Things I find or that find me

"As a writer you have to be open to the darkness.  You have to be open to the sorrow.  Whereas other people may scurry past and say I have to get on with my life, you can sit there and you can feel that sorrow pass over you.  You can feel that great lamentation come out of you.  You can say of your dead husband "Oh Stan, I loved you with my whole soul, I loved you." And in that spirit, you can write.  You can write!  Not perhaps the literal story of your husband and how you loved him and how he died, you go into the imagination and you create a story and that story is going to have whatever wisdom you have been allowed by God to acquire.  And it's going to be good.  And that keeps you going.  That keeps you working.  That keeps you open to all the signs that are going to come to you."

-- Anne Rice

Posted by Becket



"One of the great things about being a writer is that you can write in sorrow, in grief, and anguish.  You can use your emotions to make something constructive, and something perhaps that will remove these things for someone else."

-- Anne Rice


Posted by Becket


"There's no doubt that my life and my writing have been shaped by grief.  I think I was grieving for my mother before she ever died, and that was when I was 14.  After the death of my daughter in 1972, I wrote INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE, without ever realizing I was writing about loss.  I was writing about my daughter's loss.  And I was writing about my loss of Catholic faith long before that, because I had lost my faith in the year 1960, when I first went to college.  And in losing my faith, I lost my whole view of the world.  My whole rich and hopeful and really lovely view of the cosmos as a just place, in which nobody's suffering was ever wasted or lost.  In which God knew every tear that was shed.  Then as I moved on through life, I lost other people.  My father.  I remember sitting for two months in the hospital with him at night, watching him get delirious, going out of his head on Morphine.  Talking to his dead brothers and sisters and beg for them to come and get him.  I watched the great Berkeley fire, on the television, as I sat in that hospital room in New Orleans; he never escaped that hospital.  I was dreaming that very moment, that he was dying, I was dreaming of somehow getting him out.  Wheeling the gurney out and rescuing him someplace else.  And I saw a house that I'd lived in, a magnificent Tudor house on Yorkshire Drive in Oakland, I saw that house go up in flames on TV.  I was sitting there in that cold hospital room with my father and I saw it.  I thought for sure it had to be someone else's house; but it wasn't.  Not long after that, I went to the ruins of that house.  I went to what was left of that house and I climbed the front steps to find the basement a great big hole, and it was frilled with the chopped up remains of the magnificent Monterey Cypress tree that had once stood on that hill.  The whole area had been devastated by the Oakland/Berkeley fire.  These losses obsess me.  As a writer I'm driven by grief.  I think it's important that we as writers, find out what drives us.  Not so much that we find out; what's important is that we give in.  That we don't fight it.  That we just say "Yes, we will go with this pain.  Yes, we will endure this.  Yes, we will explore this." We must try, in our work, to make a meaningful universe in the pages we write.  We'll try to do that.  We'll have that faith, we'll have that strength.  Sometimes, it's so dark and so difficult when you have to grasp things, you have to look for signs, you have to look out the window and see a sign in the way the flowers are blooming on a tree."

-- Anne Rice

Posted by Becket