It Is Important To Know

I'm Blessed In My Good Friends, And Some Of Them Happen To Be Writers, Though That's Almost Never What Our Friendships Are About. And Every Writer I've Ever Read, Living Or Dead, Has In One Way Or Another Helped And Inspired. I Have A Feeling It's Important Not To Mix The Two Up.

Short Stories Consume You Faster. They're Connected To Brevity. With The Short Story, You Are Up Against Mortality. I Know How Tough They Are As A Form, But They're Also A Total Joy.

Tonight I Can Smell The Season The Way It's Usually Only Possible To At The Very First Moments Of Its Return, Before You're Used To It, When You've Forgotten Its Smell, Then There It Is Back In The Air And The Flow Of Things Shifting And Resettling Again.

Thomas Teal, A Luminous Translator Of Jansson's Twin Talent For Surface And Depth, Simplicity And Reverberation In Language, And Someone Who Knows Exactly How To Convey Her Gift For Sensing The Meaning Embedded In The Most Mundane Act Or Turn Of Phrase.

All We Need To Do, Reader Or Writer, From First Line To Final Page, Is Be As Open As A Book, And Be Alive To The Life In Language - On All Its Levels.