Writers Are Hurt Into Being

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This is the second excerpt from my Worldcon conversation with James Patrick Kelly.  In it, we discuss the origins of art in pain and for the first time I publicly talk about the event that drove me into becoming a writer.  It's been something like forty-five years, so it was about time.  But it was still extremely difficult for me.  More difficult, probably, than you, reading this, can realize.

The link to YouTube is here.


And on a lighter note . . .


Here's a quote (ellipsis mine) I recently found in an article in the New Yorker :

The collapse of the World Trade Center towers, nearly ten years ago, registered as minor earthquakes (with magnitudes of 2.2 and 2.4) on a seismometer locked in a former root celler . . . in Palisades, New York.  A blown-up seismogram of hte impacts from that morning now hangs on a wall of Thomas Lamont's onetime swimming pool, which has been converted into a kind of seismological museum, beneath the cafeteria at Columbia's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Wow.  Doesn't that sound exactly like J. G. Ballard?  Another case of life imitating art.

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