poor tessie
Is there a single story, or bit of writing, something you read, etc., that made you want to first begin writing? It doesn’t have to be a story; you could expand this – a piece of art, a bit music composition, whatever. Can you pinpoint, if possible, an object with which you interacted that made you want to create some real writing for the first time ever in your life and continue to do it until you die and rot?
I would rather focus on that initial first ever commitment to writing. We’ve talked a lot about ways we continue to inspire ourselves to create text (what music we listen to or what art we look at, for example), so this is more of an origins question: the origins of your first ever serious impulse to write. For that reason, it might be a little too hard to answer, but still fun to think about, maybe.
This question courtesy of David Erlewine, who emailed me this:
maybe you could do a post about the story that “got” people into writing. kinda cheesy maybe … and for some there may not be “one” story but i know for me reading shirley jackson’s the lottery absolutely made me want to write/read/etc. for good.
For the last week, a fever has been kicking my ass.
Norman Podhoretz’s new book, Why Are Jews Liberals? is organized around a non-thesis so idiotic it’s not worth discussing, but the NYT got Leon Wieseltier to do it anyway. It’s actually a pretty good piece of writing, considering the topic is a book that in a half-sane world wouldn’t exist in the first place.
I’m slowly working my way through 
Here in Massachusetts, where it’s raining a little on the chimneys, you get to thinking about Puritanism and grimly mowing the lawn, keeping yourself right in the eyes of Judgment, which is not so much a single set of floating eyes or even many sets of eyes but a vast eye-mucus gum, that sticky feeling of making one decision after another, freighted decisions, handled clumsy, bound for worry, leaving you fraught over past transgressions and mowing the lawn in the rain.