On writing
More importantly, the whole point of even writing an essay is to attempt to make sense of something that matters to you. This means truth-seeking is baked into the process, and the reader is invited to join in the sensemaking.
Follow the link in our bio to read our Art of Fiction interview with Shirley Hazzard in issue no. 173 (Spring 2005).
instagram.com“Fiction results from imagination working on experience. We shape experience in our minds so that is makes sense. We force the world to be coherent—to tell us a story.
Not only fiction writers do this; we all do it; we do it constantly, continually, in order to survive. People who can’t make the world into a story go made. Or, like infants or
... See moreAnne Lamott, on using writing to open a door:
"There is a door we all want to walk through, and writing can help you find it and open it. Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you soften, can wake you up. But publishing won’t do any of those things; you’ll never get in that way."
So
Doris Lessing on reading:
“There is only one way to read, which is to browse in libraries and bookshops, picking up books that attract you, reading only those, dropping them when they bore you, skipping the parts that drag – and never, never reading anything because you feel you ought, or because it is part of a trend or a movement. Remember that
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“The process of making art is the process of becoming a person with agency, with independent thought, a producer of meaning rather than a consumer of meanings that may be at odds with your soul, your destiny, your humanity, so there’s another kind of success in becoming conscious that matters and that is up to you and nobody else and within your
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