What I Write



Three times in these past few days, I was asked what I wrote. And I didn't have an good answer.

Now, If someone button-holes me and wants to know, I will say "Potatoes."

I guess you could say I write about potatoes as much as anything.

I write to make magical rings and dragons as real as unwashed potatoes.

I write to make wooden chairs and a sack of potatoes as interesting as what the last ice dragon is hiding in her broken hand.

I write to show how the smallest acts (like sweeping the floor and peeling some potatoes for a poor, old neighbor) can change the history of nations.

I grew up surrounded by potato farms and beaches. It's good for a writer to have a deep sense of the common, muddy world before he goes and tries to make his own paper world or tries to explain the complexities of the one we live in.

There is a certain writer I admire because she wanted to describe what a certain poison tasted like, so. . . she tasted a bit. As a writer you need to know this, or what rotting potatoes smell like, or what the hundred different night noises in Harlem mean.

The easiest beast to draw is a fantastical one, like a dragon, rather than, say a horse. We have a Da Vinci drawing of a dragon, and it is terrific study because his idea was to patch together different real animal parts to make a new whole, a dragon. The imagined, if done well, is not something new, but a delicious variation of the mundane.

You have to first know your common russets and yellow finns, whether you write of them for a cookbook or you tell a tale of gnomes sneaking off with enchanted tubers. You have to know how your common goat and lion are sinewed together to create a dragon real as that bowl of steaming, buttered potatoes with dill sitting on the table before you.

Well, I don't actually write much about potatoes. But I write about potatoes, if you get my drift.