the Sun's write inspiration to MMe

…so I’m sitting in the mugginess, zooming sideways through the subway tunnel, and reading an article from the June06 Sun Magazine that I find inspiring. It’s an interview with Barry Lopez about his writing, politics, living in nature, life. Here are some quotes that made me think of you (the people I know who do some writing): “Try to open doors for writers who are devoted to story and language, and who have serious questions about the fate of humanity…Being businesspeople, however, such men and women have very few outlets for frankly expressing their concerns…I want to get these savvy, ethical, powerful businesspeople together to talk. Often they don’t even know one another…The only thing I know as a writer is how to tell a story...I think my compulsion to leave town is based on a belief that it is only by leaving the security of the familiar that I can learn whether my particular metaphors can continue to ground the reader in something trustworthy…my writerly responsibility is to try to be discerning—even when camped in the Transantarctic Mountains—about how these circumstances I’ve put myself in relate to readers who are just trying to hold a family together, stay employed, deal with dying parents, and change the baby’s diapers when they haven’t slept in twenty-four hours…Before that, when I wrote Arctic Dreams, the image I had of the reader was always of somebody standing right next to me…another New York friend said to me a few years ago. ‘It’s so clear you’re not from the city. You’re always looking up.’ He said people in New York don’t look up. I look up at the buildings. I look up at the sky. I’m curious about all of this. It’s a hunger. I have to feed it…These are all cues to pay attention, to stay awake. I sometimes say the first rule of everything—including writing—is to pay attention…No one can tell the whole truth…I want to confront my own ignorance every day…So when I say a ‘literature of hope,’ I mean a literature that gives readers the opportunity to be hopeful about their own circumstances and the circumstances of their communities…I have to believe that my imagining a story will somehow help people to imagine a way around difficulty.”

http://www.thesunmagazine.org/
http://www.thesunmagazine.org/366_Lopez.pdf

This was a sweet article, and fires my motivation to set the next Sun Discussion group, which meets in boston every now and then. I hope you too are inspired:)