"stick your hands inside of my pockets/keep them warm while i'm still here"
time to gush some jeannette winterson into your life on this blustery, beautifully cold, clear day...straight from my nightstand to your computer screen...
from the introduction to Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles:
"Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision.
Decision, the moment of saying yes, is prompted by something deeper; recognition. I recognise you; I know you again, from a dream or another life, or perhaps even from a chance sighting in a cafe, years ago."
"...indeed almost all of my work is written in the First Person, and this lead to questions of autobiography.
Autobiography is not important. Authenticity is important. The writer must fire herself through the text, be the molten stuff that welds together disparate elements. I believe there is always exposure, vulnerability, in the writing process, which is not to say it is either confessional or memoir. Simply, it is real.
Right now, human beings as a mass, have a gruesome appetite for what they call 'real,' whether it's Reality TV or the kind of plodding fiction that only works as low-grade documentary, or at the better end, the factual programmes and biographies and 'true life' accounts that occupy the space where imagination used to sit.
Such a phenomenon points to a terror of the inner life, of the sublime, of the poetic, of the non-material, of the contemplative.
Against all this, a writer such as myself, who believes in the power of story telling for its mythic and not its explanatory qualities, and who believes that language is much more than information, must row against the tide rather like Siegfried rowing against the current of the Rhine.
The Myth series is a marvellous way of telling stories--re-telling stories for their own sakes, and finding in them permanent truths about human nature. All we can do is keep telling the stories, hoping that someone will hear. Hoping that in the noisy echoing nightmare of endlessly breaking news and celebrity gossip, other voices might be heard, speaking of the life of the mind and the soul's journey.
Yes, I want to tell the story again."