Category: Essays

I took a turn through 19th century children’s literature, where the unnerving weirdness of Pinocchio gave me a taste for speculative fiction that sent me spiralling gloriously into Stephen King.

In children’s books, kids just get horses somehow. They don’t buy them. They win them in raffles or end up shipwrecked with them on desert islands. Horses come into children’s lives through magic. The stories give kids power, control over another creature, but even in stories parents have the ultimate power.

And for all you writers unknown to me at present … I hope to meet you soon.

As a prose writer now myself I am taught and retaught by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Penelope Fitzgerald, Bernard Malamud and L. P. Hartley, Sylvia Townsend Warner and J. G. Farrell.  And Dickens, always Dickens.

I was a lonely child who read Enid Blyton sitting under a guava tree in our rambling house in Calcutta, India.

I am beginning to branch out into a novel of interconnected stories like Russell Banks’s "Trailer Park". The opportunities for showing how the transformative moment changes not only the main character but those around him/her are endless.