Pelicans & Persian Carpets

Abstract

I'm planning to talk to you today about being a novelist, that is, a person who finds and invents stories and offers them to the society she lives in. Why? you might ask. For what purpose? And I might reply, for your delight. Or perhaps, for your illumination. For modesty can hardly be a quality of novelists. And so I might say I'm offering you a mirror, to look at yourself in, sometimes perhaps a magic variety that shows you the past with the intention of making sense of the present. Possibly a crooked one, whose images may shock. But not one I hope that might shatter into dangerous fragments which will lodge in people's eyes and distort everything they see. Or I might say I'm trying out narratives to see if they fit, and giving you a chance to do the same.