Last week the writer, Jonathan Safron Froer came to town and talked to a crowd in an old downtown church about the ways in which someone can stumble when asked easy questions. He threw a lot of jokes about Sarah Palin into the air and we all chuckled and worried and listened. And he talked about how the books he wrote surprised him in the writing, they morphed and changed so much, they started one place as one kind of a boat and each bit of that boat was replaced in the journey and when they arrived on the other shore, each story was a new. I hadn't read his books. I didn't know anything but his name. And when I walked out I thought that he had stood and told some truth.
He quoted W H Auden who said (he said)
"I look at what I write so I can see what I think. "
And Kurt Vonnegut who said (he said)
"A reader is to a book as a musician is to a score."
And Joseph Brodsky who said (he said)
"The rhyme is smarter than the poet."
And the anonymous someone who once said
"A bird is not an ornithologist."
And he was very funny and inspiring and I went home and wrote and wrote and wrote. My sketchbook page above is chock-full of drawings after some pr photo of him, that might become a paper doll.
Oh and apparently there is someone named Muffin Lord. If that was fiction, no-one would believe...
Take care,
Rachael