Everybody has a book in them, the old saying goes, and in most cases that's exactly where it should stay. Yet at the San Miguel Writers' Conference last week, which was full of aspiring writers, I kept running into people with interesting stories to tell: the Australian woman who walked the camino de Santiago with the ashes of her son, the Canadian pilot who built his own plane, the Mexican acupuncturist who is also a poet, the woman who wrote about growing up in Teheran during the revolution, the American grandmother who lived for two years in Mali, the woman from Little Rock who used to babysit Chelsea Clinton, the young psychotherapist from Texas who grew up on a cattle ranch. "Yea," she said casually, "I know how to castrate a bull."
In his beautiful memoir, Let Me Finish, Roger Angell writes of the great New Yorker writer Emily Hahn (remember her? no, me neither) and describes her “gleam of everyday transcendence.”
The New York Times' double dose of Donald Antrim - a review in the book review and a profile in the magazine - gave me the name of yet another contemporary novelist I need to feel bad about not having read.
Still not sure what to make of last night's wordless tribute to Russian writers.
I was at a party recently and many of the people who asked what I did for a living, after hearing my reply, gave me a short soliloquy on how they write a little too, or have always wanted to write. They were well-meaning, trying to show camaraderie, and also I believe honest (who, apart from writers, doesn't like to write?). But if you really want to endear yourself to a writer don't say that you write - say that you read.