gaiman

talks Clarion, radio plays, the Arthur C. Clarke award, and The Graveyard Book.

i know i've held you but i can't remember where or when

I took the kids to the park last night. There was a little girl there with pale bleached hair, gray eyes, and a kitten named Shadow. While my kids were brachiating and throwing themselves down on the grass, I sat watching and thinking. I sat there trying to center myself. To focus. To breathe. To try to grasp some idea of how to take all the disparate aspects of myself and to unify them into one whole once again.

I'm not the woman who left for Clarion West, and it's a hard road to navigate.

I'm all about being unified and whole.

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The girl handed me her cat that she'd just gotten that day. I took it, and pet it while she told me about it, how she got it from the pound, and how her other cat had disappeared and was probably dead. (There is an age where children are so matter of fact about death.) We talked about her cat, and I stroked its head and back. And for that one moment everything so simple and so clear.

There were moments like that at Clarion West, seemingly small moments when I was writing or in class, or moments when I was with a classmate and everything was simple, easy, illuminated, and I felt alive and whole. In those moments I could focus and breathe and there were insights there about who I am and where I'm going, who I want to be and what I will do with myself.

Everything else aside, the writing is going to rock.