Like comets

Eudora Welty’s On Writing quietly and forcefully reflects that love (which flames right out of sympathy for the human condition) must be core to a story’s source of understanding. More than plot and character, what is the pull on the line for the writer: what place of origin, what sources, what living connection?  “Out of love, you can write with straight fury.”

With giant effort pushed to its limit, writers bring all the integrity, strength, and abundance they possess towards a “fresh approximation of human truth.” Our relationships (of blood, of passions, of thoughts and deed) and our interiority (“the vastness of our secret life”) reticently, stubbornly, come to life. And illuminate over and beyond their single significance.