To Be Any Sort Of Competent Writer

The Ordinary Is The Divine.

A Writer Is Dreamed And Transfigured Into Being By Spells, Wishes, Goldfish, Silhouettes Of Trees, Boxes Of Fairy Tales Dropped In The Mud, Uncles' And Cousins' Books, Tablets And Capsules And Powders...and Then One Day You Find Yourself Leaning Here, Writing On That Round Glass Table Salvaged From The Park View Pharmacy--writing This, An Impossibility, A Summary Of Who You Came To Be Where You Are Now, And Where, God Knows, Is That?

When Something Does Not Insist On Being Noticed, When We Aren't Grabbed By The Collar Or Struck On The Skull By A Presence Or An Event, We Take For Granted The Very Things That Most Deserve Our Gratitude.

I Would Distinguish Between A Visitor And A Pilgrim: Both Will Come To A Place And Go Away Again, But A Visitor Arrives, A Pilgrim Is Restored. A Visitor Passes Through A Place; The Place Passes Through The Pilgrim.

Novels Are Routinely Denigrated When Characters Are Not Found To Be Likable. Is Raskolnikov Likable? Is King Lear? The Plethora Of Such Naive Readers Testifies To A Failure Of Imagination - The Capacity To See Into Unfamiliar Lives, Motives, Feelings - And This Failure Must, At Least In Part, Be The Failure Of The Teaching Of Literature In The Schools.