So I have some news. I feel very happy and nervous abut it but I also feel keenly aware that while I have good news some friends, who are extremely talented, have had bad news or are unable to take up the offer due to damn financial constraints.

So the news is that I have accepted an offer of study towards a PhD in creative writing at the IIML to start in March 2012.

It will be part-time study so I can continue to work part-time.

The PhD has two componants; creative and critical. For my creative component I intend to write a collection of poetry exploring the intersect between people and technology. For my critical component I intend to explore the use of science in the works of Jorie Graham, Lavinia Greenlaw and Robert Crawford. These things may, of course, alter slightly over the next few years.

I'll be using this blog as my reading journal next year but I'm hoping to continue with the interviews, poems and other booky stuff too.

I just want to say thank you to all my friends, family and everyone else who reads this blog and supports my work. None of it would have happened without your support.

At the end of this post is a short short story I wrote which is about the death of a child.

I wrote it a few years back for a short short story competition. (It didn't get anywhere.)

Last year, my friend Sarah Laing had this to say about dead children in literature:

'I am ambivalent about dead children in literature. For me, it's the ultimate taboo, I don't want to think about children dying, I resist engaging because it is one of the saddest things I can think of. Sometimes I think it is a cheap trick by writers, to force emotion out of their audience. It feels like a device, a tool. But perhaps that 's the point of art, to provide semulcrums of grief, love, rage – practice runs so we are better equipped for the real thing...' (see link for her full musings on the topic).

When I read Sarah's post, I thought of my story. She is right of course. How awful, how mawkish and manipulative to write about a child dying, because anyone with an ounce of humanity will have an emotional reaction to even the two words in close proximity: 'child die'. You could potentially get away with terrible writing because the reader will be so sad about the dead child they won't notice.

I think she is also right in her idea that sometimes writers go to these ugly, unthinkable places as a sort of emotional rehearsal. I know that is what I was doing when I wrote this story. I was undergoing a different kind of grief about one of my sons. (He wasn't dead, but I had lost him all the same, for a while anyway.) I think I wrote this to prod at that grief a bit, to push it into fiction and see how the grief looked there. Also, I think mothers writing about dead children is like a Mexican sugar skull – laugh at death, defy it, dare it to come near you, show it that you will bite it's head off if it tries...

Sometimes a more skilful writer than me, can write about a dead child and handle it with great grace. Two examples are this New Zealand short story containing a dead child by Tracey Slaughter. & I recently read this beautiful memoir by Elizabeth McCracken  – she writes deeply into and through her grief at losing her child (a still birth) yet this book is not 'therapy writing' but beautifully crafted prose which intelligently shines light into some murky emotional places.

& Here is my wee story. The little boy dies, OK? so don't go getting attached.

THE BLUR By Helen Lehndorf

My mother peers over the top of her glasses at the photos on my wall.

'You never did get studio portraits done of the children, did you? I sent you that voucher.' She lifts a picture of Toby down. 'This is a lovely one of his face, but his hands are blurry.'

*

The toaster is faulty and always burns one side. It annoys me but I only remember about needing to replace the toaster while I'm eating the half-toasted, half-charred bread. The rest of the day it doesn't cross my mind. Sometimes it seems my life is full of these small irritations – easily fixed, absent-mindedly neglected.

It drives Rod crazy that I don't lace my sneakers properly. The laces are a random cross-hatch with uneven knots. It drives me crazy that he automatically puts another round of toast in the toaster when he takes one out. There's always cold toast sitting sadly in the slots. It's such a waste of bread.

“I'm from a big family” he says. “There was always someone who wanted toast.” But now in our family there are just the three of us and I usually eat cereal anyway.

When I wake there is always that dozy sense of morning optimism. Then I remember. The remembering seeps across my chest like an ink stain on linen.

After he turned five, it was harder to get a good photo of him. He'd spy the camera and pull his 'camera face' – an unappealing fake smile, more of a grimace really. I had to sneak up on him, snap photos while he was absorbed in playing, or pushing cars around.

Children these days expect to see photographs instantly on the little screen on the back, so he was annoyed that day, I had dusted off my old SLR film camera. It was the day we bought the second hand swing set from a Kindergarten garage sale. I snapped him swinging, shimmying up the bars like a monkey. His summer-brown legs wrapped around the metal, a plaster on his knee where he'd come off his scooter.

“Where am I, Mummy?” he said, running his fingers over the back of the camera.

“You'll have to wait for these photos. I have to get them developed,” I rubbed his back, “now go and wash your hands. I've made pasta for lunch.”

He was always in a hurry, always in a rush. He made us faster, too, as we raced to keep up with first him, and then Priscilla. But we aren't so fast any more. Now we are quite slow.

I went inside to finish making lunch. He was there in the yard and then he wasn't and then he was gone, out onto the street. I heard the accident before I saw it. Every day I hear it again.

It was over a year later that I found the film in the fridge door. I got my friend Susan to take it into the shop for me. I couldn't do it. There was too much I'd had to do already. She came in, pale and serious, with bagels and the green envelope. I made coffee and we sat.

There he was, climbing and swinging. The chickenpox scar on the side of his nose. The tomato sauce trail down the front of his t-shirt. In each photo he was moving. In every photo, arms open, legs in motion. The very energy of him. The blur.

Ripple

The floor has a ripple

in it, which is funny

because the carpet is blue

like the sea and the baby

is pulling and chewing

on your nipple so hard

that it bleeds

and her little legs kick-

kick you, her hands find

your hair and pull hard

and there's a roaring

in your ears that might

be the sea and they ask

you if you're blue and

you say you just need

some sleep then everything

will be alright but now

the floor has a ripple in it.

I think I may have forgotten to let you all know that I have some new work over at Turbine 10. Here is one of the pieces.

Easing back into the Tuesday Poem...

If you would like to submit a poem to be published on my blog as a Tuesday Poem (They can be previously published) contact me.

The third installment in the Quick Ten Interview series.

Bill Manhire

Arguably New Zealand's best loved poet. Bill answers questions about musicality, collaboration, lightning strikes and the muse.

Bill Manhire hardly requires any introduction but you can read his NZ Book Council profile here. Manhire’s published books include a Collected Poems (2001) and Lifted (2006), and many anthologies. His most recent book is The Victims of Lightning (2010) from Victoria University Press. He was the inaugural Te Mata Estate New Zealand Poet Laureate in 1996–97, received an Arts Foundation of New Zealand Laureate award in 2005, and in 2007 received the Prime Minister’s Award for Poetry. He directs the creative writing programme (IIML) at Victoria University of Wellington.

You can follow the IIML on Twitter.

Today - Thursday September 23rd, Wellingtonians can listen to Manhire's lyrics set to Jazz music by Norman Meehan at Te Papa.

There are affiliate links in this interview. I’ve found The Book Depository to be the cheapest and quickest place to find books and recommend them without hesitation. Free delivery anywhere in the world is an amazing thing.

HH: What does working with other disciplines like jazz music bring to your creative process?

BM: It makes me less predictable to myself, I guess. It shuffles my head around. There’s also the odd satisfaction of seeing my poems translated by an expert, but for once I have a reasonably good grasp of the target language.

HH: What comes first for you - words or music (or should I say the musicality of the poem)?

BM: I think I almost always start in musical territory – with a cadence, or a musical phrase – and then add more phrases, until there’s something there that has meaning, that manages to be more than noise. Then I try to follow the meaning and the music at the same time. I have to admit that I would always sacrifice meaning for a fine musical effect.

If I could get away with it, I would probably call every one of my poems “Song”. For me, the music you hear in your head off the page is more amazing than anything that happens in performance – the rhythms of the lines play against the rhythms of the sentences, and that’s something you simply can't get in prose.

HH: What do you enjoy most about collaborating with other artists? 

BM: Well, I guess – in an entirely pleasurable way – I get pushed out of my comfort zone. See above. Suddenly other possibilities turn up in the world, and I can follow them or adjust them or somehow use them for my own purposes. I guess there needs to be some temperamental affinity in the first place, but often collaboration feels like the wrong word. Illustration isn’t right, either. With Ralph Hotere, for example, I’ve sometimes put things in front of him – even things I’ve done specifically for him, like the PINE sequence – and watched in astonishment as he made something far more remarkable than what he started with.

Sometimes there's more equivalence, if that’s the word – as with the Plunket birthday piece I wrote with Eve de Castro a couple of years ago. We were writing for the NZSO and children’s choir, and we agreed to use some found text (from Plunket books) and to include work associated with small children (a round, a lullaby) plus the names of Plunket nurses – and then to end where we'd begun, with a child being born. That’s the big effect of babies entering the world: they make life circular again.

HH: How do you get writing done - what is your creative process?

BM: I don’t know any longer! I used to need several days of empty-headedness, an expanse of time in which to rid my head of all the trash that’s usually there, so that other stuff could find its way in. But I haven’t had space in my life for those empty days for a long time. I'm surprised to find I like commissions; or arbitrary challenges – again because they push me into territory where I surprise myself.

In the end for me it's all magical/alchemical. You toss a bunch of sounds and meanings into the pot, and see what happens. Sometimes it's just a question of bringing together words and phrases that have never coincided before: e.g. "nest of weapons" / "lyrical foliage". Much of the time the result will be inert; occasionally you get some sort of precious metal that looks nice but has no apparent use; and very, very rarely you get some weird substance that you feel you could build a whole new city from.

HH: What advice would you give budding writers about craft and revision? How much time do you spend on it?

BM: Well, there’s nothing abstract about it – you pick up craft by actively writing, and by reading. It’s not a matter of being able to define dactyls or Petrarchan sonnets.

As for revision, it really is the biggest thing. You want any poem you write to seem effortless and inevitable – even in its roughnesses. But poems tend not to come fully formed. The best ones make you feel they do, mainly because of all the invisible revising work that's gone on somewhere off-stage. It's like The Wizard of Oz – big effects throughout the land, but the poet is just a little figure behind the curtain.

HH: The anxiety of influence - your poem "On Originality" muses on this - who were your poetry idols when you were younger?

BM: I loved early Robert Creeley, and Spanish poets in translation – the poems in The Elaboration are essentially Creeley crossed with Lorca. But mostly I tended to like poets who produced work that looked tidy and symmetrical on the page – yet inside the apparent tidiness all sorts of imaginative and emotional leaps were taking place. R.A. K Mason would be the local example - all those manic, teenage contortions. And I was full of my own teenage contortions when I first read him.

Plus big chunks of Donne and Herbert; Browning. But also Carl Sandburg, Philip Larkin, Emily Dickinson. I eventually developed weirder and wiser pleasures, too: John Crowe Ransom, the clunkier bits of Wordsworth and Hardy. I came across a great phrase in a Wordsworth poem the other day: “beyond participation”. The poem is “The Affliction of Margaret”, and I suppose it describes what bereavement feels like. "Beyond participation" points to the dead, who can no longer participate in life, and so it might indicate Margaret's son, dead seven years. But she uses the phrase of herself. It's how she feels. Amazing.

I also read a lot of the generation of American poets who began writing in the late 50s and 60s. I gave a talk about this once – it’s reprinted in Doubtful Sounds, and is also posted at the NZEPC.

HH: In an interview with Mark Broatch - Sunday Star Times it says “The Victims of Lightning takes its title from poet Randall Jarrell's line that good poets get struck by lightning five or six times in a lifetime of standing out in thunderstorms; a dozen or more and the poet is great. Manhire says every poet is capable of writing work beyond themselves. "I suppose what I'm saying to [students] is that you can construct the atmospheric conditions for lightning to strike."

Can you clarify? You don’t mean that poets need to wait for the muse do you? How do you make it easier for lightning to strike?

BM: One of the things I'm thinking of is workshop exercises. You can use various kinds of constraint to generate accidents that you can then consciously turn into something that is entirely yours – yet you would never have found your way to it without the initial trigger.

So you play with chance, but you also take responsibility. I like the story Charles Simic tells about Octavio Paz going to visit André Breton after the second world war:

He was admitted and told to wait because the poet was engaged. Indeed, from the living room where he was seated, he could see Breton writing furiously in his study. After a while he came out, and they greeted each other and set out to have lunch in a nearby restaurant.

“What were you working on, maitre?” Paz inquired as they were strolling to their destination.

“I was doing some automatic writing,” Breton replied.

“But,” Paz exclaimed in astonishment, “I saw you erase repeatedly!”

[Ah, said Breton] – “It wasn’t automatic enough.”

Constraint: producing accident, and then volition – you always have to be able to seize the moment, and yet be willing to erase repeatedly. Maybe I’ve just started answering question 5 . . .

HH: Can you tell us a bit about “Buddhist Rain”?

BM: Well it started with Norman Meehan setting some of my poems, and me feeling interested in what he’d done and then suggesting to him that I try writing texts specifically for him to put to music – with him having as much freedom to rework or abandon words as he wanted. In the end the wildest thing he did was to add an extra “la” to the “la la la la la la la” chorus of “Across the Water”. It was a very good "la", though! The project has become bigger than the CD that’s about to be issued by Rattle I'd say there are another dozen songs waiting in the wings.

At one point I sent Norman a list of possible titles, and asked if he and Hannah Griffin would like to choose the ones that interested them, and I would try to write the lyrics. So that’s where several of the texts published in The Victims of Lightning – “Pacific Raft”, “Buddhist Rain”, “Making Baby Float” – came from. There were also some that Norman liked but I never quite got round to, for example “The Third Piano”.

HH: I'm curious about the PhD programme, is it working out how you imagined? What did you imagine? What does the multi-disciplinary approach bring to the projects?

BM: Actually, we're not doing anything especially original. Most creative writing PhD programmes in Australia and the UK offer something similar to our mix of creative and "scholarly" elements. Some of the mixing of creative and critical, the complementarities, are wonderfully interesting and provocative. You can see the sort of projects that are underway on the IIML's website Some brilliant work is happening. 

I suspect the process is hard for some people: you get articulate in one language (the novel you're writing, say), and then you have to abandon it and try to speak convincingly in another language altogether. We hope that some of the writers may be able to produce hybrid projects, where you can't separate the creative and critical components.

There are bound to be some bumpy moments, some of them of the university's making. I don’t think rule-making academics understand that excellence takes many different forms. A lot of PhD regulations and protocols seem to be based on an anxious Social Sciences need to mimic the evidence-based objectivity principles that inform the hard sciences. So there's constant talk of theory and methodology, and lots of noise about Literature Reviews. These academic requirements may not be terribly helpful when you're embarking on a novel or just emptying your head so that unexpected words and thoughts can slide in. I still think E.M. Forster got it right: “How do I know what I think till I see what I say?”  Or here’s Margaret Atwood in a recent interview – "Q: What can we expect next from you? A – I never know. It's unknown to me."

HH: What are you reading at the moment?

BM: I've been reading a couple of newish – to me – American poets:

Mary Ruefle and Ben Lerner. They both do well what many of their contemporaries do by rote. Also, the English poet Alice Oswald, the Irish poet John McAuliffe, the Shetland poet Jen Hadfield.

I decided to join in Bindu's challange to spend the next 21 days writing 800 words a day (#215800) and doing some yoga everyday (Join me if you like!).

Today I worked on an idea I have to help people kick-start their creativity, then I wrote this short piece:

What defines me?

I guess most of us have some big things that happened in our lives that go towards defining us. One of the things that has shaped me most as a person is the death of my mother when I was 19. Like most teenagers I had a complex relationship with my mother, we were often arguing and I frequently said things to her that in hindsight must have been hurtful.

She was a complicated woman who found it hard to demonstrate affection or talk about emotional matters. So many things were left unsaid when she passed away. Even now, 20 years after she died there are moments when my grief is still raw, she never met my partner or children, she never saw me graduate or achieve any of my significant adult milestones.

When she was ill I waited for her to start talking about things, open up like in the movies, but she never did. This made me very angry, she was so stubbornly in denial and denying me any closure (I hate that word but there you have it). She wasn't how I thought a mother should be.

How has this shaped me? I tell my children and partner I love them everyday. I try to name things for what they are. I try to forgive her and see her as a woman doing her best just like I am. I try and be the best I can be for her and for me.

My mother is a poem

I'll never be able to write,

though everything I write

is a poem to my mother.

~Sharon Doubiago

 Did you have a complicated relationship with your mother?

I'm off to do some yoga...

Here's the wrap up post for W&R. We have a couple of months before Writers on Mondays start back up again (July 12th, programme announced in May) so you can look forward to regular posts on the sessions I get to. In the meantime these will have to hold you over. I've distilled the sessions to their most essential part of the conversation.

Charlotte Grimshaw

Grimshaw says she is most interested in didactic morals in her work, that she wants it to be more subtle. Looking at all sections of our society she doesn't see any of them as necessarily good or bad - there is no point in writing cardboard villains. Readers, she says need to have empathy for all characters to some extent, an author has to paint a portrait not write a lesson. Writers need to put the question correctly then let the readers come to their own conclusions.

Margo Lanagan & Neil Gaiman

What whooping when Neil Gaiman walked on the stage - he certainly has a devoted following. Poor Margo did well holding her own. They are both entertaining readers. I prefer Lanagan, I loved her Tender Morsels. The main assertion of the session was that there is no such thing as "Children's fiction" or "Young Adult fiction", there are only books that would be too boring for them and / or go over their heads. Both the authors and chair Kate De Goldi argued that there is no reason you can't deal with dark issues in kids books, in fact they usually like it.

Gil Adamson

I was disapointed with chairperson Jenny Pattrick's questions, most of which were quite lame. Gil's novel The Outlander began life as a poem, which never worked until it grew into a novel. I would have been interested to learn more about her poetry. She did talk about the dark themes in her poetry and using a somewhat surrealist method to access the subconscious, using games to break down barriers.

Simon Schama & Margo Lanagan

Poor Margo, Simon is such a diva he took over the session. Interesting quotes:

The future is a version of history and writing the past is perhaps always a fiction.

(I think perhaps Lydia Wevers the Chair said that?)

Historical certainty is first cousin to boredom.

(Schama)

Historians are always stabbing the horse they're riding.

(James Belich via Lydia Wevers)

Elija Trojanow

A very charming and educated man. In fact I was so busy being charmed I hardly took any notes. There's an image above to distract me further. I'm a sad case.

Kevin Connolly

Kevin takes delight in language - a poem is an event for the reader. There's an excuse for the use of multi-media if ever I heard one! The narrator of this video cracks me up but the poetry is good:

I'll close on that although I have skipped a few sessions.

Night’s Magic

Sir Isaac Newton (1643 –1727)

"Newton was not the first of the age of reason: he was the last of the magicians."

– John Maynard Keynes.

When Isaac closes his eyes

he is hanging, arms outstretched

only faith keeps him

from falling – a magic trick.

In his left hand is the Book of Revelations

in the right, the Book of Nature,

written in geometry.

He opens his eyes to take note

of God’s will in action. Observations

must be interpreted –

bodies in motion, fruit from the tree.

Reclusive, he experiments upon himself,

slides a bodkin into his eye socket

between eyeball and bone

until he sees severall white darke

& coloured circles.

Sibyls and Daemons

are still close enough

for him to hear their voices.

The sun rises so slowly it’s too hard

to pick the moment of first light

or the last of the night’s magic.

Helen Heath 2009

Read this poem and more in Sport 38 in shops from 1 May 2010.

For more Tuesday Poems go to the Tuesday Poem blog.

The Lumiere Reader has a good write up of “Self-confessed writer of whale pornography Philip Hoare" and "fellow Brit boy-gent Geoff Dyer...almost completely ignoring mediator Harry Ricketts." so I'll just point you there for that session and add an interesting quote:

“History being written before it happens” - How is that possible? Do we rise to expectations? Self fulfilling prophicies?

Bill Manhire – guest of the Steve Braunius show

Steve's coloumn in the Sunday Star Times (28/03/10) summing up his experience at Writers & Readers was very honest (including the Damien Wilkins story!). He is a rogue with alcohol issues, a diva and Bill was very patient with him. Steve pointed out their only point in common was that they'd both been to Antartica and that Bill loved it and he hated it. Hmmm, anyway, Bill as always was excellent when he was allowed to speak.

Kamila Shamsie was supposed to be in conversation with John Campbell but for some reason he never made his flight down so the irrepressible Kate De Goldi stepped in at the eleventh hour. I'm keen to read Kamila's work, the most recent is “Burnt Shadows”. Kamila said that she found images the best place to start with writing rather than other texts because you don't have other peoples words to re-write. Simple but true.
Favourite quote:
“The stories we tell tell on us” (reveal us)

VUP launch at the Atrium on Blair/Allen Sts

Bill Manhire, Kate Camp and Geoff Cochrane all launched their new collections of poems. I have to admit I have a vested interest. However I thought it was a great night despite the torrential downpour. Monsoon (how appropriate) Poon does excellent finger food! It was wonderful to hear the three of them read and catch up with lots of buddies.

Brooding Glyn, whooar.

Weds contd

Audrey Niffenegger was funny and self-deprecating, it looked like a lot of book clubbers had come to see her in little clusters. I didn't feel like I got any deep insights about the process of writing from her but her visual art work sounds intriguing. Lynn Freeman got her talking about her time spent researching her second novel in graveyards, particularly Highgate cemetary, where she now works as a tour guide. Writer's equivalent of method acting perhaps?

Peter Singer and Rod Oram spent their session agreeing that we need to “do good”. I was mostly mesmerised by Sean Plunket sitting on the edge of his chair, swinging his head around and knocking his head piece mic. I would have liked to ask Peter Singer what he thinks we should do to combat “do good” fatigue – How do we sustain the level that is required to make change?

Chloe Hooper was replaced by Derek Johns and I am very ashamed to say I actually dozed off during this session! I've never done that before but there you have it. My only excuse is that I was up late the night before.

Richard Dawkins played to a packed house at the Michael Fowler Centre. He really was (if you'll excuse then pun) preaching to the converted. The session started with a 30 minute lecture from Dawkins which you could have got from reading some of his work. That was followed by some rather sycophantic, unchallanging questions from Bernard Beckett. I left as they opened the questions up to the audience but I heard it went on the same way. I was a bit dissapointed, it seemed too down pat and a bit lazy of Dawkins.

Thursday opened with Geoff Dyer talking with Emily Perkins. Emily asked good questions, they had a good raport on stage and he came across as very charming. He talked a bit about recording peak experiences in your life, about primal premeditated moments. What emotional luggage do you bring when you visit loaded places like memorials? His readings were humerous but although he is often called a “counter tourist” I got the feeling that he is really just another wealthy neurotic Englishman abroad.

I was looking forward to Glyn Maxwell as one of the (only two!) internationl poets this year and he didn't disapoint. He talked with Fergus Barrowman about form and rhyme and beats and how you need to know a lot about them before you can break them. He talked about having a happy childhood and the influence of Wales, how he just loved the sound of words, the musicality of them. Something you hear over and over again from different poets (musicality - not necessarily the happy childhood!). Perhaps if you have no dark obsessions you need to focus on musicality?

More sessions to come soon...

Writers and Readers week is always an exciting, stimulating time and this year was no exception.

The main disappointment for me is that there are no longer NZ writer focused sessions at the Dans Palais. In fact where has the Dans Palais gone? I know it was a small venue but it was so charming.

Also didn't the Gala Opening used to have drinks afterwards? I guess they are cutting back on costs, shame.

I managed to be privy to basically all of the events at the Embassy including the schools events on Tuesday, which, by the way, really raised my hopes. No matter what the media says, there are plenty of smart and engaging youths in our community. Some had travelled from as far away as Picton.

As I mentioned earlier, the Gala Opening on Tuesday night lacked the sense of occasion it seemed to have in previous years although the session itself was a great little intro to the week, chaired by the glorious Kate de Goldi. Kamila Shamsie, Neil Cross, Gil Adamson and Audrey Niffenegger chatted about their novels. If I had to pick one author to read out of the four I would try Shamsie with Gil Adamson a close second.

Wednesday opened with Sarah Waters, the session was chaired by her publisher Lennie Goodings. It's unusual for a writer's publisher to interview them on stage, it runs the risk of being a glammed up press conference. Lennie had been interviewing her on the whole world tour and they had it down pat, a bit too pat, which was a shame, as I'm sure a good Chair would have teased some great moments out of the hour. Still Waters was charming and the audience loved her.

In contrast Emily Perkins with Caroline Baum was a great session. I hadn't heard of Caroline before, her bio says: Caroline Baum was the arts editor of Melbourne’s Sunday Herald and the features editor at Vogue Australia. She has presented ABC TV’s book show Between the Lines, and was executive producer of ABC Radio National’s Arts Today. She has also hosted Foxtel’s book show Talking Books. Caroline became the founding editor of Good Reading magazine in 2001. In 2006 she produced and co-wrote her first television documentary, In Search of Bony, for SBS. Her company, Two Heads Media, currently has several TV projects in development. She is a regular contributor to national (Australian) newspapers and magazines.

No wonder she is a fantastic interviewer. Emily was smart and sharp. Quotes I liked: “When we tell stories we are controlling time” “Writing is a mapping process”. Emily also said something along the lines of being sick of “illuminating endings” or just any endings or seeing life as a narrative arc. Hmm sounds like she's been hanging out with Damien Wilkins.

I'll continue with these notes shortly