. . . there are lives to describe, and events to report and narratives to limn the shape of in the rhythms of prose. There are more people in my head than I've ever met, and many of them play a more important role in my life than the real ones. Sometimes I hear their voices, sometimes I see them act, sometimes I feel their anger and joy. It's all an elaborate game of course, a way of exercising my mind I've chosen or inherited. The game is that there are lives for me to write. And in writing them I write my own. Not autobiography, but a geography of the interior, like those Age of Discovery maps of places scarcely glimpsed or dimly suspected, a map of thought and emotion and sensation infused and transformed into these other, imagined lives.
But this is all too mystical and metaphysical, too much of inspiration and too little of perspiration. What really happens is that . . . . .Abstract | Bibliography | Glossary | "Holier Than Thou" | Project Entrance
Initial release: June 10, 1996
Last update: June 11, 1996