From a WSJ review of Elizabeth McCracken’s A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction:
Ms. McCracken refuses to link process and outcome in fiction, so the whole endeavor retains its mysterious sheen. By the end of the book, I didn’t want to write a novel, I wanted to read one. If that’s another kind of long game, then well-played.
Last month Elizabeth borrowed my Smith Corona GT Ghia to type up the answers to her typewriter interview.
I took a picture of this deteriorated sticker at the airport yesterday and thought of Bertha Truitt, the mysterious main character in Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway, who, whenever she’s asked where she’s come from, answers, “I’m here now.”
Here is a beautiful passage about walking from Elizabeth McCracken’s Bowlaway:
In the mornings he would walk…. At the start of a walk, alone or moving, the sun at his back or cold rain down his collar, he was more himself than under any other circumstance, until he had walked so far he was not himself, not a self, but joined to the world. Invisibly joined. Had a religion been founded on this, purely this, he would have converted….. Proof of God? Proof was in the world, and the way you visited the world was on foot…. Your walking was a devotion.
Filed under: walking
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