When Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven, first came out in hardback, I resisted it. I picked it up a few times, reading the opening (I loved the opening), but — oh, gee, it was another dystopian novel, and did I really want to read or watch one more story about the end of life as we know […]
So yesterday I spent a bunch of time beating myself up for writing that blogpost. For whining. But as often happens, my whining elicited a flurry of emails of support and affirmation and encouragement. In one, several passages from Thomas Merton, including this one: “The purpose of education is to show us how to define […]
“The first thing a writer has to do is find another source of income. Then, after you have begged, borrowed, stolen, or saved up the money to give you time to write and you spend all of it staying alive while you write, and you write your heart out, after all that, maybe no one […]
I can write anywhere. I made up the names of the characters on a sick bag while I was on an airplane. I told this to a group of kids and a boy said, “Ah, no, that’s disgusting.” And I said, “Well, I hadn’t used the sick bag.” J.K. ROWLING from Advice to Writers