I Was At The Tail End Of

Fashion Is Fickle, And I Was Published Because I Was Fashionable. Because I Was Gay.

And It Was Always The Stories That Needed The Telling That Gave Us The Rope We Could Cross Any River With. They Balanced Us High Above Any Crevasse. They Made Us Be Natural Acrobats. They Made Us Brave. They Met Us Well. They Changed Us. It Was In Their Nature To.

But Everything Written Has Style. The List Of Ingredients On The Side Of A Cornflakes Box Has Style. And Everything Literary Has Literary Style. And Style Is Integral To A Work. How Something Is Told Correlates With - More - Makes What's Being Told. A Story Is Its Style.

Google Is So Strange. It Promises Everything, But Everything Isn’t There. You Type In The Words For What You Need, And What You Need Becomes Superfluous In An Instant, Shadowed Instantaneously By The Things You Really Need, And None Of Them Answerable By Google.

Thomas Teal, A Luminous Translator Of Jansson's Twin Talent For Surface And Depth, Simplicity And Reverberation In Language, And Someone Who Knows Exactly How To Convey Her Gift For Sensing The Meaning Embedded In The Most Mundane Act Or Turn Of Phrase.