There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we believe we left without having lived them, those we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar…
How can it be that the act of reading is like making art? What would that mean? What good would it do to turn one’s life over to reading in some specifically artistic way? And how would such a decision lead to a career in…
We come into the world screaming for food and attention. The scream is our first language, a vocalization that later becomes a cry, a coo, a pleasurable burble, and when the time is right, a first primitive word. Unlike learning to read and write, which…
I’ve made a claim that there is an intimate connection between the craft of writing and the act of reading. You might question this claim on empirical grounds. Surely, there have been writers whose craft is first rate, but who haven’t read much. Maybe there…
Perhaps, in tune with Henry Miller’s intuition that he was an artist long before he became one, some of us are readers and writers long before we become so. It is, thus, this notion of springing into existence, of “getting started” on the way…
A real book comes into being from nothingness, without even the biological roadmap of sperm, egg and instinct that guide much of animal life on the planet. Many books—commercial trash, series fiction, many mysteries, romance novels, guidebooks and shelf after shelf of others, exist…