Place Has Always Been Important To Me,

The Intermittent Depression That Had Shadowed Him Throughout His Adult Life Was About To Envelop Him Once Again.

To Me, Writing Is A Very Physical Process. I Lay Out The Entire Book With The Two Narratives Side By Side On My Bedroom Floor, And Just Get Down On My Hands And Knees And Start Looking At It In That Physical Space. "does This Really Follow From This? Should This Be Here Or Elsewhere?" I Will Literally Cut The Paper Into Paragraphs. I'll Cut It Into Segments And Move The Segments Around From One Narrative To The Other Until I Feel That I've Found The Natural Structure.

Digression Is My Passion. I Love Telling The Main Stories, But In Some Ways, What I Love Most Is Using Those Narratives As A Way Of Stringing Together The Interesting Stories That People Have Kind Of Forgotten, And That Are Kind Of Surprising. The Problem Is, How Do You Pare Stories Away So That The Book Doesn't Become A Distracting Jumble Of Material, And Readers Lose Focus? In My Experience, There's Really Only One Way To Do That. I Pack It All In With The Rough Draft, Then Count On Myself And My Trusted Readers To Tell Me What's Good And What's Not Good.

I Thought I'd Go To A Bookstore And See What Moved Me.

Place Has Always Been Important To Me, And One Thing Today's Chicago Exudes, As It Did In 1893, Is A Sense Of Place. I Fell In Love With The City, The People I Encountered, And Above All The Lake And Its Moods, Which Shift So Readily From Season To Season, Day To Day, Even Hour To Hour.