Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts
Showing posts with label influences. Show all posts

17 July 2005

The audience lives inside all of us...

For Albert, who asked, Who is your audience, I quote one of my favorite writers, James Purdy, from an interview. This might explain, better than I was able to, why I could not furnish a ready answer about my "audience":

"My writing is concerned with the soul, with the unknown forces of the psyche. A British writer said I write under the skin, which I liked. In a spiritual sense, the real life of man is going on inside. It's not what he says or does, it's something else. The only way, I think, one can get in touch with that is in dreams, either sleeping or waking...not a trance like stage, but going beyond the conscious. I think maybe that distinguishes the two kinds of writing: there is the muse kind and the journalistic kind. I feel that the stories and subjects 'come' to me, because when I try to seek them, they elude me. Consequently, I don't write for anyone. I write for the soul. If you really tell yourself the truth, you've told everyone. This doesn't come easily at all. It's all a matter of psychic energy, of getting in touch with what you're looking for."

from The James Purdy Society Web Site