I was contacted some months ago for this blog interview by Darrell Laurent for his blog Snowflakes in a Blizzard. It’s always great to learn that people are promoting literature and reading. I have come to see reading as an unusual act in these times, a throwback to a way of communicating and seeking that so very many people view as antiquated and strange. Yet there is a deeply personal exchange that happens between reader and writer, wherein we enter the brain of another, begin to empathize or identify or feel, and for a brief moment in our brief lives we can attempt to understand an idea of the human experience that may be different from our own. There is a divine moment in this act of reading, enchantment, if you will, for there is nothing physical taking place between author and reader. The reading exists in another plane, one transcendent and impossibly far. Reading then, becomes an act of the spirit, an act of channeling and meeting another, and in doing this we hope to move to a time and place and imagine a world of terror and delight, if only for a few moments. We are delivered to the possibility of dreams and compassion. We can feel that we understand a truth. And while this truth may be one we shun the second we shut the book, it really does not matter, as we have at least, spent some time seeing another’s truth and in so doing, we can potentially re-imagine our own.
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