Notes

A Bend in the River by V.S. Naipul
Salim journeys into the heart of Africa, into the same territory explored by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness nearly eighty years earlier—but witnessed this time from the other side of the tragedy of colonization. Salim discovers that the nation’s violent legacy persists, through the rise of a dictator who calls himself the people’s savior but whose regime is built on fear and lies (familiar isn’t it?).

Fires by Raymond Carver
One of my favourite authors, he says of why he chose to write short-stories: Nobody ever asked me to be a writer. But it was tough to stay alive and pay bills and put food on the table and at the same time to think of myself as a writer and to learn to write. After years of working crap jobs and raising kids and trying to write, I realized I needed to write things I could finish and be done with in a hurry. There was no way I could undertake a novel, a two- or three-year stretch of work on a single project. I needed to write something I could get some kind of a payoff from immediately, not next year, or three years from now. Hence, poems and stories.

Towards Another Summer by Janet Frame
When I was younger and struggling to find something to write about, I had actually wished that my circumstances were different. I actually believed that if I had struggled, I would have something substantial to write about. Well, I wonder what Janet would say about this: Frame was born to a railroad worker and a sometime-poet who had been a maid for the family of writer Katherine Mansfield. Her early years were marked by poverty, the drowning death of her sister, and the disruptions created by her brother’s epilepsy. In 1945, while studying to be a teacher, she suffered a breakdown. Misdiagnosed as having schizophrenia, she spent nearly a decade in psychiatric hospitals. From 1947, following the drowning death of another sister, she endured repeated courses of electroconvulsive therapy. During that time she read the classics voraciously and cultivated her writing talent.