, for example, and other fiction writers who write with Gallant’s precision, insight, sense of perspective on life and its vagaries.