I'm not writin nuttin but I wanted to pass on two relevant things I've read this week:
I have always been inspired, in many ways, by nature and by solitude but I was a little surprised and quite pleased to read about a recent gift to Iowa State University in this short news item entitled
Writing Requires Solitude from an alumni magazine:
A 76-acre plot of land donated to the English Department's MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment serves as a place of solitude for students, alumni, and visitors to write. ... The plot is populated by ducks, beavers, wild turkey and deer, and the English department plans to preserve its wild character.
Also, I'm in the middle of Muriel Barbery's
The Elegance of the Hedgehog which I am enjoying thoroughly. Chapter 18 is entitled
Ryabinin after the character in
Anna Karenina and she describes wonderfully the process of writing for her and ends with this:
...Freed from the demands of decision and intention, adrift on some inner sea, we observe our various movements as if they belonged to someone else, and yet we admire their involuntary excellence. What other reason might I have for writing this...if the writing did not have something of the art of scything about it? The lines gradually become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will and appear in spite of me on the sheet, teaching me something that I neither knew nor thought I might want to know. This painless birth, like an unsoliticed proof, gives me untold pleasure, and with neither toil nor certainty but the joy of frank astonishment I follow the pen that is guiding and supporting me.
Good on you all that scythe away with pen in hand.