Month: June 2019

Richard A. Johnson’s Writing Space

It’s daybreak in Victoria, mid-spring, which means the dawn light creeps through the gaps in the window shade at 5 a.m. and by 5:30 I’m sitting at my desk next to a steaming cup of black coffee. With any luck, our 22-month-old son has slept solidly through the night and won’t be jumping in his crib, knocking on the adjacent wall, or running into my office to bang on the old Mac, for at least another hour. By which time my wife will be up to handle morning routines and allow me another precious hour or two to remain embedded in the work of drafting, editing, or procrastinating.

“Writing is done in solitude,” wrote Rebecca Solnit, “but not in isolation.” I adore the Writing Space section of TNQ’s website because I spend a lot of downtime imagining idyllic writing spaces and the solitary writers who inhabit them. My favourite physical element of my own space is an adjustable, electric standing-desk (a “most luxurious item,” confessed Ayelet Tsabari of hers, and rightly so). A few years ago I spent the weekend before my birthday visiting friends out of town, and when I returned my wife had replaced my decrepit IKEA desk with this beauty. At first it felt too luxurious—a desk fit for an elite novelist, perhaps; not an imposter and word-grinder who spends no small amount of his time editing corporate reports and listicles. (I got over that feeling when I played with the control panel.)

We moved to Victoria from Toronto last summer, and by necessity that meant letting go of an old space—and many of its resident objects—and populating a new one. The choice of what to keep and what to discard came down to a decision about the nature of inspiration: What do I need to surround myself with in order to write? Marilyn Bowering wrote of the things she carried from one writing space to the next that they bestowed a feeling of “continuity to a journey which has often felt navigated blind.” Continuity. So I Marie-Kondo’d most of the décor and detritus (and a few of the books) from the old space and pared myself down to only those things that are essential to the continuation of my story. In addition to old journals and a haphazardly curated selection of mostly non-fiction books, there remain dictionaries, style guides, a few pretty perfect-bound magazines, and a cherished 1940 edition of Leaves of Grass. Plus a photo of myself, age six, which reminds me to be honest with my stories and not to take myself too seriously. (Ain’t no such thing as a six-year-old imposter.)

In fact, this writing space of mine is a shared space—my wife takes over between 8:30-5:30 most days to produce exquisite podcasts, while I spend the day happily ensconced in the mind-bending world of fatherhood. Susan Olding wisely admitted that “a lot of the real work of writing gets done outdoors when I’m walking,” which is absolutely true. Fatherhood, too, is an outdoor pursuit, and while my creative brain hibernates as I herd a proto-toddler around parks, beaches and neighbourhood nooks, my reflective brain gathers perspective and silently edits whatever claptrap I penned that morning. When my fingers escape the firmness of the keyboard and sink into the wet sand of a low-tide beach, drawing triangles and stick figures, I feel something honestly refreshing, intimate and authentic—much like the feeling of a creative breakthrough.

And when I return to the writing space in the evening, after supper and stories and bedtime routines—assuming I have a nickel of creativity left to spend—I raise the desk and tap my fingers and become writer-like again. Even if all I’m doing is, in the familiar words of Richard Kemick, staring “into the abyss of draft number seven.” The abyss, to paraphrase Joseph Campbell, is where you find the treasures of life.

Ergo, writing space: a good place for a treasure hunt.

(I don’t tweet much but hit me up @writing_richard if my writing space feels at all familiar to you. Solitude, not isolation, right?)

Photos courtesy of Richard A. Johnson.

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Marilo Nunez’s Writing Space

I read Virginia Wolff’s A Room of One’s Own while in university (my first degree was in theatre and I was twenty years old) and it changed my life. I longed for a room like the one she describes in her book, a place just for me, a space that contains all of my creative dreams. A place I could go and write all day. It would be many years, and many desks and spaces, before I would feel that I had found “a room of my own”. I always wanted to be a writer, my whole life. But I was always too afraid to admit it, fearing that if I let anyone read my stories, they’d laugh in my face and tell me they weren’t any good.

So, I did theatre instead. Yes, just as frightful (people to scrutinize your talents all the time) but somehow it felt safer than letting people read my work. I became an actor, then an artistic director and arts administrator running my own theatre company. But four years ago, my body began telling me I was pushing too hard- running a company solo for ten years is not an easy thing- and stress was literally killing me. I was getting pneumonia at least once a year and my marriage was falling apart. I decided to save my marriage and my health and so I closed down the company and we moved to Hamilton. The plan was to take a year for both my husband and I to engage with our creative selves. The windfall from the sale of our house in Toronto was supposed to make that happen for us. Our new house had so many more bedrooms than the one in Toronto. I chose my room, imagining myself spending hours of my day writing my plays and novels. But, as is the case when one is too afraid to jump, I was offered an arts administration job in my new city and so I took the job. Fear has a funny way of gripping you in its hold.

I was once again putting budgets together, making other artists’ dreams come true and I was denying the one person I should have been putting first, myself. I craved writing and going into my new room to create, but I was always too tired. I lasted three years and then I broke. I told my husband I needed to go back to school and get my MFA in Creative Writing or I was going to lose my mind. I even showed him a page from my journal that I had written over fifteen years previous, even before I’d met him, where I wrote, I want to get my MFA in Creative Writing or I am going to die.

I am about to graduate from the MFA program at Guelph this year. I have written five plays and several short stories, one of which is in this publication. It is a struggle every day to go to my computer and write. It doesn’t come easily for me. Writing is one of the hardest things I have ever done. But I love it so much. And I would rather do this than anything else in the world. And just this past summer, my husband helped me to repaint and re-organize my room. It is now the room I have always wanted. It holds all of my cherished books- plays, books on writing, poetry books, short story collections and the literature that I love, books by Marquez, Cortazar, Bolaño, and Allende. It has a couch where my dog Saga lies while I write and where my children come in to draw and talk to me about their days. The wall where my desk leans against is a beautiful pink and on the walls of the room are posters and creative designs of my plays. Oh, and I can’t forget the large poster of Frida Khalo that hangs just to the left of me, above my computer. Frida’s energy inspires me. And when I am feeling stuck, I’ll get up and do some yoga or lie on my floor to think out the plot of my stories. I have finally found my place , my room, where I can make all of my dreams come true.

Photo by Dustin Lee on Unsplash.

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What’s Margaret Nowaczyk Reading?

A month ago, I travelled to Iceland for the Iceland Writers Retreat and for weeks ahead, I boned up on Icelandic literature: Nobel prize winners, twenty-first century darlings, and a few thrillers. No sagas. In doing so, I was delighted to discover Sjón, a multi-talented poet, novelist and lyricist (he has written lyrics for Björk) and Halldor Laxness, Iceland’s sole Nobel Prize winner in literature. Right now, I am reading Sjón’s “The Whispering Muse”(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York), a clever retelling of Jason’s myth (he of the Golden Fleece).

“The Whispering Muse” is a slim novel, beautifully translated by Victoria Cribb. It is narrated by a comically dull self-appointed expert on fish and their contribution—as food—to the superiority of the Nordic race. Throughout, two narratives roll in like waves until Greek and Icelandic myths clash and crest. The endings—for there are two—will satisfy both speculative fiction and magical realism fans.

Speaking of waves in narrative, “Meander, Spiral, Explode” by Jane Alison (Catapult, New York), presents a gentle yet firm denunciation of the climactic Aristotelian narrative schema taught in all creative writing classes. Using patterns from nature: waves, radials, and honeycombs in addition to the titular three, she dissects literary works from flash fiction to epic tomes illustrating alternative but equally satisfying narrative structures, all in a non-scholarly and engaging manner.

Photo by Patti Black on Unsplash.

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David Waltner-Toews’ Writing Space

Every writer, I think, needs a space. This need not be a room, as Virginia Woolf imagined. When I was trying to fairly contribute money and labour into raising children, paying mortgages and cars, maintaining a household and a couple relationship, writing at home was not possible. I wrote poetry in hotel rooms in Kathmandu or Nairobi or Bogota. For longer pieces, or to gather my thoughts into some semblance of coherence,  the only place I could write was a cabin on the Bruce Trail, which we rented from a psychiatrist, a friend and colleague from my wife’s work. I would sit at a small wooden table and look out over Georgian Bay, and go for long walks along the escarpment.

When I retired from the university, I was afraid that my writing would suffer, and perhaps even disappear. How could I nudge open a head-space in the home that was so crowded with memories of a young family, of getting lectures ready, of fussing over academic articles? Every time I looked up from a story or poem my mind would be cheerfully assaulted by thoughts of yard work, housework, meals to plan. It took an effort, and a few turbulent years, but for me writing, like water, always finds its necessary way. I now mostly write at a computer in a room that overlooks our backyard. Within the room is a bookshelf with books that I have most recently pillaged for my latest books, a large painting from Vietnam, some family pictures, a couch. Looking out the windows, I see a yard surrounded by towering, ancient, black walnut trees. When the kids were teenagers, there was a clay tennis court back there. Now, I see a green space, shrubs, grasses, semi-feral flowers.

What both the cabin and this room have in common is the opportunity to lift my eyes from the writing task at hand, to rest and re-focus, to remind myself that these words I struggle with, that I forget, that so often fail me, are not all there is. I can’t always see the view directly—the spruce tree off our deck has grown so big that it partly obscures (or enriches) the view—but I know what’s there. I can get up and look out another window, or go downstairs (my main exercise!) and walk outside. I can talk to the chickens. I can be in a world greater than the word-nets I use to grasp it. At the cabin there were loons, mergansers, waves, crumbling cliffs, rocky beaches, and clusters of spruce and poplar; at my home in Kitchener, that mind-calming role is played by cardinals, forsythia, juniper, grasses, robins, crows, and, more recently, a small flock of chickens.

Photos courtesy of David Waltner-Toews.

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What’s Jennifer Lynn Dunlop Reading?

My favourite poet, Mary Oliver (Sept 10, 1935 – Jan 17, 2019) passed away recently, and I have been re-reading her work. I am captivated by her images of nature, the way her words depict scenes vividly and imaginatively, such as ‘the eyelash of lightning’ (Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does it End?). Doesn’t that provide a compelling visual? I also admire the imagery in this excerpt from Rhapsody part 7: “If you are in the sea I will slide into that smooth blue nest, I will talk fish, I will adore salt’. Isn’t that a thought-provoking way to represent love?

Her work challenges and inspires me, not only to be a better poet but to fulfil my own unique potential as a person. In her poem ‘When Death Comes’, she states: “I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.” I agree with her sentiment. It motivates me to consider what I am leaving to the world – what memories, what words. Will I have any impact on it? Am I interacting and engaging enough with the world?

And who hasn’t appreciated her famous quote, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life” (The Summer Day)? She asks us personally what we will choose to accomplish. She emphasizes that we have only one life, and that it can wriggle out of our grasp if we are not careful. She challenges us, but she also accepts us:

‘You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.’

‘Wild Geese’ is framed on the wall of my bedroom, and it has helped me cope with some difficult times.

Mary Oliver loved her partner Molly Malone deeply, and I appreciate how she adored unreservedly and that she was forthcoming about it: “from the complications of loving you i think there is no end or return. no answer, no coming out of it. which is the only way to love ” (Thirst). She was true to herself and her love, not just of Molly but of the natural world, and she inspires us to do the same. I understood her, because our gratitude for nature and our continuous curiosity and openness to feeling are similar.

Her words stay with me. Her poetry has calmed me, contented me, inspired and challenged me. That is what art is meant to do, what it is capable of accomplishing. What more can you ask for?

I am also reading Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight. I am in awe of the way he writes. His prose is gorgeous and intelligent. I enjoy every sentence. I am a voracious reader, and I read several books a week. And some are more satisfying than others. I appreciate poetic language and learning something new – whether about a culture or historical event. Michael Ondaatje leaves me feeling both refreshed and knowledgeable, a superlative combination.

Photo by Duncan Maloney on Unsplash.

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Finding the Form with Callista Markotich

Welcome to the latest installation of “Finding the Form.” In this new series, contributors share how they found and developed the creative form for their recent work in The New Quarterly. You can find Callista Markotich’s “The Bed-Making” in Issue 150.

It had to be a Poem.

Try to convey in prose, the feeling of being watched, being witnessed by spirits, spirits of women long buried, while making a bed. Your telling can’t explain, can’t specify time and place, doesn’t begin here and end there. There is no pivotal moment; nothing really happens. In fact, in one draft this poem was titled Drift, so gauzy are the elements of where, when and how. You’ll sound fey.

Yet, it is told. Poetry can do that, streaming the lush Orphic invitation across the River Styx flowing between life and death.

And it’s poetry I’m writing these days. For years my ‘pen’ was bristling with communiques concerning the concrete world of directives and actions: memos, policies, guidelines. Freedom to plumb the affective domain for the making of a poem was like stepping off the grid of sidewalk and entering a woodsy, winding, dipping, climbing trail. Even when challenging, there’s that dappled sun, that rich shadow, that chance of meeting a muse just over the rise.

It had to be a poem. At first (oh, such a draft this was!) it was “This Way to Love”
What souls surround me/ as I make this bed/
silently approving /this way to love?
This poem was on my desktop, the subject of the furrowed brow and the midnight flash of genius, gone at dawn, while I toiled to convey a feeling, one that I experience from time to time, one that I believe might not be unique, although no one has ever admitted to me that dead women watch them work.

In one iteration the poem was called SKIRTS. Indented and in italicised were the faint sounds of skirts worn by phantoms from other epochs gathering together to observe the performance of a ritual, one that in life, gave them comfort and satisfaction, the daily intersection of tenderness and task. Work. Kahlil Gibran’s love made visible, the making of a bed.

In SKIRTS, I relished the sibilance, rustle of taffeta/ whisper of silk/ rasp of homespun. But it was technically problematic to include these skirts and the sounds they might make. Sounds are of the physical world, they don’t read well in the quietude of the piece; they challenge the airy, almost-not-there character of these unsummoned souls. They were distracting. Especially, they were inauthentic. I’ve never heard skirts, I confess. So delete, delete, delete and tap, tappety tap – more revision.

In another version I had a final stanza that grieved the absence of my own mother in this ghostly company, how she never came with them:

I can’t conjure the sound of stockinged leg /the brush of tweed or tartan

her memory still too ponderous with grief/ no, I would sit upon the unmade bed

and weep…

I’d like to say it only took moments to recognize the devolution into more than a little pathos/bathos. So thought my dear, small, hard-thinking editing group, so thought I. And, although it is true that at this time I mourn her heavily, that element is not authentic either, as the wraiths in this poem are fully illusory; they do not have identities or temporal or personal associations, or skirts, for that matter.

It is a common, mundane task, making the bed, yet this poem does not invite the vernacular into its diction and tone. These spirits, this task, absent that tensile thing, fitted with a pop, belong to their recollections, their pasts. Formal language tries to ennoble it, bestows importance to that mystery of having lived, being dead. The vocabulary wants to elevate the bedmaking,

the weightless instant of unfurled white, offer the gravitas of tombstones with their formal inscriptions. Archaic usage, such as “aloft above the unmade bed,” reverences the presence of these spirits from centuries past.

I think there is only one line which could reasonably be uttered by a normal modern-day person in ordinary conversation: and someone smiles…. In diction and tone this is vernacular.  It also introduces a playfulness, a nod to the light triviality of a bed-making. These are not the twisted spirits of, say, Edgar Allen Poe, crossing the Styx with tortured purpose, dark issues to resolve. It is also the only line that asserts a tiny apologetic, a diminutive insistence against possible scepticism…. I know that someone does.

The concept originates from a feeling that I have had infrequently since early days of being responsible on the home front. Growing up haphazard in my approach to domestic matters, this is odd, I admit. I sometimes had a sense that when I took extra care, when I consciously performed a household thing well, that bit of mindfulness was witnessed in the spirit world of women who once performed these quotidian tasks; they approved. Not every household thing, chiefly making beds and loading dishwashers.

Wraiths and dishwashers? Seriously? Yet that was one of the tasks that evoked the feeling. I would load as many pieces as possible, for efficiency and conservation; I would load them with great precision, for cleanliness for my people. You could say on one hand for efficiency, and on the other for love. Before you say weird, bear with me, because I think there’s a history here.

I had an aunt, Aunt Fan, on my father’s side. Aunt Fan never married, but she adored her sister’s children (my father was one of those) and their children (I was one of those). She loved us as her own for as long as she lived.

Aunt Fan was a woman painstaking in her approach to domestic tasks from making coffee to making beds and, as a girl, I confess to a degree of bafflement and impatience, I have to say, at the effort and time she put into these works.

Aunt Fan was a pioneer female employee of Bell Canada, rare in her day. In this role, she was brisk, no nonsense and without flourish, yet at home, elaborate as any chatelaine. As time went on, I came to understand that she was committed to our creature comforts, for love. She did these things well because she could, and she wanted to, for us. Aunt Fan isn’t one of these spirits, they truly are anonymous. I etched her name on a stone, though, in this poem:

Rest in Peace, Fanny, Mary, Nell

Fanny.  Aunt Fan. I think she is the genesis of the feeling which spilled into The Bed-Making.

Photos courtesy of Callista Markotich.

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Quilt of Stories

This feature is part of the Platform Series, which was made possible with generous support from the City of Waterloo and the Kitchener-Waterloo Community Foundation. Read more about the Platform Series here.

The X Page: A Storytelling Workshop is a community arts initiative that connects women who are immigrants or refugees with artists who assist and mentor them in writing and performing their own stories. The X Page is the opposite of a blank page: it’s the space where we enter into an image using all of our senses. Throughout the 12-week writing and performance workshop, participants develop a personal narrative, and work collaboratively to bring their individual stories together into a cohesive presentation. The project culminates with a performance before a live theatre audience and their stories are published here.

Table of Contents

Rana Alsafi, “Unexpected Gift”

Olga Barmina, “When the Shoe Fits.”

Uzma Bhutto, “Green Avocado Bag”

Maha Eid, “My Cherished Siblings”

Hamideh Eltejaei, “The Patchwork Story”

Dani Guse, “The Invisible Border”

Mahtab Kamali, “Surrender”

Amna Kulsoom, “A Day at School”

Peggy Law, “I love Who I am Because He Chose to Love me”

Margaret Emilia Looker, “‘You’re late!'”

Zahra Mohamed, “The Shelter”

Sumeyra N., “Where Am I?”

Samina Naz, “Ear Piercing”

Nermin Ozdemir, “Things I Wish I’d Known: A Letter to Myself Before Leaving Turkey 16 Years Ago”

Yomatie Persaud, “Role Reversal”

Paulina Rodriguez, “Teachings of Nature”

Pooneh Torabian, “The Piano Teacher”

Umut Uzunel, “Sitting at the Back of the Classroom”

Ati Zar, “The Chemistry of Calligraphy”

 

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

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The New Quarterly Secures Two Silvers

The New Quarterly won double silver in Poetry and Personal Journalism at this year’s 42nd National Magazine Awards, securing the best showing by a Canadian literary magazine and ninth best overall. The magazine’s success was announced on May 31, 2019 in Toronto after more than 185 Canadian print and digital magazines put forth submissions in both official languages. The New Quarterly garnered five nominations at this year’s National Magazine Awards, including two in Poetry, two in Personal Journalism, and one in Fiction.

Terence Young’s “The Bear” won silver in Poetry. Young—a retired teacher of English and Creative Writing at St. Michaels University School—is not new to receiving recognition; his poem was also a runner-up in The New Quarterly’s 2018 Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest. “That Time of Year,” a story from his second collection of fiction, The End of the Ice Age, was selected for the annual Best Canadian Stories in 2012.

In Personal Journalism, Meaghan Rondeau’s “Half-Thing” won silver. The New Quarterly first celebrated her innovative essay by awarding it first place in the 2018 Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. Rondeau’s work is not limited to poetry and short fiction: her first play, Cassandra in the House, was produced at the Brave New Play Rites in Vancouver.

“The competition was fierce at this year’s NMAs—in Poetry, there were eight shortlisted, and in Personal Journalism, there were 11 shortlisted,” The New Quarterly Editor Pamela Mulloy said. “It’s always a surreal experience to attend the NMAs with all their razzle-dazzle, and to see The New Quarterly‘s name on the big screen makes me incredibly proud of all the work that goes into bringing these winning writers to this very big stage.”

In the 20 years that it has participated in the National Magazine Awards, The New Quarterly has won ten gold, nine silver, and had 43 honourable mentions.

About The New Quarterly

The New Quarterly (TNQ) is a non-profit Canadian literary magazine that has been publishing the best of Canadian writing—short fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—since 1981. TNQ also holds three annual contests: the Nick Blatchford Occasional Verse Contest, the Peter Hinchcliffe Short Fiction Award, and the Edna Staebler Personal Essay Contest. The magazine hosts the Wild Writers Literary Festival and manages the Write on the French River Creative Writing Retreat. TNQ is housed at St. Jerome’s University at the University of Waterloo and acknowledges that its office is located on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples. The University of Waterloo is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land promised to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River.

For more information, please contact Pamela Mulloy at: pmulloy [at] newquarterly.net

Photos courtesy of the National Magazine Awards. For the latest award updates, follow them on Twitter at @MagAwards.

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Finding the Form with Natalie Southworth

When I started “The Realtor” my hope was to write a story where the reader wouldn’t feel compelled to judge any one of the main characters for what happens. No one would be blamed for the break down of the family. It would be a true tragedy in that way.

To do this, I started out by using a third person omniscient point of view, which allowed me to better understand and imagine each of the characters. It was helpful in unearthing material, but not much else. Not having any one point of view created too much distance between the reader and the characters and too many missed opportunities to delve deeper into their emotional worlds. Also, Frank, the father, quickly emerged as the most interesting character. Making him a puppeteer opened up a whole world to explore. The other characters were interesting mostly because of Frank.

The problem was I didn’t want the story told through Frank’s eyes. Life was happening around Frank and to Frank. I thought his mystery, his inability to reinvent himself, would be understood best if he was observed.

As an experiment, I rewrote the story in Frank’s teenage son’s point of view. In doing this, I discovered the ending. Knowing the ending helped the story’s structure fall into place. It would be told chronologically and cleanly, driving forward to the ending, heavy on scene over exposition.

Knowing the ending also allowed me to go back and heighten the significance of the puppet scene at the BBQ fundraiser. In that climatic scene, I layered in the narrator’s quiet observations. It’s the moment he realizes he admires his father, when the seed of the life-changing choice the narrator makes at the end is planted.

Natalie Southworth’s award winning stories have appeared in literary journals in Canada and the UK. She lives and writes in Montreal.
www.nataliesouthworth.ca

Photo by Sagar Dani on Unsplash.

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Stephen Maude’s Writing Space

Saturday morning and here I am sitting alone at Mitzi’s Café. That’s the way my narrator, an anxious cinephile named Emily, begins her story in “Happy Enough”, which appears in TNQ150. And that’s the way the story began for me as well – sitting alone in a café. “Happy Enough” is the third of my stories to feature Emily and her friend Morah (see TNQ123 & 141). The first of these also opens in a café, a now-defunct coffee house in Toronto’s west end. I was sitting in that same place in fact, in January 2011, gazing out the window with my notebook lying open on the table, when Emily and Morah walked in, picked up my purple gel pen, and wrote themselves onto the page.

Cafés and libraries are my go-to places to write. I have a lovely home and a wonderful family, but when I’m at home, there’s always something other than writing that I could be doing – or should be doing, a voice in my head keeps telling me. So, when I want to write, I get out of the house and go somewhere else. Someplace where I can feel anonymous for an hour or two. Not only does that free me from distractions around the house, it also liberates my imagination.

In her essay, “Woolf’s Darkness”, Rebecca Solnit draws on a 1930 essay by Virginia Woolf to make the point that venturing outside the familiarity of home and into the city can be a means of inducing reverie, subjectivity, and imagination, a sort of duet between the prompts and interrupts of the outer world and the flow of images and desires (and fears) within. When I’m walking or cycling city streets on my way to the café or library, I’m shedding thoughts about planning meals or paying bills, and making space for imagination.

Today I’m at my local branch of the Toronto Public Library – one of my favourite places to be. The shelves beside me are lined with books, works by Solnit, Woolf, and hundreds of others. Surrounded by great writers, it’s easy to feel intimidated, to fall prey to the negative chatter in your head. Who are you kidding, calling yourself a writer? Do you really think anyone cares what you have to say? But just as easily it can be inspiring. I have little doubt that, once upon a time, the authors of the books lining these shelves were likewise plagued by misgivings. They were staring at a blank page and wondering how to fill it, just as I’m doing now.

Photos courtesy of Stephen Maude.

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