Look at this cute picture of Anne out at a book party! (Scroll down a little, there you go). To my delight she's pictured with the wonderful Felicia Sullivan. I feel like I'm in an alternate universe. I'm out in the country fixing up my little writing garret in order to get my next big thang underway this summer. I go to Ikea and Lowes a lot, and I sometimes have paint in my hair. My whole French boyfriend plan isn't looking very likely, but I did get asked out by a very nice guy at Ikea who was purchasing about 5 rooms worth of furniture. (It was really a remarkable sight.) "Divorce apartment," he explained.
Anyway--not being in New York full time is giving me lots of time to meander and revisit things, like this fabulous interview with Kathryn Davis over chez Jessa from the May edition of bookslut (as we eagerly await the June). I love Davis and her novel The Thin Place is so good that it made me not want to write anymore, not in a depressing way, but in a thank-god-someone's-totally-on-top-of-that-way. Here she explains the book:
The thin place is a term from Celtic mythology. I first heard about it when I was visiting a friend who was a lay member of a religious community, a bunch of sisters at a convent in Peekskill. They were talking about how they were going to have to sell the place where they lived because they couldn’t afford to keep up these huge, gorgeous, drafty buildings for only a handful of nuns. They were sad to be leaving, they said, because it was a thin place. I’d never heard the phrase before, so I asked what it meant and one of the sisters explained that a thin place is a place where the membrane between this world and the other world -- the world of spirit, the part of life we can’t see -- is very, very weak. So things leak back and forth between the two. I knew then that that was my title. I didn’t know precisely where the book was going to be set. I thought maybe it was going to be the seashore, a place I’ve always wanted to visit, but this wasn’t the book to do that. I also knew that there were going to be lots of living things in it. That was kind of all I knew.
The Thin Place is full of creatures. I think of it as a symphony of consciousnesses.You tune into the consciousnesses of dogs and cats, and even plants, corn and lichen. You capture the energy and sense of constant communication and communion in nature.