While her April column is not yet up, I forgot to check last month (was it that busy? i, that nuts?) to see what wisdom (because there is always something meaty here, I find) Winterson has for me. Today, I managed to gather my wits about me (it is only the first real week of April for crying out loud) and found that her March column is packed with some goodies:
On still working, still writing, 20 years after The Passion was published:
"20 years – and here I am, still working, which matters to me, though I confess that much of the media treatment over that time has made me feel like someone who sits down at the keyboard to play only to have the lid slammed down on her fingers – not once, but many times. Don’t get me wrong – I don’t feel sorry for myself, though I have been known to get under the bed – yes right under it, repeating over and over again, ‘I don’t want to be hurt anymore.’ But I know that comes from an old place too, and a place that will never be healed. That doesn’t matter; we write from our wounds – our strength is that we write at all." (Emphasis mine.)
On those would deign to review books:
"I don’t mind when people aren’t interested in my work – just as long as they don’t pretend that’s because it is inherently uninteresting. I don’t mind if people dislike my work – as long as they don’t justify their response by blaming the work for not being the kind of work they do like."
On nuturing creativity:
"What any creative person needs – all they need – is not praise or blame, but an active and grown-up engagement with the process of making things. That process is necessarily experimental, either in part or in the whole, and sometimes things work well, and sometimes less well. Sometimes things work for a big audience, sometimes only for a few. That’s how it is, and I wish, really wish, that we had a mature culture, interested in creativity, that could understand that. "
Finally, on travel (which I wholeheartedly agree with and which I try to embrace at every turn for the very reasons she notes):
"Just back from Venice – which was beautiful and strange. Travel has become a kind of steadying hand for me – a reminder of where value lies. At home it’s harder to pull out, stand back, get a perspective, but going away makes a difference. Needless to say this is not a plea for more flying round the planet, rather a need to be somewhere else, some of the time, which is why I am still hunting the Paris apartment."
Would that we could all be hunting the Paris apartment, no? Setting this aside, I find that Winterson always has a voice, a view, a vision that I agree with most of the time. I've admired her work since The Passion was published, so at the 20-year mark, it is good to see she is still enjoying her work, stretching further, seeking to know more of herself and the world around her.
Reminds me of one of my favorite lines in Carole Maso's AVA: "We aspired to the state of music."
Winterson promises a piece about her 20 years of writing & her recent visit to Venice. To be published in The Times sometime in April...
